What is it about comics people (or should that be 'comix people'?) that compels them to do strips about their lives? Is it because they want to further the medium itself, by breaking it out of it's stereotyped subject matter? Or is it because it's cheaper than therapy? My opinion is that they do it because the readers send them letters telling them how great they are and how they, like, empathise with the artists' crappy life (I've never seen an autobio strip by someone who hasn't got a crappy life, though maybe that's just my narrow spectrum of experience).
Of it's type, I suppose, Assassin & Whiner is quite good. Ms McNinch usually uses the 'first person-talking head' type strip, so you can see how her expressions relate to her words. I can see how a lot of people would really like this stuff, comix people being into fringe-cultures. The main problem with 'Asswhine' (so it's called by the cognoscenti), is that you really have be 'into' this, and to be interested in the minutiae of the life of a slightly-above average person. Not wanting to sound misanthropic (well, there's a first time for everything), I'd really want to know her 'better' before I could care that much about her life. This probably means that I'd have to read all the previous eight issues, and maybe not even then.
You have to admire Ms McNinch for laying her life and her problems bare to whomever is reading her strip (those of us without her artistic talents have to make do with poxy web diaries.), but it doesn't do a great deal for me. If you 'go' for autobio comix, so to speak, I'd say send her a dollar. If you don't, I'd say try before you buy, as it were, if you can.
Matthew Lawrenson