Artist Mary Wilshire (Wimmen's Comics, Red Sonja, Power Pack) illustrates Fat Free in pencils that aren't always well served in the trade paperback printing. Though Richard Milner includes a special pleading intro explaining the rationale behind the use of pencils instead of more traditional inkwork, I'm not completely convinced by 'em. One thing inking can do is magnify compositional and anatomical flaws – and I suspect a big motivation behind keeping the work in pencil was to obscure how difficult it is to construct a comic story around a realistically fat character.

One of the reasons so many mainstream comic characters have the same basic body form resides in the fact that decades of panels featuring mesomorphic body types has created a visual library of poses for nearly every situation. Fat bodies don't behave so predictably, however, and require the artist's constant attention. (One of the things that makes Jaime Hernandez, say, such a wonderful comics artist is his visual appreciation for a variety of body frames.) More than once, I found myself thinking (as in a panel where a Jude who suddenly seems to have lost her breasts is shown cutting fabric for a short-lived dressmaking business), "Waitaminute, did our girl just drop fifty pounds between panels here?"

Still, Wilshire's pencils are livelier than the material they serve. If many mainstream fans unfairly sneer at autobiographical comics for being solipsistic and whiney, it's hard to hold this book up as a counter-argument. We never get a smidgeon of, say, the wonderfully snippy character details that characterize autobio godfather Harvey Pekar’s best work. Only figure in Free to rise above two-dimensions is our narrator.

Too, at the risk of veering into a tangential argument with our narrator, I had a problem with the way she turned the entire NYC size acceptance crowd into a mass chorus slamming her decisions. To be sure, the issue of weight loss surgery can be a contentious one: many plus-sized advocates criticize it for a variety of reasons (none the least of which is the number of serious complications that they've watched friends and lovers experience), but there are others in the community who've chosen the procedure for themselves. We're never shown that in Fat Free, of course, because aside from caricatures recognizable to them-what-knows-'em (hey, look, there's Ned standin' in a row of would-be dancers!), none of the P.H.A.T./N.A.A.F.A crowd is even given a name.

Why should they be? It's not their "Amazing All-True Adventure"...