So this is exactly a story about what then? Don’t be fooled, there is more to Tom Humberstone’s tale of slacker love that meets the eye, the problem is untangling its core message to make sense of everthing that has gone before it. Confused? Don’t be.

On the surface, How To Date A Girl… is a classically structured boy-meets-girl fauxmance. The first meeting of our protagonists Tom and Kate starts as a boozy night down the local before ending in a tube station with a cough, an awkward kiss and the promise of more to come. Before you start to settle in for a cosy night with cocoa and a happy ending be warned, this is an autobiographical work. These things rarely end in a neat little package.

Broken down in to three acts, Humberstone’s story is constructed around dialogues between friends as he counsel from his friends on how to win Kate over. From page one it’s plain that this is a comic for readers, where the words seem to leap off the page to the extent that you can hear the clink of pint glasses and buzz of crowd scenes as a small cast of well-wishers impart their, at best vaguely useful, advice. The downside to this approach is that some of the pages come off as overloaded, with the characters almost tearing speach bubbles apart to try and make eye contact with each other. Humberstone overcomes this largely by avoiding rigid panel structure for a more montage-driven approach that lets the conversation flow across the page. It’s a refreshing way to deal with scenes that so easily could have descended into uniform panels of talking heads against a neutral background.

Aside from his page construction, Humberstone’s crosshatched artwork is as imperfect as his characters: awkward, expressive and full of gentle humour. Using a scratchy, sketchbook immediacy for the majority of the book, it’s a shame that he abandons this for a more slick presentation in the final act.

Humberstone’s honest style stretches far beyond the style of his pen and ink work as well, and here begins the tough work of how to accurately assess this book. Dogged by self-doubt, the Tom we are presented with is a slacker-by-numbers and knows it. To liven up procedings we are given the Harvey Pekar treatment of occasional asides to the reader, something Humberstone himself is called out on by Kate at the first opportunity. If anything, Tom draws such attention to all of his failings (and his attempts to cover them up) that he takes ownership of them, injecting an almost Woody Allen vibe ­ the namechecking of Manhattan at the end a deliberate poke in that direction.

Having got this far, where How To Date A Girl…  ultimately falls down is in its denouement. Essentially we have 50 pages of banter with nothing to show for it at the end. Had Tom been struggling with writers block at the start, come out of a damaging relationship or toyed with leaving town then the reader could appreciate the necessity of telling the story, of marking an important point in his life at which things made a turn for the better or worse. In the absence of any wider context (and we are assured he has gone on to a more loved-up and fruitful existence) we have a story of romantic missteps with no real point beyond a nod to the redemptive power of art.

Playwright Neil Simon knew to bend the truth Biloxi Blues for the sake of a good story, but in flagging the bits he made up at the end he got away with constructing the ending he wanted rather than the one life gave him. How To Date A Girl… is real, charming and messy, but it just lacks a killer punchline. Sometimes there is a thing as too much honesty.

£tbc; b/w, 54 pages, A4. W/A Tom Humberstone www.ventedspleen.com