Maximum Minimum Wage

Have you ever read something and thought, “This isn’t bad, but it’s been done much better somewhere else?”  That’s the experience I had while reading this collection of writer/artist Bob Fingerman’s otherwise entertainingly filthy saga of a New York couple struggling to find their place in the big city.  If it wasn’t for the fact that it covered a lot of the same ground in a less graceful manner than Alex Robinson’s “Box Office Poison” I might’ve enjoyed it without reservation.  As it is, I have a few.

“Minimum Wage” is the story of writer/cartoonist Rob Hoffman, his hairstylist girlfriend Sylvia Fanucci, and their assorted friends as they go about their lives in the Big Apple.  Rob’s existence is particularly colorful because aside from being a nerd who is more than a little neurotic, his primary source of income comes from drawing cartoons for porno mags.   Sylvia doesn’t mind too much, but Rob’s constant fretting about his station in life drives most of the book.

That’s not something you should worry too much about as the stakes here never really reach “fate of the world” status.  All of the stories here focus on the mundane struggles of everyday life like getting a new apartment, moving, selling stuff at comic conventions, meeting your fiancee’s in-laws, and hanging out with friends.  There are occasional forays into more serious subjects such as how to cope when your girlfriend gets pregnant, dealing with the death of family members, and marriage, but Fingerman laces them all with caustic humor to keep things from too maudlin or sentimental.  I don’t think I’ve ever read a scene where a couple finds out they’re expecting when the girl starts lactating during sex.

Of course Fingerman’s style of humor certainly won’t be to everyone’s tastes.  It certainly qualifies for a “hard R” rating with the level of profanity, sex and bodily fluids on display here.  Now this series was originally published in the 90’s when things like Rob and Sylvia having sex multiple times in an issue, gratiutously profane banter, and seeing a guy getting covered in a mixture of spit, urine and blood during a performance art bit could come across as being genuinely shocking and boundary-pushing.  Now, in a post “Crossed” world, the bar has been raised substantially and there’s very little about this title that feels shocking.  There are certainly exceptions, as the scene were likeable jerk Matt proves that he’s not as potty-trained as he thought he was and the homeless dude who goes around punching random people, but most of it didn’t make me bat an eye.

Fortunately the characters themselves are pretty interesting.  In spite of his neuroses, Rob is still an eminently relatable protagonist in the way he’s constantly quoting bits of pop-culture related ephemera and stressing out about his job and lot in life.  His relationship with Sylvia is also handled in a refreshingly normal manner as they make a genuinely believable couple in the way that they get along most of the time and talk out their issues rather than getting into volume-raising shouting matches.  Rob’s friends, from the even-more-nerdy Jack, the aforementioned “likeable jerk” Matt, the mostly-has-it-together Brian, and Max, the reserved one, all feel refreshingly familiar.  I’m willing to bet that if you’re a guy, you’ll see a lot of your own friends in them as well.

So while I generally enjoyed “Minimum Wage” the problem comes from the fact that it’s tale of struggling New Yorkers never really grabbed me in the way that “Box Office Poison” did.  With that series, Alex Robinson not only managed to nail a specific time and place but delivered characters who felt completely real with enough depth to make any questionable decisions they made feel like natural extensions of who they were.  There’s also the fact that the pacing makes “Box Office Poison” a lot easier to get into as “Minimum Wage” is positively crammed with dialogue and incident on nearly every page.  Normally I’d say that’s a good thing, but it took me a while to get used to Fingerman’s rhythms as they feel very monotonous at first.  Even though you’ll adapt to them the rest of the book still feels like it’s going at a breakneck pace with very little time to slow down and let things breathe.

Another thing is that while both stories aren’t really driven by their narratives, Robinson still manages to develop a few distinct plot threads throughout his work.  Not only do they help give the story some momentum, it allows him to wrap up the book with a reasonable amount of closure as well.  Fingerman doesn’t really do that here, and that’s not really a problem for most of the book as each particular act is fairly self-contained.  Unfortunately when we get to the tenth and final one, the overriding issue is Rob’s baby issues in the build-up to his wedding and that reaches what can only be called a “calculated anticlimax” at the end.  There’s more, somewhat non-canon, story after that but its ostensible end only provoked an indifferent shrug from me as I thought about what comic I wanted to read next.

Of course, all of this made a VERY big impression on one comics fan at the time:  Robert Kirkman, who is behind this deluxe re-printing of the series.  (The “Maximum” part of the title comes from all of the supplemental materials included here.)  For all the noise I just made about the dialogue here, anyone who has read “The Walking Dead” or “Invincible” or any of his other comics will find that he’s adapted Fingerman’s “explain everything” style of dialogue almost wholesale in his own work.  Granted, I think Kirkman has refined things a bit in his delivery and there’s something more inherently appealing about seeing this ultra-conversationalist style being employed in settings that are antithetical to what’s in this book.

So if you’re a real fan of Kirkman and want to see one of his formative influences (as well as one of the four books he’d loan to anyone to show the depth and breadth of comics) then you should pick this up.  I would also recommend that you read this before “Box Office Poison” because doing it after will certainly diminish its appeal.  However, if you find yourself at a bookstore and having to choose between one or the other, then let me solve that dilemma for you now:  “Box Office Poison” wins hands down.  “Maximum Minimum Wage” is fun, but it’s not nearly good enough to be considered part of my canon.