Is it a career or just a series of lame jobs? It'ss all here--from doing time as a miniature golf lackey, to going bust in the internet boom. Beaupre recounts skirmishes with bad bosses, crazy co-workers, sex, drugs and polyester uniforms as he delineates his quest to find and hang onto a job he can live with.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
The resentful employee on the cover of this chronicle of Beaupre's wage slavery looks different from how he appears inside the book, and though the image screams icon up front, don't miss the unexpurgated edition. Fortunately, that shows up more than three-quarters through, by which time things are devolving from the high hilarity of the very first jobs--washing dishes, tending a miniature golf course, door-to-door sales, security guarding--into hanging on to a steady paycheck by sticking with one company. If Beaupre's narration mellows down, his longtime friend Lafler's cartooning stays witty and wacky. The two proceed one panel and one paragraph per page, so the book doesn't look the way the usual graphic novel does, like a collection of comic strips. Moreover, quite often Lafler doesn't literally render Beaupre's words but fashions gag and satirical cartoons based on their implications and suggestions. Lafler wields a most appealing, cartoony style, half The Simpsons, half Peter Bagge's Bradleys, and Beaupre is the lower-middle-class working-stiff spokesman par excellence. An awful lotta guys will identify. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
Stephen Beaupre is is best known to comic aficionados as the former co-publisher of the Cat-Head Comics imprint and editor of Buzzard, the 90's preeminent comic anthology. Post-comic pursuits include Beyond the Fringe, a long-running humor column featured in Worcester Magazine, and hard time in the Internet trench as writer/editor for popular online destinations such as Angelfire, Tripod, and Monster.com.
Steve Lafler is the cartoonist behind BugHouse, Baja and Scalawag, a trio of indigo toned graphic novels about bugs playing be-bop jazz.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Skip work to read this book,
By The Tza (New York City) - See all my reviews
This review is from: 40 Hour Man (Mass Market Paperback)
I got my copy of this book in the mail the other morning. As a former co-worker of Mr. Beaupre's, his description of at least one of the dot-bombs he worked at is amazingly accurate. Also, it made me realize why I will still always call this just a job and not a career, regardless of what I may be I'm doing.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Highly recommended.,
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: 40 Hour Man (Mass Market Paperback)
40 Hour Man is an unusual style of graphic novel narrative, telling the true story of a working stiff's 30 years struggling with the minimum wage American dream, from being a mini golf lackey to going under with the Internet boom and bust and much more. Each page features a paragraph of text and a black-and-white cartoon illustration. Although there is a small amount of adult content - 40 Hour Man is definitely for mature readers only - the primary focus is on frustrations of the working world, petty co-workers, vengeful bosses, bean-counters in suits, and other employment-related hazards. There isn't an overreaching moral to the memoir, other than that happiness in the working world is fleeting and should be enjoyed while it lasts but not depended upon to stay, but the story itself is all too sympathetic and cannot be put down. Highly recommended.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Amusing, but probably not for everyone.,
By
This review is from: 40 Hour Man (Mass Market Paperback)
Stephen Beaupre, 40 Hour Man (Manx Media, 2006)
I have no idea how this got into my head, but from the thumbnail on Amazon's site and some weird logical leaps in my skull, I'd gotten the idea that this was a book about a cat burglar. (Second-story man, forty-hour man, see how I got there?) What it actually is is a memoir about Stephen Beaupre's working life, half prose, half graphic novel. And I will admit right up front that in general I loathe memoirs, and so you should probably add another half-star or so in your head to the rating at the bottom of this review in consequence. I say this because 40 Hour Man isn't a bad book, really, though the concept does invite repetition and boredom. Basically, Beaupre and longtime friend/co-worker/illustrator Steve Lafler wrote the story of Beaupre's career. Every job, no matter how trivial. (And most of them are, especially when you get into the dot-com boom.) What saves it from the quicksand of its own concept is Beaupre's aggressively self-deprecating humor, though that's not enough to make it stand out from the memoir glut we've been experiencing over the past decade. Lafler's art has that same kind of self-deprecating feel about it, seeming almost too naïve for its own good, if you get my drift. (Look at the crudeness of the figure on the front cover for an example of what I'm talking about.) Still, if you, like Maureen Corrigan (in Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading), lament the days when people wrote books about actual, honest-to-pete work, then 40 Hour Man is definitely one for you. ** ½
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