2 out of 5

I came for the Worden bit.  There’s more here worth staying for, but Mary burns through some positivity with short-sighted and disruptive messaging.  And, y’know, a lack of frikkin’ point.

Pseudo-biographical comics are one of the more masturbatory variations of the format.  Reading the letter responses to Slutburger #1 suggests exactly the kind of mindset that digs this scene: the That Happened To Me Too! crowd.  To each their own.  I don’t like chit-chat because it falls into this very same gist (flat information exchanges; I like X, Oh? I like Y? and so on), but I accept that this form of socialization works for people, and Mary is essentially up front that putting her experiences down on comic paper act as her form of therapy, so I’m not faulting her for that.  Lord knows writing endless reviews is a masturbatory act as well (literally, of course, and now you’re fully aware of what I’m doing while typing).  And while her pacing and lettering – specifically bubble placement – at this stage in her game could use some hecka work, I dig Fleener’s 2D, pop-art style.  You can tell by the enmeshed bodies on the cover of this issue that Mary’s not lacking in compositional skills, and so the look of her art comes across as exactly that – a look; an affection, and not a limitation – and gives the book a sense of confidence and purpose, even if I ultimately felt the story that takes up most of it kicked its own point in the patoot.

Most of Slutburger #2 is about a recently passed pal of Mary’s whom she is convinced is haunting her.  We spend way too long focused on coincidences that seem influenced by said haunting, and it just doesn’t quite sync up with Fleener’s cynical sensibilities; that is, she seems awfully naive about the whole thing for someone of a snarkily observant mindset.  And then after subjecting us to pages with no sense of flow (time jumps, no build-up to select ghostly moments or effective transitions between them), lamely cutesy interactions between her and her husband, and character interactions that are strictly of that information exchange bit and don’t actually help the story at all, we get a “let me tell you the point” page about AIDS and a dedication of the comic to… someone who I’m not clear what role they played in the story?  Were they the dead friend, but you changed their name?  “All of the men mentioned in this story are DEAD,” Fleener proclaims, excepting her husband – not proclaimed.  I know its nonsense to pick on the specifics of a statement introducing something ‘serious’ Fleener wanted to speak to, but it’s indicative of the sort of ignorant story-telling style, subjecting us to a nigh whole comic worth of whatever that was just indirect support for a moral.  Meh.

‘The ballad of Stoney Joe’ is an amusing (and painful) non-verbal tale of taking peyote and f’in cacti.  Dennis Worden’s few pages picking on Fleener and Slutburger are pretty good, but more appreciable in that he really went to town on her and it’s great that the two had the kind of friendship where they could laugh such hazing off.  There are some great Worden moment in there, but it’s mostly just a friend taking jabs at their buddy.  The comic concludes with an interestingly bizarre tale o’ love scripted by Jon E. and drawn by Fleener.

Averagely entertaining stuff, bumped down due to the frustrations expressed in my wandering rant above.  Yes, this comic was written more than 15 years ago and I’m complaining about it now.  The end.