The Beauty of Sloppiness: Julia Wertz's Museum Of Mistakes

In the original introduction that Peter Bagge wrote for the first Fart Party collection, he said of the webcomic proliferation of the early 2000's: "Some are professionally drawn, others cleverly written. Fart Party is neither...Yet both in spite of all that AND because of it, Fart Party is the best! It's very direct and funny and honest in a way that very, very few other comic strips ever are, and once you start reading Julia's strips, it's hard to stop."

As per usual, Bagge is right. Wertz breaks tons of rules with regard to what good cartooning is. The way characters relate to each other in space is awkward. The use of gesture is either underdeveloped or ham-fisted. There is frequently way too much text in a given panel. The thing is, none of that matters. This collection of Fart Party strips, unpublished strips, and assorted ephemera over the years is a document of how a young artist develops over time--not just with regard to drawing, but also their unique authorial voice. And no matter how sloppy her strips were, no matter how many typos there are (and there are many in this volume, including modern strips, and even on the title page!), none of that mattered. There is an enthusiasm and an immediacy in her drawings as Wertz shares her world with the reader, and the reader can't help but get swept along. Wertz world is an interesting place to be, and the hostess never runs out of stupid jokes, embarrassing anecdotes, hilarious stories, and glimpses of her pain. Her "definitive" Fart Party collection, Museum of Mistakes, includes the two original volumes and a great deal of additional material, including a note or two from 2020, updating her relationship and status as an expectant parent.

The one word I'd quibble with regarding Bagge's assessment of Wertz's comics is "honest." The concept of "honesty" in memoir is kind of a marketing device that allows for "authentic" voyeurism. It is meaningless. There is no such thing as "truth" in memoir, as the author's job is to tell a story, not recite every memory verbatim. And even if they did, it's only from one person's point of view. And Wertz herself noted that while all of the stories here are accurate, they are far from the complete picture of her life in her early 20s. She elides things like her lupus diagnosis, her older brother's addiction issues, her own alcoholism, and more that she hasn't been willing to share. Which is not to say that she should, but it should also be understood that memoir, like anything else, is a genre that demands something of a coherent story or well-threaded series of gags. In the parlance that Alex Hoffman coined, Wertz's autobio material is definitely "closed," meaning that Wertz only provides enough context to the reader to understand her jokes. 

Still, stuff bubbles up. Wertz writes about her tendency to isolate herself and her general social awkwardness that she masks with humor, attitude, and deflection. This give-no-fucks attitude is the essence of her humor, but it's also the core of a coping mechanism that went a few rounds too many. It's that need to keep others at arm's length that led to the extreme isolation that she touches on at the end of this book and details in Impossible People. The result was a whole lot of people who liked her, but few that she let in enough where she felt comfortable going to them. It reminds me a bit of reading John Porcellino's book The Hospital Suite, which reveals the true story behind his years of struggles with his physical and mental health that he just alluded to in the pages of King-Cat. When the artist is ready to share this different kind of story, it recontextualizes their entire body of work. For Wertz, it adds a weight to her silly comics that wasn't there initially but doesn't neutralize what people liked about them in the first place: a small, perpetually indignant malcontent who hilariously rails against the world, but one with an inherent sense of delight regarding so many things. 

While Wertz mostly lets things stand, warts and all, she does add context to a few things here and there. Mostly, she's content to let the book be what it is: funny, obnoxious, sloppy, and a portrait of a young person trying to figure things out in public. One can see not just her drawing and storytelling improve, but also her writing in general. In the chapter featuring strips for what might have been a third volume of Fart Party if Wertz hadn't chosen to do Drinking At The Movies, Wertz maintained her silliness and sense of enthusiasm, but there was clearly a different perspective as a humorist. "Perspective" is the keyword here. It's what made Drinking At The Movies and The Infinite Wait such excellent books, as Wertz had had a few years to consider the meaning of certain events in her life, unlike the immediacy of the Fart Party strips. I also think it's why it took so long for her to write (and finish) Impossible People; she needed time to process the events surrounding her initial rehab, struggles with sobriety, and the eventual lessons she learned about how reaching out to others is so crucial for one's mental health. 

In a sense, this is something she's done for a long time with the stories she's told in public, as they've clearly resonated with a number of readers. If immediacy was what made her early work stand out, it's her willingness to go all-in on providing context that makes her later (and current) comics so different from most memoirs. While there are any number of things that drive me crazy about Wertz's drawing (especially character design outside of her and a couple of other characters) and proofreading, her emphasis on storytelling and the complexity of her authorial voice make her a unique figure in the world of comics memoir. Museum Of Mistakes is a welcome document that allows the reader a chance to see how this voice gained its coherency and how talented she was as a storyteller even as she was still figuring out her style.

The Exception That Proves The Rule: Julia Wertz's Impossible People

There's a scene late in Impossible People, Julia Wertz's recovery memoir, where she meets New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast. Chast reveals that she's a big fan of Wertz, because "it's not from the cartooning world. You don't follow any rules, which makes it unique and fun!" Wertz starts to follow this up about not really even knowing the rules before she's loudly interrupted by Chast's bird saying "Who cares?" This is pretty much Wertz in a nutshell. She does a lot of things as a cartoonist that I would hate from virtually anyone else, but her ability to draw you into her particular kind of storytelling is so all-consuming that I simply don't care as much. 

