The Norm: 12 Steps to Marriage

(TheNorm.Com, 2003)
™ and © TheNorm.Com

Definitives are frequently hard to back up, but I think it can safely be said that anyone who doesn’t like The Norm doesn’t know The Norm, and, that being the case, this elegant little comic novelette is a grand way of making his acquaintance.

Busting with charms, craftily engineered and solidly made (no, seriously, all those little aspects of comic-book publishing that sometimes gets shortshift are meticulously attended to here; from the more than just readable logo to the shining white paperstock), it is as they say a “good jumping-on point” for new readers.

The wedding of Norm and Reine is in its way a perfect venue for showing off the strip’s constant tug of war between observational and character-related comedy as one regular guy tries to understand his life as he lives it. And in this increasingly irregular world, you can take cozy comfort in knowing that being able to draw doesn’t automatically disqualify someone from drawing a daily comic strip — not any more, anyway.

— S.A. Bennett

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#1

Cover Price: $4.95
1 copy available for $3.99

Michael Jantze