Comic Review: My Boyfriend is a Bear

All love stories should start the way this one does: the person we will fall in love with greets us by unearthing something about ourselves we felt we had to keep buried. In this case, its literal: the magazines Nora’s ex thought were low-brow that the charming Bear has literally dug up and brought back to her.

Pamela Ribon does a lot of interesting things with My Boyfriend Is a Bear, the graphic novel released in April. It’s a strange hybrid of a hipster fairy tale and an experiment in magical realism. The Bear wears clothes, understands English, and installs shelving, but also has a tendency to dig through the trash and leave claw marks on the light switch, and needs to eat 20,000 calories a day before hibernating through the winter. The story never takes itself too seriously, but it also never treats its premise like a punchline.

Nora, the introverted twenty-eight-year-old with a terrible job at a customer service center and a penchant for sewing, does not go through a revolutionary change in this story. This is not the story of how Nora finally found true love (with a bear). It’s more about how Nora found a way to live her life both by herself and with a partner and learned to cope with the people who would rather she stick to the status quo rather than doing things her own way.

The story could have focused on Nora and the Bear and how they learned to adjust to each other, but instead, it focused on how Nora’s relationships with her friends, family, and in a way her relationship with herself changed once she fell in love with the Bear. Ribon once again shows her expert understanding of friendships by showing women who can be rather horrible to each other and still recover their relationship. Nora’s friend Debra acts as a sort of combined antagonist and personification of Nora’s fears and doubts, while Carly is the embodiment of what Nora wishes she could be, relaxed and confident in her polyamorous pansexual lifestyle. The way Nora’s relationships with Carly and Debra evolve over the course of the story really are the checkpoints of Nora’s character arc. It’s how we see her grow, and at times, regress.

Artist Cat Farris illustrates each panel gorgeously, with watercolors for certain scenes from the Bear’s point of view, some absolutely fantastic Picasso-esque pages for when Nora and her friends are several martinis deep in a conversation about horrible exes, and innumerable adorable panels of the Bear and Nora’s cat Nutso. Her character design for the Bear is especially good; it is able to convey a lot of body language and facial expression without crossing into a look that gets really “cartoony”, which really fits with the story that this is a bear, a real bear, and not a Disney character or something.

The story really does cover some Real Facts about Real Bears™ but it’s not really about a girl who dates a bear if that makes sense. That’s not the point. If you think you might know what I mean, or if you have no idea but this sounds pretty interesting to you, definitely check out My Boyfriend is a Bear, available now from your local comic book shop, bookstores, and online retailers.