Minimum Wage Volume 1: Focus on the Strange

Bob Fingerman, who South Park / The Book of Mormon's creator
Trey Parker has described as "a brilliant satirist, artist and mind," has
returned to his signature series Minimum Wage after a fifteen-year break.
Spurred by assembling last year's definitive collection of the '90s era
material, Maximum Minimum Wage, Fingerman is thrilled to be creating new
material. Minimum Wage Volume 1: Focus on the Strange collects the
first six all-new chapters, as well as a ton of bonus material including the
covers and a huge guest artist gallery featuring pin-ups by Bill Sienkiewicz,
Farel Dalrymple, J. Bone, Joe Flood, and Brandon Graham.

Picking up the
story in spring of 2000, freshly separated Rob Hoffman is trying to reassemble
his life. Only 25, he's going through a divorce, his finances are in ruins, and
he's forced to move back in with mom. All around him things are changing. The
internet is about to erase his number-one source of income: men's mags. But the
internet also offers a new angle on dating, and so begins Rob's adventures as a
singleton.

Rob Hoffman,
protagonist of the original Minimum Wage graphic novel, returns in a new
collection that finds him awaiting the finalization of his divorce. He's living
at home with his mother, eking out a living drawing pornographic cartoons, and
diving back into the sexual hunting ground that is the NYC bar and club scene.
Rob's misadventures in and out of the sheets with three women-a stoner with body
image issues, a married post-menopausal children's show entertainer, and a
superior from his porn industry job-happen in impressively rapid succession, but
all are punctuated by the unshakeable memory of his ex-wife, Sylvia. Rob's world
is all-too-identifiable, populated with visually distinct and quirky characters
possessing a fleshiness that lends realism to the book's many couplings. Thanks
to Fingerman's facility as a writer and illustrator, the city lives and breathes
as Rob navigates his way through a maelstrom of urban oddity. Fingerman's
previous work was always grounded in candid, realistic examination of the human
experience and this tale brings readers more of that, the author's ongoing
evolution and maturation as a graphic novelist evident. A humorous and trenchant
comic for grownups that leaves the majority of its contemporaries in the
dust. - Publishers
Weekly