Wedding Juice and Other Melodramas No. 1
Cartoonist: Sanika Phawde
Self-published / $20
September 2024
The first lesson comes within the opening pages of Sanika Phawde’s comic about marraige: if you drink the wedding juice, you will die. But Wedding Juice and Other Melodramas isn’t a fable. Phawde isn’t subject to a witch’s curse, they’re just allergic to kiwis. Dad’s on the three-way video chat harrumphing at bringing up something so morbid when planning the ceremony. The stage is set. And it is extravagant. Pyrotechnics and dry ice. Decorations that resemble a cartoon supervillain’s headquarters (you bring the cat). Phawde keeps a cozy home, decked out with maximalist opulence and mad monstera, living the life of a freelance artist. So her parents want to throw a once-in-a-lifetime wedding ceremony to match the singular personality of their beloved child.
It’s barely booked and already a circus.
Phawde knows how to use the power of comics. The style in Wedding Juice is loose, shifting, unconcerned with being realistic in order to make the comic feel real- Phawde captures how the moment feels to get reality to come across. And boy it does. Dad is acting out his vision of the wedding procession, with mom recording, describing wind machines and fireworks with a rising intensity. The bride sinks deeper and deeper into the mattress, phone gaining weight like the accelerating mass of a collapsing star. Cut to fiancee in kitchen. Houseplants and ankle socks. Internet browser tabs left open a month. The realness is right there, the conflict and anticipation so undeniably present in the story, Phawde can go anywhere with the artwork.
Because it is such pure cartooning, I’m compelled to make foundational comparisons. Wedding Juice would be right at home in the ’91 Diane Noomin anthology Twisted Sisters. Everything that echoes this comic visually came from ago and before. When undergrounds were reinventing the medium. They are mutually disinterested in the established ways of doing things, but so in love with the medium that they play around with it. The confidence to do something because it feels right instead of doing it by the rules. Viv Albertine mentality.
Phawde has a very specific vision for the story to be told, and mixes precision and freedom so that it extends beyond the art. Keeping your head when planning a wedding requires same contradiction. It’s the most important day of your life, roll with it. So the story moves down the page in a way that feels natural enough to read, often without any traditional panels or grids. Once the plot’s path for the eye has woven its way to the bottom of the page, Phawde fills in the negative space with embellishment. An unresolved blend of realism and Snoopy Dance simplicity with ubiquitous ornamentation. It’s very Ron Regé Jr, very sketchbook to squeeze stuff into every available plot of negative space.
Spontaneous and then then set in concrete, embellished upon. The panel is framed in blossoms or by tremendous plumes of sparkling smoke. Patterns fill in the empty spaces. Slices of kiwi pad the splash page where Phawde’s drowning in the juice. Nearly every page has petals falling all about it. Wedding Juice has its photographic moments, but nowhere does it say that documenting what happened needs to be presented in sepia squares. Phawde keeps it real and goes for baroque.
Wedding Juice is eager to be silly, but it is mostly centered on how pressure stress burns through one’s social battery. Things go from extravagant-but-tolerable to totally ludicrous in a single breath. Normally dad’s. So while Pawdhe growing a mouth the size of a screen that’s filled with shark teeth razor fangs probably didn’t acutally happen, the self-preservation in conversation that caused them to appear in this comic is the kind of thing that everyone can relate to, no matter their family traditions or martial status. These are the dynamics that give this particular slice of life its spring (and its sweetness). Knows how to lie to tell the truth.
Which is: this wedding is shaping up to be not the vibe. The elephant in the room sets this comic apart from other wedding memoirs I’ve read. It’s a fun subgenre of comics, if you like love stories and unrestrained chaos you’ve got to laugh at (to keep from crying). Never light, per se. But here there is a tension. Letting two people you love dearly who have absolutely no self-restraint plan one of the most important days of your life, which is typically quiet because you like it that way. Not having control over what’s important to us is devastatingly relatable. Who amongst us hasn’t faceplanted hard into the bed, hoping to smoosh one’s problems, to squash the weight of the world, in addition to smashing one’s nose.
Through a phone, it kind of stops being your wedding. Phawde’s fiancee kind of steps in it. But that could be because, instead of bridging the culture gap, he’s being kept on one side of it. If the version of things that your aging parents tell is taken at face value, you’re in trouble. And the plan is to just throw him in the deep end for the actual ceremony. But into a cartoonishly exaggerated pageant. The funniest thing to me about the “I thought Indian weddings are supposed to look tacky” faux pas is, have you never been to an American wedding? Weddings are gaudy.
Okay so and an interesting return to an underused style, autobio comics in a serialized format. Today, the memoir is told complete. A graphic novel for a book market. Mostly serious, often dire. What wins awards is trauma presented neorealismo. Despite Wedding Juice‘s nontraditional Twisted Sisters style placing it firmly in the aesthetics of the undergrounds, it’s probably more comparable for contemporary readers to golden age romance comics. And just so. Will dad ever listen? Will getting dropped into the culture provide further challenges for future husband, or does he surprise everybody and take to it? Tune in next time!
The first issue of Wedding Juice and Other Melodramas is available from Radiator Comics and wherever finer micropress comics and zines are sold.
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