Helpful Score: 3
A better title for this slice of life would have been Some Stuff I Saw at Work. It's light fare and it's the kind of book anyone could have written about any job. This one just happens to be centered around a restaurant job.
Numerous times throughout the course of this book I kept wondering to myself, If this lady has been cartooning for over 35 years now, why isn't she good at it yet? The characters ALL look the same, with both male and female having so few defining details that they are virtually indistinguishable.
As for what the book is about, it's the story of a former art major who gets a job as a waitress.
The book doesn't actually fail at everything attempted, but it doesn't succeed at much.
As an ode to a waitressing job, it does the job, in a minimalist, minimum-wage fashion. Yes, there will be colorful characters who have sex in the restaurant bathrooms and snort coke in the kitchen -- surprise, surprise.
Regarding the sex in the book, it's mostly after-the-fact gossipy girly chit chat, but there was a memorable event depicted where the waitress bangs a roller disco dude simply because he said he was a god, and instead of running away from the crazy man, she actually invited him into her vagina, silly waitress.
As a treatise on working conditions and the exploitations of workers, this is a fail for anyone interested in the politics of labor -- this lady was so oblivious she didn't see the changes coming in the '80s and how we'd all be working in the equivalent of a waitressing job in the 2010s.
As a graphic novelist, this is one of those artists who doesn't value perspective -- just look at the handle and the lip of the coffee mug on the cover if you have any doubts. So between poor perspective skillcraft and characters who all look the same, as previously mentioned, I don't think anyone will particularly care for the art.
The one thing that does capture the reader's attention is the theme of the waitress who can't shake the artist mindset inside her. She is drawn to a job where she can make customer case studies like characters named Lesbian (because that particular co-worker was a lesbian) and Rye Toast Ruth (because that particular customer orders rye toast). It's all surface oriented, no doubt, but it did propel me forward just enough to read the whole thing. She sees the things around her with open eyes as she rides an otherwise empty bus to and from her job where she will be covered with the grease of other people's soon forgotten and forgettable meals. She appreciates both the architecture of Oakland and the uniquely funky characters who inhabit those buildings.
Numerous times throughout the course of this book I kept wondering to myself, If this lady has been cartooning for over 35 years now, why isn't she good at it yet? The characters ALL look the same, with both male and female having so few defining details that they are virtually indistinguishable.
As for what the book is about, it's the story of a former art major who gets a job as a waitress.
The book doesn't actually fail at everything attempted, but it doesn't succeed at much.
As an ode to a waitressing job, it does the job, in a minimalist, minimum-wage fashion. Yes, there will be colorful characters who have sex in the restaurant bathrooms and snort coke in the kitchen -- surprise, surprise.
Regarding the sex in the book, it's mostly after-the-fact gossipy girly chit chat, but there was a memorable event depicted where the waitress bangs a roller disco dude simply because he said he was a god, and instead of running away from the crazy man, she actually invited him into her vagina, silly waitress.
As a treatise on working conditions and the exploitations of workers, this is a fail for anyone interested in the politics of labor -- this lady was so oblivious she didn't see the changes coming in the '80s and how we'd all be working in the equivalent of a waitressing job in the 2010s.
As a graphic novelist, this is one of those artists who doesn't value perspective -- just look at the handle and the lip of the coffee mug on the cover if you have any doubts. So between poor perspective skillcraft and characters who all look the same, as previously mentioned, I don't think anyone will particularly care for the art.
The one thing that does capture the reader's attention is the theme of the waitress who can't shake the artist mindset inside her. She is drawn to a job where she can make customer case studies like characters named Lesbian (because that particular co-worker was a lesbian) and Rye Toast Ruth (because that particular customer orders rye toast). It's all surface oriented, no doubt, but it did propel me forward just enough to read the whole thing. She sees the things around her with open eyes as she rides an otherwise empty bus to and from her job where she will be covered with the grease of other people's soon forgotten and forgettable meals. She appreciates both the architecture of Oakland and the uniquely funky characters who inhabit those buildings.
