Mirka Andolfo's Un/Sacred follows Angelina and Damiano, through a long and winding relationship. Damiano's originally just interested in sleeping with Angelina, but quickly finds himself having fallen into a seven year relationship with her. The story as written as a series of one-page comics, each more or less stand alone, but part of a larger arc. The first third of the volume is mostly Damiano trying to find ways to convince her to sleep with him, or thinking she's asking him for that when she's really inviting him to a sleepover with her gal pals. So the entire page is panels of him watching her make preparations, getting increasingly excited, and then the payoff is him sitting grumpily while her friends give him a manicure and sing along to some cheesy song.
The second third (dubbed "Purgatory") runs from their engagement and the difficulties that arise with Angelina's mother, up to the wedding. The humor is much the same, but filtered through wedding prep and conflicts between Angelina's very uptight, rich white lady mom, and Damiano's more hedonist parents. One comic seems to be a part of an adult film, and in the last panel we learn it was, and that it's when Damiano was conceived. And that his parents thought that was a good thing to watch with the engaged couple.
The final section covers Angelina being pregnant and Damiano trying to find a balance between growing up and being a responsible husband and expectant father, while not abandoning his dreams of music stardom. There's a lot of panic about that, Angelina getting frustrated with some aspects of pregnancy, including one comic of way too many people trying to cop a feel. There's also a family reconciliation, but it reveals there was almost an incest situation which. . .I was not expecting that. Don't know if Andolfo always had this swerve planned, or if things changed somewhere along the way.
A lot of the humor revolves around misunderstandings or misdirections. Damiano getting himself in hot water for not recognizing the earrings Angelina wore when they first met, but talking himself out of it by perfectly describing her necklace from that day. Which he remembers because he was fixated on her rack, which Andolfo draws very generously. I think there are slightly more jokes that revolve around Damiano being a horny devil than Angelina being rather naive or squeamish about sex, but it's pretty close. Damiano certainly gets more character development; though he retains the core of a lazy horndog, he does try to get a regular job and be a considerate boyfriend. He doesn't always succeed, but Andolfo shows him making an effort. Angelina doesn't seem much changed; she never entirely seems comfortable talking about sex with other people, but she was never oblivious to the idea, just firm that she wanted to wait. She's still very bright and cheerful, still prone to telling Damiano to go sleep on the couch when he fucks up.
Most panels, Andolfo keeps the artwork of fairly straightforward style. Minimal linework, distinctive character designs, easy to exaggerate for comic effect whenever called for. But it shifts to a more detailed approach with coloring done to approximate an unearthly glow for the wedding sequence. And since it takes place in a church, Damiano and all his family are giving off smoke the entire time, which was a little detail i appreciated.
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