Impossible People is somehow both way too long and not long enough. It covers way too much ground sometimes, and the deleted scenes that Wertz has posted on her Instagram would have added the kind of rich detail found in her best book, The Infinite Wait And Other Stories. At the same time, Impossible People meanders, loses its way, picks up loose threads again, and is held together not by the fact that it's a recovery story, but rather that it gets at what is referred to as the "root" in recovery terms. Wertz bites off a lot more than she can chew in terms of the cartooning and character design, but her sheer determination and ambition to finally tell this big story somehow makes all of that less important. There are a lot of ways to think about the book, but let's start with the obvious. 

Wertz has a profound understanding that memoir is a genre like any other genre, one where the artist can manipulate any element they want to produce the story they want. "Truth" is irrelevant so long as a good story is told, yet "truth" has always proven to be an important marketing element for memoir. If something is true, it creates a voyeuristic thrill absent from fiction, and in many cases creates a window of misery porn for readers. Wertz absolutely rejects all of this, to her credit. The subtitle of the book is "A Completely Average Recovery Story," in part because every recovery narrative, no matter where rock bottom happens to be, tends to fall along certain patterns. The key to starting recovery that actually works is coming to terms with negative emotions and all the ways in which we seek to conceal them, usually by lying. Being honest is the first and hardest thing one must do in recovery, and it has to continue throughout--especially in not lying to yourself. 

Wertz uses a lot of recovery language in Impossible People and gives us glimpses of meetings, sponsorships, and accountability partners. A key character is her brother, a recovering drug addict who provides a lot of hard advice and compassion. The thing that makes Wertz a great writer--her ability to spin anything into comedy--is precisely the thing that made recovery difficult. By minimizing her own pain and attempting to laugh it off, she delayed getting to a lot of her root issues of exactly why she started drinking. Notably, Wertz doesn't go into much detail as to these events, but the truth is that it doesn't matter much what they were, so long as you're able to talk about them out loud to a therapist, sponsor, or peers. The Blue Book of Alcoholics Anonymous is mostly filled with recovery narratives. Recovery is a kind of belief system, beginning with giving yourself over to the infamous Higher Power, and so recovery narratives are really conversion narratives. 

One very smart thing that Wertz does in the book is explore the problematic aspects of recovery, beginning with the higher power, the religiosity of AA, the misogyny inherent in its origins and execution, and much more. She doesn't linger on it, as this book isn't a critique of AA in particular, but what her brother points out and what she learns is the most profound lesson of recovery: isolation is death. 

This is the heart of the book. Wertz has always painted herself as a misanthropic curmudgeon for comedic purposes, but the reality is that she's simply a shy but socially curious and empathetic person. However, worrying that your problems aren't "big" enough, feeling unworthy of love, friendship, success, etc, feeling like a burden to others and other ways we trick ourselves into isolating. For addicts, what happens is either lapsing into addiction, or worse, trying to white-knuckle sobriety. I would argue that this is uniquely exacerbated by the rugged individualist ethos of American culture. Seeking help is weakness. Buck up and stop complaining. No one wants to hear your problems. If you don't do it yourself, it's not of value. All of this is illusory, of course, whether or not people want to admit it or not. For an addict, it takes a lot of work to purge this social pressure, but the reality is that at a genetic level, humans are social animals. They need each other. They want to communicate with each other and always have--dating before even language. Our trauma is what tricks us into isolating ourselves and making ultimately ineffective choices for our coping mechanisms. Our culture encourages us to do this. Trauma isn't a contest as to who's had it worse; rather, it should be understood as something we all experience and need to reach out to others to cope with. 

As a result, Wertz presents an array of characters who are fully fleshed out in a way that she's never done in any other book. Sure, her friends and family have had supporting roles, but not to this extent and not to this degree of openness. Cartoonist friend Sarah Glidden and recovery friend Jennifer are prominently featured, with the latter particularly grounding Wertz and calling her on her shit. There's a boyfriend (Jeff) that Wertz becomes devoted to (to the detriment of her recovery), only to have him tell her he's cheating on her as he breaks up with her. The one problem with all of this is that Wertz's character design (beyond her own iconic avatar) has always felt perfunctory at best. Furthermore, Wertz's work has always had a static quality where body language, the relationships between bodies in space, gesture, and other key elements of cartooning have felt limited. It didn't matter as much when Wertz was just going for jokes, but it made things more awkward for the deeper, more interpersonal discussions that made up so much of Impossible People. The problem is that Wertz didn't seem to be able to create avatars as interesting or evocative as her own for anyone else, giving them mostly a vaguely generic cartoony naturalism that wound up not being enough of either. As drawings qua drawings, they were sometimes distracting. 

Fortunately, Wertz is well-suited to draw the other co-star of the book: the buildings of New York City. Her level of detail, care, and precision in rendering buildings stands in contrast to drawing people, but it nonetheless added so much flavor to the book. The other fortunate thing is that Wertz's talent as a writer is so prodigious that the cartooning issues melted away not just with her always-winning one-liners, but also her deeper, more interpersonal relationships. Her frank talks with her brother, her heart-to-hearts with her best friend Jen, her hard-won wisdom from her sponsor, and even the flirty banter she has are all totally absorbing and have such a strong rhythm that it holds the very loose plot together. It's less of a plot than episodic storytelling, albeit with a strong thematic throughline. That throughline and lesson of recovery is what gives Impossible People its very warm heart. The sarcastic Wertz is really someone who is quite sincere in how much she loves so many people in her life, and the lesson of the book, as it is for all of those in recovery, is learning how to practice gratitude for the loved ones in our lives. One may not feel like you deserve it, but practicing gratitude, reaching out, and being there for others just as they are there for you is the essence of all community and the key ingredient to fostering mental health. Julia Wertz explores the lessons of recovery and emphasizes that sobriety on its own is irrelevant with community, all while never deviating from everything that made her funny in the first place. 

