Fungirl: Vulva Viking by Elizabeth Pich

One unexpected consequence of the combination of a bisexual main character and a minimalist art style: I thought the love interest in this book was female for a few pages, until our main character calls him "this guy." (Though, quirkily, she uses a "they" pronoun at first, as if the wavefront of her crush's gender has not yet been collapsed, but switches to "he" after someone else says "Boys want to be wooed.")

Hey, love all the people, right? And Fungirl is just the person to do it, with her nutty ball-of-manic-energy neediness.

But, as you may guess from the title, all does not go well for Fungirl in Fungirl: Vulva Viking, the most recent one-shot by Elizabeth Pich about her continuing character, who I still think is a great attempt to stake out wider realms of cringe comedy from a female perspective. It was published about a year and a half ago, and followed the big collection Fungirl and the similar one-shot Fungirl: You Are Revolting.

Fungirl is a twenty-something slacker in a pullover sweater, living with premed roommate Becky (and, unofficially, Becky's sensitive boyfriend Peter) and working a string of small-time jobs that she always manages to screw up. There have been male characters fitting that rough description for decades - comedy thrives on them - but Fungirl is a specifically female version of that loser, and Pich delights in making her femininity a shambling, violent, needy, destructive engine of chaos in these books.

This time, Fungirl is working at a corndog stand, and barely holding onto that job. But she meets a cute influencer, a skateboarding dude who seems to be into her, and they set up a date.

It does not go well. I don't want to spoil how or why it doesn't go well, but it goes horrifically not-well, in a way that leads to a more realistic version of the cover scene and is directly responsible for the title. It goes wrong in a solidly adult way: that's as far as I should go.

That's the story of Fungirl's life, though: she screws things up, hugely and humorously. She wants love - I should probably say "sex" there, but "love" is close enough, since she wants that, too, only slightly less vigorously - and she is no good at getting it. She's no good at holding a job, either, or at being a good roommate, or at a dozen other standard adult things.

That's why we love comedy characters like Fungirl. Well, I don't know if there are other comedy characters like Fungirl. But why we've liked her male counterparts for so many years. And why her adventures are so much fun in their demented splendor. And why we maybe wish we lived in a world where women were freer to screw up this badly, to be this funny this much. But we do have Fungirl, even if she - as far as I know - stands alone in her field.