Broken Frontier

A budding rock god meets the girl of his dreams. Thing is, she’s engaged to the A&R man who wants to sign his band to a major label deal.

Tristan’s band Like A Dog is on the rise, but his love life is down in the dumps. He bailed on his bandmates to follow a girl named Maria, but he’s back from his oversees trip with his heart in his hands. Like A Dog is L.A.’s biggest unsigned group, and Tristan’s bandmates hope that tonight’s gig will put them back in the game. But it’s a girl named Isobel—Tristan sees her first at the airport and then in the front row of his band’s gig—who lights his fuse. To bad she’s already taken, engaged to Marcus Lee, the same guy who wants to sign Like A Dog as soon as their set is over. Tristan makes matters worse when he blows off Marcus’ offer. And the intrigue ticks up a notch when Tristan’s bandmate tells Marcus that not all of them feel as their lead singer does. But throw Tristan’s charmingly obnoxious brother Lance and fortune cookies into the mix, and soon the tension is as thick as a power chord.

Packaged as a 64-page digest and released quarterly, Love the Way You Love may have a unique format, but its premise and story are quite derivative of Scott Pilgrim. Tristan’s Like A Dog might lay waste to Scott’s Sex Bob-Omb in a battle of the bands, but whereas Scott Pilgrim is special, Love the Way You Love needs a lot of hard work and inspiration before it can even be compared. Jamie S. Rich’s writing shows that he’s not all that comfortable yet with the format. The first three pages have some nice contrapuntal elements as it juxtaposes Tristan’s flashbacks with the present, but the remainder is straight ahead storytelling that bogs down somewhere in the middle before it revs up with real plot points and conflict towards the end. But while the pacing is uneven, a much more curious aspect of Rich’s scripting is his characterization, particularly of his lead character. When we first meet Tristan, he’s a mess and quite wishy-washy. Indeed, it’s difficult to think of him as the front man of a hot band. But once he steps off-stage he has balls and charisma to spare and maintains this posture throughout. Rich’s writing makes it hard to see how such divergent character aspects can exist within the same person. But despite this, there’s something charming about Love the Way You Love. Some of it is surely do to the shout-outs to bands I listened to at Tristan’s age, but most is due to the fact that though I don’t understand Tristan, I like him and his supporting cast. Rich offers a great mix of personalities, and though his script takes too much time to get up to speed, once it’s there he keeps the curveballs coming. The last third of Love The Way You Love is a real treat. Too bad the first two-thirds are just as tedious.

Marc Ellerby’s panel constructions are very manga, but his figure work is squarely in the tradition of American cartooning. This gives his illustrations a puckish, humorous quality that engages both the eye and our sense of who and what his characters are. And for all the whimsy and anti-gravity hair, the tone of the artwork doesn’t overshadow the serious aspects of Rich’s script, as Ellerby captures his characters’ emotions quite well. He does just as well with conveying their ages, portraying them as young adults who don’t look like teenagers. This gives his characters a more mature affect than his style would suggest. With subtleties like this, the reader sometimes sees Ellerby’s images struggling with the rough patches in Rich’s script. There’s room for improvement, but right now Ellerby is a more developed artist than Rich is a writer, and it shows.

It’s hard to recommend Love the Way You Love. It needs time to develop and may turn out to be a fine comic. But for now it just doesn’t stack up to other comics in the same genre.