Sequart Reprints: Autobio Minis From Wertz, Park & Ayuyang

This review originally appeared at sequart.com in 2008.
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I love the immediacy of a good autobiographical comic, especially when it feels like something ripped out of an artist's sketchbook. That's certainly the case for the minicomics of Laura Park, Julia Wertz and Rina Ayuyang. All three artists make very different stylistic decisions, but share similar senses of humor and outlooks on life. Their minis avoid simply being standard diary comics or straightforward accounts of their life narratives, and instead focus on the "little nothings" (to quote Lewis Trondheim) in life that make for good gags, jokes and anecdotes.

Julia Wertz is best known by many for her webcomic, The Fart Party. Her art is the rawest and most stripped down of this group, often using stick figures to depict her life. One can sense the burning need she has to express herself in comics form, as even the crudest of her drawings are well designed and expressive. Her understanding of gesture and timing is what makes her strip so effective. The particulars of Wertz's life are no more or less interesting than anyone else's, but she's clearly fully aware of this. Instead of a navel-gazing narrative, Wertz instead concentrates on wringing humor out of every situation. Her tendency to look at life as a series of adventures is contrasted nicely by her cynical, curmudgeonly attitude.

Issue #5 is about a cross-country trip by train that involved meeting up with her boyfriend and seeing many other cartoonists. Wertz's comics have actually gotten funnier and more cutting since that relationship ended, especially since boyfriend-foible comics are an area that several other cartoonists have been mining (Liz Prince comes to mind). What fuels the humor of this issue is the tension between Wertz's misanthropy and genuine desire to reach out and share ideas with like-minded individuals. The jams that Wertz and Park did were fantastic, as both artists seemed to bring out the best in each other. I could see the two of them collaborating on a long-form work with spectacular results.

Issues #6 and 7 detail the agony of moving across country. Wertz is often at her best when she can really go off on a good rant, but the target of her fury is just as likely to be herself as an outside irritant. One critic admired her comics because they "bared all"; on the contrary, I admire them because Wertz edits out events that aren't pertinent to her punchlines. While many of her strips can be found at her website, they're meant to be read on paper and work best as coherent 32-page units.

Most of the material in Laura Park's mini, Do Not Disturb My Waking Dream, can be found on her Flicker page. Many of the pieces there are in sumptuous color, which obviously didn't translate over to this black and white mini-comic. On the other hand, that only highlighted her remarkable and multifaceted skills as a draftsman. This mini has a variety of single-panel strips, gags, sketchbook drawings, short stories, recipes and other ephemera; with all of it revealing much about its author. Even in the fairy tale she starts about a young girl and a garden, the character she draws is an obvious stand-in for herself. Park is comfortable in any number of styles, from realistic and heavily rendered to a more cartoony line.. Her sense of design is what really pops off the page, from her own iconic character to the fonts in her lettering. The word that best describes her work is "playful", both in terms of the way she addresses her subject matter and the way she plays around with the medium. There's something warm and inviting about her line that makes one want to look at more of her drawings, because they create a comforting environment for the reader to visit--even if it's just for a brief time. Park's storytelling ability doesn't get too much of a workout in this mini, but her restraint and understanding of story beats pervades other work of hers I've read.

In Namby Pamby #4, Rina Ayuyang spins stories about her cat, her brother, her TV-watching habits and people she's met into engaging, well-constructed stories. What's interesting about her work is the effortless way she's able to switch tones from story to story. "Cat's Got A New Crush" and "A Secret To Die For" are both light-hearted accounts of specific obsessions. Ayuyang loves writing about such obsessions from a third-person perspective even as she immerses the read in the particulars of her cat's imaginary life or the way Murder, She Wrote episodes are constructed. The scene where she imagines her cat leading a gang and getting into vicious knife fights with rival cat gangs was hilarious.

"The Book of Ruth" is a touching, hilarious tribute to the life of her older brother from her perspective. The twelve panel grid she employs forces her to keep each panel clear and simple while propelling the reader through her brother's life story. While she gets off plenty of jokes at his expense, Ayuyang doesn't spare herself, frequently casting herself in the role of consummate irritant. The sequences where each youngest child reacts with jealousy at the arrival of a new child, only to be taunted by their older siblings as a sort of karmic payback, are cleverly told in an understated manner. From the lighter early stories to the range of emotions exposed in Ruth's story we turn to a thoughtful and meditative anecdote about a man that Ayuyang was friends with, each relating to each other's misery and ennui. It was done with her non-dominant hand for an anthology, but the result saw a striking use of white on black to tell this bleak but ultimately hopeful story. Ayuyang doesn't have Park's chops, but she is able to effectively tell the kind of stories that she wants to relate.

It's interesting that all three artists discuss their lack of self-confidence and self-worth through their comics, but it seems clear to me that they work through this self-doubt every time they commit to creating a page. The proof of their ability, commitment and passion for comics is on every page, even if it's not immediately apparent to them. They've internalized Lynda Barry's dictum not to worry about whether "Is this good? Does this suck?" and instead have faith in the simple act of drawing and writing and where it will take them. These minis have the feel of immediacy and urgency to them, as though the artists simply couldn't wait another second longer to put them together. That's why the work of all three artists bears watching as they continue to develop their voices.

