Eugene Wang leads a complicated life. He works a dead-end job at an underhanded brokerage firm. He lost his most recent girlfriend to his mother, who is, oddly enough, a right wing religious fanatic. He just found out that his father was not actually murdered, but is working as a security guard in the building where the above-mentioned brokerage firm is located. Eugene’s best friend is a bullshit-slinging, slut-banging motivational speaker who, despite having graduated from college, is still living the frat-boy lifestyle. And Eugene spends a lot of his time feeling sorry for (but also trying to avoid) Sue Ann Potts, the perennial psycho/sucker.
Got all that? Good. That’s just the tip of Stan Yan’s comic strip, THE WANG, here represented by the collection, ERECTION YEAR. With this group of characters, Yan examines what it’s like to live in dysfunctional America. All right, maybe that sounds kind of bland in this modern era, but he looks upon the subject with an honest eye, exploiting a lot of horrible situations for a hearty gut-laugh. Along the way, he also has a few chuckles talking about what it’s like to be Chinese-American surrounded by white society (the latter usually represented by George Gedaladapus, the motivational speaker mentioned above).
Eugene Wang has difficulty with his job because he finds it hard to take advantage of elderly people with limited incomes. As a result, his only customer is his father, who has a few heart-to-heart talks with his loser of a son (one of which was about how Santa is not real; apparently, his mother told him that she thought Santa was a burglar, so she shot him, thus explaining why he doesn’t come around anymore).
This is to say nothing about how Eugene will put up with his ex-girlfriend’s complaints (because he still has a thing for her). And how his mom is still stalking his ex-girlfriend, even though the two women had been broken up for some time. And how his ex-girlfriend went to his father to help investigate said stalking. And then there’s his ex-girlfriend’s dog, Dildo, who exists only so she can get hot chicks’ numbers.
Sex plays a prevalent role in this strip, but surprisingly, it’s never really crude. Which isn’t to say it’s not dirty (it is), but not even a cad like George talks about “fucking a broad,” for example. Looking back, the harshest word in the strip is probably “bitch.” Dildo humps legs and licks his own balls (and a dick and balls actually shows up at some point), but these characters are pretty . . . clean. Weird, right?
You’re not likely to see THE WANG in your Sunday funnies anytime soon, but there’s a lot of commonality of experience in these characters. They’re easy to identify with, and if you’re not one of them, you probably know one of them (at the least).
Just hope that you’re not Sue Ann Potts. Poor, gullible Sue Ann Potts . . . .
THE WANG: ERECTION YEAR
Writer and illustrator: Stan Yan
Publisher: Squid Works Comics
49 pages
$6.95
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