Dotty's Inferno

by Bob Fingerman

As the goggle-eyed philosophical Frenchman once wrote, “Hell is other people.” Meet Dotty. In life she was a call girl. In death she’s been damned to work in Hell’s Inhuman Resources department, New Male Arrivals Division, assigning wayward souls their crummy afterlives. For eternity. All the same, Dotty spends more time away from her desk on odd jobs and adventures, be they fetching Cerberus from Hell’s dog pound to licking psychotropic toads’ heads and tripping ballz. Forever is a long time, so might as well make the best of a hellish situation. From the pages of Heavy Metal and Soft Wood, as well as five never-before-seen stories, Dotty’s Inferno is a roasty romp by MAD and Minimum Wage creator Bob Fingerman. Also included, a bonus gallery featuring “pin-ups” by John Cebollero, Howard Chaykin, Dave Johnson, Mike Mignola, Dan Panosian and Bill Sienkiewicz!

72 pages, Paperback

First published October 20, 2020

About the author

Recent releases are From the Ashes, a satirical "speculative memoir" set in post-apocalyptic New York (IDW, March 2010) of which The Onion wrote, “As a blitz of astringent satire, an unabashed love letter to his wife, and a love-hate manifesto aimed at the whole human race, From The Ashes is a gem; as an addition to the often-staid canon of post-apocalyptic pop culture, it’s a revelation… A“

In August 2010 my second novel, Pariah (Tor Books), a Pinteresque zombie tale, was released. It rec'd a starred review from Publishers Weekly and an A- from Entertainment Weekly and was Fangoria's Book of the Month selection. The mass market pocket edition came out in 2011.

My most recent release is the deluxe oversized hardcover collection Maximum Minimum Wage, from Image Comics (April 2013), which made Entertainment Weekly's Must List and received a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

Reviews

[Rod Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

This parody of Dante's Inferno finds prostitute Dotty Dasche condemned to the second circle of Hell and drafted as an office worker who greets and gives out work assignments to a never-ending line of naked men who constantly sexually harass her. As in Dante's Inferno several famous people -- e.g., Tommy Wiseau, Francis Bacon, and Donald Trump, Jr. -- pop up in cameos in the story or in the background.

It's supposed to be funny, and I have found Fingerman's work amusing in the past, but this seems to think humor consists only of sexual harassment, visible penises, and many, many piles of feces. It wants to be wicked and witty, but its just dreary and dull.

There are six short stories with Dotty and then three stories featuring the demon duo Ralf + Borax. It was annoying that the stories weren't printed in some sort of chronological order because the final Dotty story features a cross-over with Ralf + Borax with inside jokes that can only make sense if new readers know who in the hell Ralf + Borax are.

[Alex Sarll]

A workplace comedy set in Hell, though one could argue they all are. The locale is much as Dante envisioned it, though with notes of Bosch too, and a lot more dogshit everywhere. Also, everyone's naked, which initially seems like Bob Fingerman taking the opportunity to indulge his more Robert Crumb obsessions, except that soon enough the busty eponymous lead ends up slightly less naked than anyone else, so it becomes more about comically unappealing male nudity. Indeed, once the focus shifts to blue-collar (in a strictly metaphorical sense) demons Ralf & Borax, and their lecherous boss, some of it's skirting pretty close to gay panic as comedy engine. Elsewhere it's a lot smarter - there's a running joke about a particular severed arm that's the main reason I'm glad I read this. On the other hand, the final story introduces demon versions of Trump's ghastly sons and then demonstrates that if you don't focus, it is somehow possible to aim at the world's easiest comic targets and still miss. Overall it's about what I expected from Heavy Metal magazine's Soft Wood spin-off (yes, I'm afraid so), but the Edelweiss ARCs were very slim pickings this month.

[Spaghett · Rating 3 out of 5]

I took a couple classes on Dante in college and it became sort of a pet topic for me, so anything that kind of smacks of the Divine Comedy will be at least a bit interesting. Dotty's Inferno is about a hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold who enters a loosely Dante-Esque version of hell where everyone's naked and has to work a mundane office job. The biggest surprise of this volume was that it's less horny and strangely more wholesome than you'd expect, even as people are getting drenched in various bodily fluids for no reason. The humor is hit or miss, you have some pretty played-out and predictable gags, but also some clever ones with a particularly good running gag that pops up about once an issue. Some of the gags are surprisingly intellectual in places too, so you get a Gustav Dore pastiche at the same time someone's getting pooped on which is interesting. Dotty herself is really the glue that holds the series together, her attempts to do right by people and make things more bearable are compelling and you really find herself rooting for her and wanting to see her lot in life improve, but the stories are unfortunately too episodic to really go anywhere in the grand scheme of things. I could see that format working well if the series continues but right now it's basically a collection of decent little stories with no real payoff other than whatever the final punchline of that story is, and that's kind of a shame because I did find myself starting to get invested in this world and its inhabitants, but I guess we'll have to see if more comes from it.

[Theediscerning · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, the latest Heavy Metal book I'd read prior to this was hell on earth, but this was much more like it – and a lot more like the actual hell. A pneumatically pyknic hooker ends up in Hell, and the particular circle for lusty thoughts and people, full of dog turds and priapism. Bizarrely she gets the job of processing new male inhabitants, but the nature of her job, and any plot, is really secondary here to the efforts made to get classical art riffs, mentions of Dante, turds and ejecta on to the same page. It's all reasonably good fun, even if you do want it to be a bit less episodic and a bit more coherent.

Oh, and we then branch off to spend time with two people who cameo in our title hooker's strips, a pair of sewage workers who tend to go round in circles. This, again, is a bit fast and loose with plot, and point, but it is pretty amusing to see the daily repetition of their work inflict itself on them.

So, on the whole, the first chunk of this book will certainly get the ejecta on the page from the teenaged boys who this is targeted at, and the second half is enjoyable for different reasons, and perhaps more witty. I have no idea why the art quality is so up and down from one story to another, but all told this is a pretty decent one-man job. As bawdy, scummy smut goes, this is quite, er, decent.

[Adam Fisher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review being written for potential publication by Diamond Bookshelf.

[Daniel Mossop]

Couldn’t get into this, but then I’ve not read Dante’s inferno so 🤷🏻‍♂️

[Dave Corun · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked The Room jokes in the first story and the covers at the end. Otherwise it wasn't for me.