Autobio/Diary Roundup: Dabaie, Wertz, Baylis, Spina, Marcej, Harbin

Let's take a look at a variety of diary and autobiographical minicomics.

He Also Has Drills For Hands!, by Marguerite Dabaie. This is a self-curated collection of Dabaie's best daily strips over the span of a year, and the result is a minicomic that leaves the reader wanting more. These are drawn in a sketchbook and combine the intimacy and loose feel of such a drawing with a surprising level of detail and some attractive decorative features. In her Hookah Girl comics, Dabaie isn't necessarily known for her sense of humor (though there are funny moments), but her daily strip is far more likely to end with a punchline of some kind. The title of the strip refers to one of her childhood crushes--a character from a video game with drills for hands. Dabaie throws in bits and pieces from her childhood, creativity, daily life, her then-fiancee (and now husband) and a tale about inadvertently meeting John Cusack. In the selection of comics she published in this mini, it seems that she takes great pains to tell an entertaining story of some kind in her strips, rather than just focus on relating particular quotidian events. That said, Dabaie does reveal bits and pieces about her life through stories about her grandmother and things she sees on the streets of New York--it's just that every strip has the same slightly comic and exaggerated flavor, heightened by the charming immediacy & roughness of her line.

Spinadoodles: The Second Year, by Sam Spina. This is the latest big batch of diary comics from Spina, a cartoonist who's clearly attempting the daunting task of getting better in public. In over a year and a half worth of daily strips (he never missed a day), Spina tries different art styles and moves a bit away from the obvious influence of James Kochalka. The overall experience of reading this was not as rewarding as reading the samplers from Marcej and Dubaie, two cartoonists who pared down their strips to a "best-of" selection. Spina chose to steam ahead with every last strip, no matter if they were half-assed, uninspired or repetitive. This mini is a document not only of his life, but also of his development as an artist. It wouldn't be quite truthful to omit strips done while he was dead tired from a long day at work, but the resulting reading experience was a bit of a slog at times. This is not to say that there weren't highlights; indeed, about 1 out of every 4 strips either landed a decent laugh, contained a personal revelation or had an interesting drawing. Given that there are 400 or so strips (with 4 crammed to a page), that's still a fairly solid showing. And some of the best strips (like the ones where he shows snippets of arguments with his girlfriend) are all the more effective because their tone is so unlike his other comics. The strips that work best are usually the ones that look the least like Kochalka's; that is, strips with less line weight (especially in the panels) that rely more on the basic figures rather than textures.

One thing that surprised me was that after a certain point, the rhythm of the strip started to grab me. It wasn't so much that the individual entries became noticeably stronger over time, but rather the kind of observations Spina was making started to become appealing on their own. Spina portrays himself neither as a deep thinker or someone who's especially introspective, but the raw surface energy of his observations has a propulsive quality. Eventually, Spina's simple caricature of himself (big, angular nose and sharp chin), frequently childlike enthusiasm, and self-deprecatory charm leave more of an impression than any particular anecdote. Projects like this eventually tend to have diminishing returns (Spina himself complains about how much more productive he might be if he wasn't doing a daily strip in one entry) unless they become one's life's work, ala Ben Snakepit. I don't think this is true of Spina, so I imagine there will come a point where what he's getting out of drawing these strips is far exceeded by the amount of time and effort he puts into them.

So Buttons #4, by Jonathan Baylis and various artists. Baylis has been writing autobio comics drawn by others for the past couple of years, but this issue of So Buttons represents his biggest leap forward in all respects. First off, the format and coloring of this mini are clean, attractive and reflect a lot of attention to detail. Second, the ordering of the stories was deliberate (as Baylis notes in his introduction) and far more effective than in past issues. There's a beautiful flow of styles as Baylis roughly moves in chronological order. Third, everyone in his roster of artists did a fine job. More on that in a moment, but Baylis' past contributors in particular have made real strides in their storytelling. Lastly, Baylis has finally learned to rein himself in a bit. A huge flaw for many writers who don't draw (especially those that do autobio) is that they tend to over-write their stories. They simply don't know how to let the visuals of the story work as an equal partner. There's also a tendency to ramble on for too many pages instead of distilling an anecdote to its essence, the way that Harvey Pekar did so well. Baylis still has a tendency to overexplain the significance of certain events rather than letting the event speak for itself, but that tendency is lessened when he writes shorter stories. The fact that the stories in this volume were all between two to four pages seems to be a key as to why they were so effective.

Much of this issue is an ode to filmmakers that have meaning for Baylis, often in connection to specific life events. "So...Chalk It Up To Konglateral Damage", drawn by Thomas Boatwright, is interesting because Baylis associated the movie with Thanksgiving--and that he never got to see it all the way through. "So...Stranger Than Parrot Eyes" (also drawn by Boatwright) is a more cartoonish story about Baylis seeing director Jim Jarmusch on the street. Baylis fantasizes about hanging out with him and his "Sons of Lee Marvin" friends while ruminating on what appeals to him about film and what turns him off. Noah Van Sciver draws "So...Loyal", a history of his baseball fandom. Van Sciver eschews a literal approach in terms of the imagery he uses to illustrate Baylis' narrative in favor of a more whimsical take. It's an approach I haven't seen before in a Baylis comic, and it works. Fred Hembeck draws a very funny story about Baylis' internship at Marvel Comics and how he was put in a position to correct John Romita, Sr. on a piece of art. That there are so many stories in this issue (eleven plus a bonus page from Van Sciver) gives it a nice weight and denseness; the issue turns out to be greater than the sum of its parts.

