Will and Connie, a young couple returning from a trip, have a minor spat before making up. Will checks his phone messages, hears about two recent deaths and becomes fixated on the Rule of 3s - who will die next? Out of food, Connie heads out to pick up groceries for their dinner, while Will stays home and does the dishes. And then Connie doesn’t return. As the hours tick by, Will’s mind catastrophizes through the increasingly terrifying possibilities of what happened to his love. What will he do without her?
I’ve never even heard of Jordan Crane before, let alone read anything by him, but, wow - what an amazing cartoonist he is! Keeping Two is outstanding - easily the best comic I’ve read all year, and right at the end of the year too!
Whenever I find a creator whose work hits the bullseye with me I go and look them up and apparently this book is the aggregation of multiple issues of his long-running serial, Uptight, like Seth, who published his stories in his comic Palookaville before collecting them into books. And it looks like Uptight started in 2006 and only recently ended with this book coming out this year - so it’s a story 16 years in the making! Perhaps that’s why it’s so good: Crane’s taken his time and really developed his story by putting a lot of thought into it rather than rushing any part of it.
I wonder if that length of time explains why the art at the beginning of the book is so radically different from the end. Because Will and Connie practically look like babies at the start and look much more recognisably like adults by the end! I initially thought it was symbolic of the characters’ journeys: at the beginning they’re living a simple, almost child-like existence, eating snacks and dossing about, and then they go through what they go through and the experience makes them grow up, taking them out of that child-like bubble into the adulthood they’ve been ignoring. Whether it’s a case of Crane’s art changing over time (which does happen in long-running titles, like Jeff Smith’s Bone), or it’s deliberate, it fits really well.
I also liked how Crane used borders around his panels to signify when the story is “real” - the panels have a firm black line around it - and when it’s representing fantasy, memory, or the novel sequence - the panels don’t have any borders around it. Once you notice that detail, you’re able to see how effectively Crane tells his wide-ranging story by switching from inside the characters’ minds back to their present without having to resort to anything so antiquated and clunky as thought bubbles or captions.
There is another story within Will and Connie’s story too: it’s the story in the novel Connie, and then later Will, is reading, about another couple whose relationship is going through a rough patch, albeit much more painfully than what Will and Connie went through (another indication that Will and Connie are child-like adults). Dan and Claire’s baby is stillborn. Claire goes through severe depression and the two decide to go on a cruise to try and get themselves out of this mental funk they’re in.
Both storylines are compelling and complement the other in that both are about couples fighting and then, through almost losing each other, realise how much they mean to one another. Dan/Claire’s storyline depicts severe depression convincingly through some quite shocking panels as Claire imagines killing herself in a variety of ways, though I can understand why it might upset some people - this comic will definitely unsettle those of a sensitive disposition, or who have gone through similar experiences.
I really loved it though. Jordan Crane takes mundane moments and transforms them into high drama complete with a rollercoaster of emotions and a touch of profundity. It’s so impressive and inspired - a real masterpiece of a comic. I had to consciously stop myself from barrelling through it - this is the definition of a page-turning read - and slow down because it’s increasingly interesting and so masterfully put-together that the narrative flow is damn near perfect. I couldn’t recommend it more highly - the best comic of 2022!
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