True Story is an absolutely perfect love story at its heart. Beland proves himself an impossibly perceptive observer of human behavior. He's introspective to a fault, and he uses that amazingly precise internal eye to splay glimpses of his life on to the comics page. His family is slightly dysfunctional and extremely loving. Tom himself is by turns insecure and mildly neurotic. Only the character of Lily is seen without much in the way of flaws. I suspect that what Tom is doing here is filtering his perception of Lily through that initial haze of new love. Either that or she really doesn't have much in the way of flaws, in which case Tom is in real trouble in future episodes.

One of the most amazing scenes is the first time we actually see Lily get angry. Tom and Lily set up a dinner party to introduce Tom to Lily's parents. The planning stages leading up to it are a little slice of new couple's hell wherein everything that can possibly go wrong does. They make it through and dinner goes off without a hitch, and at the end of it all as they're saying goodnight, all Lily's mother can do is admonish her for not wearing earrings. It's a priceless moment. We've all been there with our own relatives and Tom walks us through it all again, deftly giving us his perspective. Lily's reaction humanizes her and Tom's reaction to her makes us love them both that much more.

The capstone to Tom's story so far takes place during the Vieques demonstrations. He's delivering an artwork assignment. It's a freelance cartoon for one of the local papers. Two of the demonstrators, one of whom was wearing the Puerto Rican flag as a headscarf, spit on him as he passes by. Tom is, after all, a gringo, and therefore part of the problem at Vieques.

He goes home in shock, and when Lily arrives, he has a breakdown right in front of her. All the pressures and frustrations, the culture shock of moving to what amounts to a new country, all of it comes out in a rush. The next morning, Lily lays out what happened to Tom on her morning radio show, complete with the kicker revelation that the artwork Tom was carrying was a political cartoon that supported the protestors' cause.

The resulting outpouring of sympathy and apalled shock from Lily's listeners is as amazing as it is heartwarming. As a result, Tom suddenly finds himself adopted by an entire nation. You can't make up stuff like this. If it isn't true, it damn well should be.