My World And Welcome To It, by Richard Marcej. Marcej is a toy designer and occasional cartoonist who decided to do a diary comic as a way of getting himself to draw every day. The subject matter is mostly standard diary work: movies he sees, bathroom habits, notable sights and events from his life. He is, however, extremely open about his life in terms of his dating habits and family tragedies, treating them with respect but also with the same level of detail he uses in his other strips. What sets this strip apart from similar work is the fact that each entry is cleverly composed and extremely well drawn. Marcej uses a single large panel frame and varies the strip's internal structure depending on what sort of story he's telling. For things like movie reviews, he splits the page up into four panels, underneath the date and a title for the strip. In the strip above, a single image dominates the entire page. In other strips, he'll lead the reader in three different panels that bleed into each other. Marcej pays special attention to clarity in his storytelling while adding a lot of detail such as hatching, cross-hatching and carefully-rendered structures. Marcej is also a fine letterer, a crucial but overlooked aspect of diary comics--especially for wordy artists like himself. The clarity and simply pleasing quality of his lettering makes even the most text-dominated strips nice to look at. Marcej isn't exactly being innovative with this strip, but it's one of the best examples of this sub-genre.

The Great Pretenders And Other Stories, by Julia Wertz. Some of these stories have appeared in past Wertz minicomics, but this mini is the best collection of Wertz's new trend in storytelling until her new book comes out. All of the stories here are from Wertz's childhood and they're entirely unsentimental, raw takes on the ways in which children parse the adult world. There's a reference in the title story to a baby in Wertz's family dying when she was just a child, leading to a game with her older brother wherein he pretended he was his own fictional twin brother. There's a running theme in Wertz's comics of wanting to be someone else, wanting a different life and identity. There's a tension between being a near-solipsist and someone desperately craving meaningful interaction, and that conflict is evident in these childhood strips as well. Wertz has a constant sense of things not being quite right (like the amazing strip where she and her brother are momentarily excited that they might be getting a heat lamp for Christmas instead of a Nintendo video game system), and that feeling is hilariously warped through her own logic as a child. The dread that Wertz felt as a child also emerged in her anxiety over "killing" Jesus in a tea party game and living at the foot of a mountain that supposedly housed vicious flying monkeys. Wertz's bug-eyed drawings are getting more and more self-assured; she's found a clear, distinct and funny drawing style that works well for her.

The Doug Wright Awards 2011, by Dustin Harbin. This is a collection of the strips Harbin did at tcj.com earlier in 2011 as part of their Cartoonist's Diary series. It's essentially a love letter to Canada and its Doug Wright Awards, a ceremony honoring the best of English-language Canadian comics. Harbin is impressed by the simplicity (just four awards), sincerity and seriousness of the event. It's an event that everyone involved believes in, a group that includes the greater Canadian cultural community, not just comics. Harbin heaps on the praise a bit exorbitantly, though he's aware that his status as an outsider perhaps blinds him to Canada's flaws. That said, there's no question that Canada has produced some of comics' greatest artists over the past thirty years or so, and so an event like the Doug Wright Awards is certainly warranted. The real appeal of this comic is Harbin's remarkable skill as a caricaturist, really nailing artists like Chester Brown & Seth without belittling them.

Short Reviews: Travel, Beeswax, Angst, I Saw You...,

Rob offers up a number of short reviews of various comics. Included are TRAVEL by Yuichi Yokoyama (Picturebox); BEESWAX #5 featuring the comics of Lydia Conklin; ANGST, an anthology of Norwegian comics from Jippi; I SAW YOU..., an anthology of missed connections stories edited by Julia Wertz.

Yuichi Yokoyama's TRAVEL was a stealth "best of 2008" comic for many. It's a comic that is of interest strictly due to its formal innovations, which make up the entirety of the story. It's a silent story about three men who board a commuter train, and then get off the train at the end and look out at a waterfront. The end. This book is all about the journey, as Yokohama stunningly plays with time, motion, light and perspective in mind-bending ways. As the train is in motion, the three men are also walking forward, tugging at the reader's eye and daring it to keep up. There are weird, unexplained tensions felt among the characters and the people they encounter, but much like anyone's experience riding a train, we can only guess at the stories of those around us.

ANGST is a collection of short works from a variety of Norwegian artists, translated into English. Jason is the biggest name featured here (with two stories I haven't seen elsewhere), but in general this is a varied and beautiful anthology. It's perhaps structured and edited a bit haphazardly, but it's obvious that this book is an attempt to get the works of its featured artists out to an English-speaking audience. The number of approaches in this book are remarkably varied, with each artist pulling from almost completely disparate sets of influences. While the entire collection is strong, the main highlights include a strip by Lars Fiske & Steffen Kverneland and their quest to rediscover the works of 20th century Norwegian cartoonist Olaf Gulbransson; a hauntingly weird strip called "Borre is Dead" by Odd Henning Skyllinstad featuring anthropomorphic penguins; and a hilarious silent strip by Knut Naerum titled "Liberation", about an animal lover's good deeds getting punished. I had the rare experience of wishing this anthology was longer when I finished it, and there was little in the way of filler or perfunctory material. I hope that Norwegian publisher Jippi publishes further volumes.

Up and coming cartoonist Lydia Conklin was the featured artist in the fifth issue of BEESWAX, a mixed-media literary magazine that features poetry and short stories as well as comics. She continues to specialize in comics about children and the societies they form around each other, as well as the deep sense of mystery and awe between children and animals. Conklin has the uncanny ability to tap into the psyche of children, as seen in strips like "The Quietest Meal of the Year". That strip features several scenes of kids at summer camp holding utterly chaotic court, living their lives out loud. Then it switches to one of the girls at the table back at home, eating in silence, clearly suffocated by being forced back into an old role by her parents.

