Comic Review : Minimum Wage 2
A few hours before his next date with May, Rob hangs out with his friends. He shares with Brian and Max both his intention to move out of his mother’s house and the news of his new relationship, and all of them have some chuckles at the raunchy answering machine message they recorded and the indignant response to it they got from Max’s mother. Later, at May’s row house, the date moves from kitchen to bedroom in nine panels. Comic book characters can be smooth operators, and nine panels is pretty standard for this sort of thing, although most comic book romance happens in the white “gutter” between the panels, and Bob Fingerman continues with seven more panels of intimacy, three in the dark. Rob is disappointed with having sex in the dark, and shares his feelings about this. One friend, Matt, says that his wearing of Heavy Metal t-shirts is “lashing out” and immature, implying that Rob’s still coping with his divorce from Sylvia. Later, before his next date with May, Rob gives himself a lecture, telling himself he is spoiled, bratty, and ungrateful, and acknowledges that he is not as free as he thought after letting go of Sylvia. However, he is pleasantly surprised at May’s, where they hook up under incandescent light just as he wanted, but afterwards he learns some things about May that shake him up a little.
If you’re not used to underground-styled comics, you might find Minimum Wage a change of pace from mainstream superhero fare to the mundanity of the real world. It is like switching from reading hagiography to eavesdropping a confessional; instead of admiring the fictional feats of saints and heroes, we are sympathizing with regular folk. Indeed, we are a step away from sympathizing with the tribulations of real people. Bob Fingerman has never made a secret that much of this story is cut from his own life; his website describes it as semi-autobiographical. Where Fingerman’s autobiographical comics differ from those of Harvey Pekar is his hero Rob lives a little bit less in his internal monologue and finds himself in more extroverted “sitcom-styled” situations and conversations, so his reality seems a little more mundane and a little less Kafkaesque. It might not be a world we live in, but it is a world we know or remember.
Minimum Wage is an excellent comic. After decades of Kerouac, Plath, Pekar, Bukowkski, and other confessional /autobiographical authors, serving up portions of your life for mass consumption, even when you’re telling it slant, is still a brave thing, and all the more so when depicted in sequential art. Fingerman uses his loose, loopy line to entangle the reader in his own entanglements, and instead of distancing himself with a clinical, objective style, he shows all of Rob’s embarrassing, messy, thought processes in the thought balloons that are becoming passé in the mainstream. Like most biographical fiction, it is deceptively light reading that will make you think for a long time.
After the release of the Maximum Minimum Wage trade in 2013, Image Comics announced that Bob Fingerman would be continuing his critically acclaimed series under their imprint. The original series was published at Fantagraphics almost 15 years ago. There are only two issues in the current series, and not only is it easy to join the story, it is recommended that you do so. You can buy both the original series and the new run digitally on comiXology.