Graphic novelist Corinne Mucha gets over her First Big Romance in 'Get Over It'

'I mean, I want to get married someday," Corinne Mucha's boyfriend told her, a few months after persuading her to give up her life on the East Coast and follow him to Chicago. "Just not to you."

Ouch!

So Mucha, who grew up in Haddon Heights, writes in her new graphic memoir, Get Over It (Secret Acres, $11.99), a moving, alternately heartbreaking and hilarious true-life account of the breakup of Her First Major Romance.

Her ex-boyfriend, Sam (last name withheld), really said that?

"Oh, dear," Mucha's cartoon avatar thinks to herself in the book, "Did you really just say that?"

It all began - the end, that is - when Mucha asked a dreaded question: Where did Sam see their relationship going?

"I felt like all my friends were splitting up or getting married," said Mucha, "and I wanted to know which camp we fell into."

Get Over It doesn't portray Sam as a villain - although he does come across as a bit of a blockhead and singularly unaware that his comments are hurtful.

"I definitely want to have kids someday but NOT with YOU," he tells her in the same conversation.

Surely, Mucha exaggerates in the book?

"I didn't add or make up anything," Mucha said by phone Monday from her home on Chicago's North Side, where she's lived since 2007.

"These are my memories of what was said, but [Sam] may not agree, given how he may remember these discussions."

Mucha, 30, has mined her personal life for material for her whimsical, gently ironic work since the 2008 publication of her first graphic memoir, My Alaskan Summer, about a season she spent working at her uncle and aunt's B&B in Soldotna, Alaska.

She's wanted to be a visual artist since before she can remember.

"I started saying I wanted to be an artist when I was, like, 4. I mean, I don't have any specific memories of saying this, but that's what my parents tell me," said Mucha, whose father Peter is a Philly.com reporter, and whose mother, Anne, is a physical therapist. "My parents took it pretty seriously, and I always was enrolled in extracurricular classes when I was growing up."

Never much of a fan of comic books, Corrine Mucha didn't come to love the medium until she was well into her college years.

"As a kid, my dad wanted me to take cartooning classes," she said, "and I would tell him, 'No, dad, I'm a real artist.' "

Cartooning become her metier "by accident" when her college, the Rhode Island School of Design, sent her to study in Rome for a year.

"I was free to do any work I wanted artwise, and so I started keeping these sketchbooks of all the great artworks I was seeing every day and all the things I was doing during the day in Rome, of the great time I was having," said Mucha. "And it felt natural for words to go with the pictures, like in a visual diary."

When her fellow classmates saw her notebooks, they told her she was inadvertently making comic books - and good ones at that.

Chicago came two years after Mucha and Sam, whom she began seeing at RISD, graduated. A cartoonist himself, Sam was invited to work on a film project in Chicago. Mucha followed without having "a life plan."

She worked as a barista ("at this super-hippie cafe") and worked on her art, developing her unique, playful drawing style. She got over Sam and grew to love Chicago on her own. Comic books, chapbooks, and full volumes followed, including the young-adult graphic novel Freshman: Tales of 9th Grade Obsessions, Revelations, and Other Nonsense and the chapbook The Monkey in the Basement and Other Delusions.

She also continued her teaching job: She teaches comics courses for kids and adults and develops programs for students at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art.

On and off, Mucha thought about her time with Sam as possible fodder for a book. She took voluminous notes, but she hesitated to complete the work, having never published anything that intimate .

She was afraid people would think she was strange, crazy, and alien if they read about the depths of depression, anxiety, stress, and self-doubt she plumbed after the breakup.

She was afraid, that is, until she heard her friends' relationship stories. "I had so many friends who had similar stories about breakups that they couldn't get over or breakups that would drag on forever," she said. "And I was, like, 'I have written down a lot about this, but it's all in illegible scribbles!' "

She's no longer embarrassed by the personal details in Get Over It, or worried about what Sam would think. ("He was a little mad" when he read it, she said.)

"I think one of the reasons personal storytelling is worthwhile is that you can look at stories from other people's lives and . . . find something you can identify with," she said. "It can give you a greater sense of compassion and empathy."

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