(From MMOB: Minding My Own Business. Click on image to see it full-sized. Warning: the comic contains adult situations, extremely cynical and biting humor, and a lot of politically incorrect humor. Reader discretion is advised.)

Every so often, there is a comic out there that when you start reading it, you go “oh my God, I cannot believe they did that.” You start laughing, one of those nervous laughs of “this is horrible but hilarious, I can’t stop reading!” and next thing you know, it’s four in the morning and you’re halfway through the archives. One of the kings of this is Something Positive (though Questionable Content sometimes manages that as well), and S*P managed to do it so well I doubted I’d find its match. Thus when I happened across MMOB: Minding My Own Business, I quickly put aside the other strip I was reviewing and started a massive archive crawl.

Early MMOB was raw, passionate, and powerful. It was almost a combination of Blues Brothers and Something Positive mixed with a massive dose of cynicism. The hero of the comic, Reidar, is a DJ at a radio station who is always wearing a mobster-style hat and dark sunglasses, as well as a tie and dress-shirt. I mean, he’s on vacation and he’s still dressed in a dress shirt with tie.

The early comics revolve around Reidar and Janice and Erika, two girls who’ve hooked onto his life for no apparent reason other than the fact he wouldn’t jump in the sack with Erika despite her doing everything but stripping naked and jumping the guy. It’s not until four months later that we meet one of Reidar’s friends, Daniel.

Daniel himself is the start of a trend in MMOB in which all of Reidar’s male friends have zero luck with women. Reidar himself slowly descends into the maw of Mary Sueism as we learn that not only do Janice and Erika want him (and indeed start dating him at the same time) but also his co-worker Jo-ann, a long-distance girlfriend named Heidi whom he’s trying to remain faithful toward, another girl named Anita that knew him from high-school, and finally Lisa, who appears out of the blue and is all depressed because she wrongly thinks he’s gay. Not only does he have all these women chasing after him, but he’s able to beat up kick-boxers without training of any sort. He’s one third owner of a nightclub, and a popular radio DJ. In short, he descends into Mary Sue territory and only his sardonic and sarcastic wit manages to keep the comic from losing all entertainment value. (In that, my friend Steve disagrees.)

That hard edge to MMOB has softened. As things start going better for Reidar, he and the comic become “nicer” in some ways. The male cast started succumbing one by one to finding women interested in them. Daniel actually finds someone first, due to a dating service application Reidar filled out as an example for his friend. (That’s right; Daniel’s date is thanks to a description of Reidar. So once again it’s Reidar Sue’s ability to attract any woman he meets or who even hears about him that draws in the girl.) Sarcasm aside, Miriam’s attracted to Daniel because he’s nice, not because of anything Reidar does. Indeed, she doesn’t even care that Daniel didn’t fill out the application for the dating service.

Chris (who goes by the name “Light” in the nightclub he owns with Reidar and their partner “Moon”) has also run across a young lady interested in him despite the fact he’s rather shallow and self-centered. Of course, he’s not completely two-dimensional (which is one of the saving graces of this comic). Even in his shallowness Chris has a sense of morality. He considers girls who have boyfriends to be off-limits to fantasize about (and no doubt to hit on). The cynic in me says it’s to avoid being beaten up by angry boyfriends, but even so, how would they know he was daydreaming about their girl? It’s an interesting twist that transforms this character from caricature to person.

While Reidar is losing his cynical edge as things improve for him romantically (and I’m not going to spoil it for you, though some of those links might), Chris and Moon remain fairly resolute with their insults and zings back and forth. Some of these insults are rather nasty, in fact; I wonder at times how these two can remain friends with the insults they throw at each other. However, it may be because they’re such good friends that they’re able to heap abuse on each other. (Whether Chris’s new relationship will soften him remains to be seen.)

Oh, and the girls who were at the core of the early strips? After two years away from the comic (which translates to a couple of weeks in-comic), they reappear having fallen in love with each other and are willing to give up Reidar as a boyfriend. Considering he never did anything with them and started avoiding his apartment to stay away from them, I don’t think he is very disappointed.

Unfortunately, the problems with MMOB may never be resolved. Rainer Koreasalo has gone on several hiatuses of late, and has been thinking of moving on to other projects. The first signs of this were at the sudden splurge of sketches he started putting up instead of comics. Eventually these sketches started to tell their own story paralleling what was going on in the comic itself.

Koreasalo is also worried at how the number of characters in the comic has skyrocketed. Each character wants their own story told and keeps pulling the comic in different directions. Hopefully instead of ending the comic he’ll cut back on his regular (pre-hiatus) update schedule and work on both his new ideas and the current book.

No matter what his final decision, the truth is that MMOB has lost a lot of the hard edge that drew me in originally. Characters grow and mature in time. But there is a way to retain that hard edge even as the characters grow. Other comics have walked this path and continue to hit hard with comics that shock and scandalize even as they entertain. If you don’t mind relationship comics and the softer edge that this comic has taken, then MMOB will continue to entertain you. But if you’re here for hard cutting humor like that found in Something Positive, you may be best suited reading the first couple of years of the comic and then leaving after Anita appears on the scene.