"The Hair" is a grotesque but funny strip about a girl chewing on a strand of her hair until it's tied so tightly around her tongue that she has to go to the emergency room. After it's removed, she finds that she's become hooked on the experience--a form of self-exploration and self-mutilation of sorts and one that clearly baffles adults. "One Second" sees a girl encounter a dog at camp, their eyes locking for a moment and then moving on. One can sense the girl knowing that the dog is looking at her, knowing that the girl is looking at it. That kind of mutual self-affirmation has even greater power considering that it felt like a secret or a mystery, that humans and animals aren't supposed to have these sorts of encounters. A similar feeling emerges from "Lubi", only this time it's tinged by a loss made more painful in that others around the girl protagonist didn't feel it as well. Finally, the two related "Riley" strips feature a girl who is moved to England and the extreme discomfort and alienation she feels, especially with her sole friend who is clearly in love with her. These strips don't quite have the same emotional power as the other stories from Conklin, who is most effective when her subject matter (and line) is at its rawest. It's that emotional rawness and unsentimental presentation of how children think and act among themselves that has made Conklin's comics debut such a forceful one.

I SAW YOU... in general has a very high hit to miss ratio, given that editor Julia Wertz had an open submissions policy. The way the anthology was structured was both a strength and weakness. The concept is simple: cartoonists adapting "missed connections" ads. Wertz provided the artist with a bunch of ads and they chose one to illustrate (or did something on their own). Those ads tend to be equal parts funny, sad and pathetic, which is the perfect blend for cartoonists. The strips that were most successful were the ones that turned the text on its head in unexpected ways--either for humorous or horrific effect. The least successful strips were the most straightforward; on their own, they were fine, but that cumulative effect of that much sameness led to pages and artists blurring together.

Given that constraint of theme leading to some repetition, this is still an unusually strong collection with a number of standout entries. While making notes on the article, I name-checked nearly two dozen different creators whose strips stood out. Damien Jay's was the most formally clever while still working in the spirit of the assignment. His strip flowed from character to character, as they "spoke" their ad to their intended, and then moved on to another obsessive person. Ken Dahl and Laura Park both mined similar territory in their multiple strips, matching ridiculous prose ("let's try to show each other the full 'stick'") with misanthropes, losers, and creeps for an experience both comedic and unsettling. That realization that these ads are an expression of obsession and not necessarily something to be flattered by was brought home in Sarah Morean's funny strip about her own secret admirer and the eventual sinking feeling that she was being stalked. Mike Wenthe & Isaac Cates reversed that realization when someone who placed one of those ads on craigslist gets a vicious reply that sets him straight.

Robin Enrico and Damon "The Ink Lab" Brown have entries that are interesting mostly because of their extreme stylization. Enrico cleverly depicted a flirty arm-wrestling match as though it were a video game (a go-to graphic specialty of his), while Brown used unusual angles and line thicknesses combined with a deliberately busy use of word balloons to show us a bustling street-side encounter. On the other end, Gabrielle Bell and Kazimir Strzepek delve into the nature of human connections, with Bell relishing a conversation that resulted from her reaching the wrong person over the phone and Kaz using a seemingly unconnected narrator for a character rushing into work, only to deliver a crushing blow at the end. The layout for both strips is entirely conventional, but both artists thoughtfully explored the anthology's theme in interesting ways.

Most of the best strips in the book are played for comedic effect. Some of them work because the drawings themselves are funny, like Colleen Frakes' hilarious drawing of a hockey player as crush object or Peter Bagge's evisceration of text with his over-the-top stylings. Other strips with great punchlines include those by Jesse Reklaw, Lisa Hanawalt (who also contributes a funny drawing), Tom Hart, Wertz herself and Joey Sayers. Sayers takes an image from an ad and runs with it in the most absurd way possible. There are at least a dozen other worthwhile strips in this anthology, which has contributions from a great number of the most talented young cartoonists working today and a number of veterans as well. If the theme intrigues a reader in any way, then it's certainly a must-read.

Autobio Minicomics

Rob reviews a number of autobiographical comics. Included are minis by Liz Baillie, James McShane, Vanessa Davis, Laura Park, Raina Telgemeier, Marion Vitus, Sarah Glidden, Alec Longstreth, Julia Wertz, and Matt Hawkins.


One joy of attending SPX is finding the latest issues of autobiographical minicomics series, as well as discovering new and interesting takes on the subject.

9/27/08, by James McShane. This was an interesting little brick of a comic; it was not so much printed as constructed, its pages punched out. Its dimensions are 4" x 2.5" by 1" with a silkscreened cover. Apart from its nature as an art object, the book itself follows an interesting formal concept: a diary comic where one draws what one has done every ten minutes. The day begins at 7:40am as his partner wakes him up and proceeds from there, detailing the most minute details of daily life in rapid-fire fashion. This approach has as much to do with animation as it does with comics, because with McShane's stripped-down approach, the reader is not meant to linger on any particular image for too long.

