PositiveThe Rumpus...if, like me, you don’t know your Bathshebas from your bathtubs, the de-contextualized vignettes might leave you feeling lost. Here is another woman who happens to sell sex, and here is another man who spent all his master’s money on sex workers and was rewarded. At a certain point, a reader might want to ask, So what? It is only in the Afterword that Brown draws a clear “connection between all these stories of whores and whoremongers”. Here, and in his copious notes (which make up a third of the book), Brown does the real heavy lifting of his argument. As well as laying out the reasoning behind his headline positions, he describes the schism in the early Church over prostitution and offers up fascinating details that reveal the depth of his knowledge. The notes are rich with this sort of detail, a welcome contrast to the sparseness of the comic itself.
