When cartoonist Bob Fingerman started drawing his Minimum Wage comic-book series in 1995, Kevin Smith movies were starting to reach a cult audience, Friends and Seinfeld were ratings co-champions, and the grunge era was fading. Intentionally or not, the climate of urban post-collegiates talking about nothing suffused Minimum Wage, in which Fingerman modulated Peter Bagge's gamy slacker-comic style through the maturing influence of Terry LaBan's Unsupervised Existence. Fingerman's stories dealt frankly with sex and its aftereffects–abortion, guilt, and jealousy, but also commitment and love–with an ear for the slangy, vulgar, self-referential conversations of twentysomethings, as well as their anxieties about officially growing up. Fingerman's hardback graphic novel Beg The Question collects the complete run of Minimum Wage, partially redrawn and rewritten. The smoothing-out job required for making a serial comic book into a self-contained narrative sometimes leaves bumps. Fingerman especially strains himself in the early pages, as he introduces his characters: Rob, a 22-year-old cartoonist who pays the bills by drawing comics and spot illustrations for porn magazines; his 28-year-old girlfriend Sylvia, a bisexual hairdresser with vague dreams of being a writer or painter; and their friend-circle of New York hipsters and ink-stained geeks. Fingerman overdoes the "casually clever" dialogue at first, filling the word balloons with lines that look good written down, but would clang if spoken aloud. He quickly establishes a better rhythm, and Beg The Question's episodic, interwoven tales of career disappointments and romantic complications take on the mesmeric quality of a good soap opera–at least until the later chapters, when Fingerman's need to wrap up Rob and Sylvia's story makes his indulgence of go-nowhere subplots more bothersome. But the writing and the art contain plenty of stark, truthful moments to make up for their occasional clumsiness. Fingerman's drawing style relies on slightly minimized, slightly exaggerated human figures, but those humans have specificity and weight (especially when drawn naked, as they frequently are), and their New York backdrop is stuffed with all manner of grime and grotesquerie. Sex oozes in from the edges of his panels, crowding his characters as much as the pop-culture ephemera that litters their apartments and brains. The keenness of Fingerman's insight into his generation's psyche comes through best when he has Rob dealing with the aftermath of Sylvia's abortion. Rob tries to work, but finds that he can't be funny, so he puts down his pen, turns on the TV, and watches Mystery Science Theater 3000. Fingerman both critiques and comprehends the ways that he and his peers try to forget real-world troubles by clinging to the soft and familiar.