McShane noticeably tells the story almost entirely with pictures, avoiding dialogue in most of his panels. I'm guessing that's partly a function of not being able to remember everything that was said and only focusing on bits of verbiage that would make the diary a little easier to understand. It's interesting that even in a comic that purports to report on the details of a day, there's still a lot of room for variation and interpretation on the part of the artist. Of course, one also has to account for the fact that drawing his log was part of this day--a snake eating its own tail, in a sense. I'm not sure I'd want to read another comic like this; this is an experiment that would quickly yield diminishing returns, but I admire the way McShane devoted himself to it for a day.

SING ALONG FOREVER, by Liz Baillie. It's always interesting to read an autobiographical comic by an artist who rarely makes them, and why they would choose to reveal themselves. In Baillie's case, it was simple: she decided to create an account of traveling to a music festival with a friend (fellow artist Robin Enrico) in order to meet her favorite band (the Bouncing Souls), see them play and take a photo with them. The comic, as she notes on the cover, is a "love letter" to the band, something that she describes as "messy, sloppy [and] gushing words of pure devotion", something that's "uncomfortably sincere".

The framework of this comic was a sort of cousin to what Jesse Reklaw is doing in his COUCH TAG series. She's revealing portions of herself through a mediated source. In Reklaw's case, it was through accounts of all the cats his family owned or the story of a particular friendship. In Baillie's case, it's the way the band became not just an obsession, but a security blanket of sorts. From the first song she heard, she felt like she was understood, that her pain was not random, and that she could find ways to put it to use. One reason why artists create is to externalize their emotions in a way they can't quite do otherwise, and Baillie's comics are filled with characters bursting with emotions they can't quite understand who express them in often inappropriate ways.

The love letter approach, while indeed sloppy, led to some delightfully spontaneous, expressive art. Baillie carefully crafted the comic to include flashbacks as to how and why the band became important to her, but the actual events of the day she met the band went beyond her expectations. As she met the band, got sketches, got a photo and watched them play from backstage by their invitation, one could sense the sheer bliss she was experiencing. She met her heroes, men she had never met but who in a sense had saved her life, and they turned out to be superheroes. Baillie had the rare experience of interacting on an intimate level with that which was by its very nature larger-than-life in her own eyes. As an artist, she had to capture these rare feelings, feelings that couldn't entirely be captured in a coherent fashion. A little sloppiness was part of the process.

SPANIEL RAGE 2008, by Vanessa Davis. Davis is probably my favorite diarist in comics and this recent minicomics collection shows that she's only gotten better. Davis has organically created a formula for her comics that plays to her strengths. Her comics are intimate without being overly confessional. They have a warmth, immediacy and spontaneity while still clearly being carefully composed. They are revealing of neurosis and worry without being pathetic. Davis' comics are funny without devolving into shtick. This volume details the ups and downs of being in a relationship without lapsing into being overly cute or sentimental. I especially enjoyed the way she and her boyfriend tease each other about various subjects, and the way she depicted the way she veered between sheer bliss and insecurity. It was interesting to see her connect her desirability as a partner with her productivity as an artist.

The key to Davis' success is providing the illusion of intimacy to the reader. The reality is that by withholding the context of the events she depicts, she actually creates distance between herself and the reader. As a result as that safety net of sorts, this allows her to talk about deeper feelings. That sense of intimacy and immediacy is further aided by the way she designs her pages--there are rarely grids or panels, yet the reader never feels lost. Her comics owe as much to the classic New Yorker cartoonists or Jules Feiffer as they do modern alternative comics. About the only drawback to her spontaneous style in this mini is her lettering. It's clear that she didn't always measure out word balloons properly for certain anecdotes, and some words spill out of the balloons. I imagine that will be corrected for the eventual larger collection of these strips.

DO NOT DISTURB MY WAKING DREAM #2, by Laura Park. Park was probably my favorite discovery in 2008, an artist with fully-formed chops who is finding her way around sequential storytelling. Her comics are a great companion piece to those of Vanessa Davis and Julia Wertz, with each artist simultaneously revealing intimate details while keeping the reader at a distance. The only problem with this mini is that the reader doesn't get to experience the sumptuous way she employs color on her flickr page for these strips. The grayscaled strips in this mini look a bit muddy in comparison.

The subtext of these strips details Park's social anxiety. Like many cartoonists, she's shy and solitary by nature, and these strips provide a window into the comfort she feels being along against her urge to be with others. "Good Time Gal About Town" crystalizes these feelings, as she tells herself to go to a nearby party but can't quite do it, telling herself "Probly wouldn't have had fun". That said, these strips really aren't about misery, but rather simple joys. "The Bestest Damn Hobo What Ever Was" is a delightful strip about an especially busy and accomplished day as she shot around Chicago on her bike. The final, contented image of Park lying in a chair with her sore feet propped up was a particular pleasure to look at.

Park is a skilled draftsman who uses a spontaneous approach to her line. The result is a series of pages that are beautiful to look at with simple, expressive figures. The way Park draws her own facial expressions on her lumpy self-caricature is this book's biggest draw. Her self-caricature captures her energy, her curiosity, her urge to create and the way she delights in the world around her. The way she frames each anecdote into structured grids (often telling the same story more than once) speaks to both wanting to make these anecdotes readable to an outsider and that she constantly thinks about her world in comics terms. Hopefully some wise publisher will publish a collection of her strips in full color. In the meantime, Park will have a story in an upcoming issue of MOME, and I'm delighted to see that she'll soon be getting wider recognition.

