The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund exists to help comics artists and merchants who fall victim to dubious obscenity law prosecutions, like the one that anchors the premise of David Johnson’s Busted Jesus Comics. While the Fringe Festival isn’t supposed to have an ethos, really, Busted Jesus still feels like an ideal piece of material for it: The show is initially abrasive, almost daring you to form an lazy judgment of both the playwright and his central character. Stick with it, however, and Busted Jesus eventually shows its hand as a classic specimen of redemptive human drama.

While the story initially jumps back and forth between cartoonist Marco’s obscenity trial in Florida and a Manhattan job interview some time later, the show isn’t really about the First Amendment. What Marco is prosecuted for distributing to a minor would certainly satisfy any community standard of “obscene” — we’re not talking some legit-as-art-just-not-for-kids thing like Love and Rockets here, but something repulsive to the point of abstraction. This initially gives Busted Jesus Comics the depressing profile of a jeremiad that has nothing much going on but an eagerness to shock and a pedestrian rage at a few familiar, if deserving, satirical targets: Corporate coffee chains, religious fundamentalism, prayer-based “cures” for homosexuality.

But anchored by a pair of remarkable performances — Matt Reckeweg’s raw portrayal of Marco as a barely functional storm system of competing neuroses, and Ja’nelle A. Taylor as his all-business interviewer — the show surprises by revealing more than enough heart to cover for the elements and characters that don’t quite come together. (The podunk picketers, for example, could, and should, go.)