Sean Seamus McWhinny
Northwest Press
$9.99 Digital Only Edition
Review by Joe Palmer
Do you like the idea of easy money? Student loans looming high? Does the prospect of smelling like fast food overcome your fear of mountainous debt? Are you a masochist, feeling desperate, or simply delusional? Can you grovel on command? Are you versed in or willing to learn the art of illusion even if you may lose your own grasp on reality? Congratulations! If you answered yes to one or more of these questions then you too can rub elbows with the rich and famous as a catering whore! Better yet – spare yourself giref and humiliation by reading McWhinny’s misadventures and musings in his humorous compilation Diary of a Catering Whore.
American poet, writer and satirist Dorothy Parker wrote “Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words”. McWhinny displays ample talent in both wit and wisecracking, two requisite tools anyone who wants to make it in — or out of alive — food service must have. By the time I’d finished panel two of opening strip Űbercool I knew I’d be in sympatico with the entire book. The hip hop jelly doughnut rapper two panels later was met with a not very ladylike snort as memories of my own days as a catering whore (we were simply cater waiters though I admit to whoring for shifts) came rushing back. McWhinny’s catering experiences are a great deal more interesting than mine were and his accounts are hilarious because they’re the kind of incidents that you wouldn’t have the unfortunate luck of happening to you because it wouldn’t ever happen during the course of a mundane work day. The humor in Catering Whore darts and dashes between farce, screwball, slapstick, and satire, though if anyone lampooned herein improves their lot it would be McWhinny by virtue of having drawn and written the strips. Many of the numerous incidents I found particularly funny were catering related, though anyone should appreciate the absurdity of the situations. I’ll never look at Olympia Dukakis without thinking of her depiction here and the Spam Ambassador piece highlighting an annual party thrown by Spam heir and gay ambassador James Hormel will color my reading of an advance copy of his “Fit to Serve” book I’ve received. The clever dialog and comedic set up throughout the collection leads me to wonder if McWhinny isn’t a David Sedaris in the making for the gay niche of indy comics.
Mchwinny’s art is crisp, open and wonderfully cartoony with the right amount of detail to create a believable stage to place his characters’ antics without visual distraction. Facial expressions are distilled to essential lines and adeptly conveyed to accentuate character traits, individual moments, and to emphasize punch lines. Kudos on making it look so easy! At first I thought I had a small quibble with an occasional rough spot with lettering until I realized the screen resolution I was reading in was 177 percent. The art and lettering are just right at 100 percent so don’t make this mistake. Bigger is not always better, boys!
You can download a preview of Diary of a Catering Whore from iTunes here, be teased a little here and purchase a copy here.