OUTREACH, by Raina Telgemeier. Telgemeier got her start doing minicomics, so it was nice to see her first such effort in several years after laboring over four Baby Sitters Club adaptations. This short mini is autobiographical, detailing anecdotes from conventions and classes she's taught to children. Her line, as always, is enormously appealing and spare. Telgemeier is an artist who really knows how to play to her strengths: gesture, expression and depicting energy and enthusiasm (especially from children). I could have read a book full of these modest, easygoing strips. I've read plenty of comics much like this one, but it's Telgemeier's distillation of both the joys and frustrations of working with children that make it such a pleasant read. There's a rhythm to these strips that's framed by the disciplined simplicity of Telgemeier's line, effortlessly setting up punchlines with visuals rather than gag lines. Telgemeier's own autobiographical book, SMILE, will be published by Scholastic in a couple of years, and I expect that to be the best work of her brief but productive career.

NO IN-BETWEEN #7-9, by Marion Vitus. Vitus has been working on this rite-of-passage/travelogue series for some time now, and it's clear that she's built up quite a bit of momentum with it now that she's serializing it on the web. The latest collection of issues stands alone quite nicely, as we see her in Austria, visiting the relatives of her ex-boyfriend--though they aren't aware that they've broken up. This series is about breaking out of one's shell, taking risks, confronting fears and experiencing intense highs and lows. Vitus mixes a naturalistic and expressive styles interchangeably, which sometimes makes for some awkward moments. Some of her figures have odd body proportions that change from panel to panel, for example. On the other hand, Vitus' more expressive drawings do a fine job of telling the story, especially in the way she draws faces. These comics have a compelling quality to them, mostly because of Vitus' narrative voice. That voice is of someone who had obviously been quieted by people in her life and was just starting to find ways to break out. That exploration of how tentative this process can be, of one step forward followed by three steps back, compels the reader to want more. Vitus' voice is self-deprecating without being self-pitying, which is a rare combination in autobiographical comics.

EIGHT DAYS OUT, by Sarah Glidden. Glidden is the artist behind the award-winning HOW TO UNDERSTAND ISRAEL IN 60 DAYS OR LESS minicomic that got picked up by Vertigo's new line of original graphic novels. I tend to think of her on the "writer that draws" end of the comics spectrum, as much of what she writes would be nearly as compelling without comics to go with them. It'll be interesting to see the end result of that comic, because I imagine Glidden's work will move more towards the middle of that art/text distinction as her line grows more confident. This mini is the perfect sort of comic to balance those interests, given the warmth and immediacy of the art. It's a travelogue (which seems to be Glidden's go-to subject at the moment) about a trip she and her brother took across country from New York to Los Angeles.

It's funny that she and her brother chose to listen to podcasts of "This American Life", because her own storytelling style is not unlike a feature on that show. Her narrative voice has a gentle, warm, probing wit. She looks at her world with eyes wide open and openly seeks out new experiences and sights. That openness translates well to comics, as the reader feels like they are traveling with her, listening to her tell a story. The sketchy quality of her art has a certain immediate power to it, but she has difficulty getting across the beauty of her surroundings with some of her less detailed drawings. It's clear that experiencing the natural beauty of the American southwest had a profound impact on her, one that she wanted to share with her audience, but this venue was not quite the right one. It really required the use of full color and/or an elaborate series of visual tricks that aren't quite in her arsenal to date. At eighty pages, Glidden does serve up a meaty account of her trip that still manages to reveal little in the way of personal detail but much in our understanding of how she perceives the world. Glidden is already a talent to watch and someone who should only improve as she continues to evolve as an artist.

2007 PHASE 7 SUMMER SUPPLEMENT, by Alec Longstreth. The most enthusiastic artist on artist cranked out an attractive-looking story as a 24-hour comic, no less. Longstreth enjoys writing about the craft of creating comics, and time management in particular. This comic was a sort of meta-commentary on time management, since it's all about his decision to become a fellow at the quite isolated Center for Cartoon Studies in a small Vermont town. Longstreth throws in nice-looking splash pages, a number of fairly detailed drawings, diagrams, caricatures of over a dozen people and more in this high-energy mini. It's a comic about wanting to draw comics, and the purity of Longstreth's enthusiasm for the form has always been one of his biggest strengths as an artist. The simplicity of his line has always made his work appealing if not always compelling. When his "Basewood" serial is done, that will most likely his best early work, and I sense that he's best suited for clever genre-related work with occasional pit-stops and detours into autobio and other experiments.

BEFORE THE FART PARTY and THE LEGEND OF REBOB MOUNTAIN, by Julia Wertz. I'd describe Wertz as another "writer who draws", only unlike Sarah Glidden, Wertz is rambunctious, all over the place and sloppy. She mixes her potent sense of humor with a healthy dose of anger, bitterness and self-deprecation. Wertzpretty much pours all of her feelings on the page, and these two comics show the results at different points in her career. BEFORE THE FART PARTY contains the strips she did prior to launching the webcomic that has attracted a fairly substantial audience. It's an interesting mini, as Wertz is trying to find a voice both as writer and artist. She actually started off trying a more naturalistic style for her autobio strips, but it was clear that she was best suited for a more cartoony, almost bigfoot, style. She very quickly honed her chops as a comedic writer even before settling on a style of art that worked for her, as was evident in strips like "Hospital 1982-2004" (wherein she discusses her history of falling down and her desire to give birth to kittens), "First/Last Date" and the hilarious "Robot Vs Snowman" (a pitched battle between her left and right brain selves that leaves both dead--this was her application strip to CCS!).

REBOB MOUNTAIN is not a comic, but rather an illustrated story from Wertz's childhood. There are a few interesting uses of misdirection here, as we expect an irreverent story from her early life (which had many unusual stories attached to it), but instead we get a fairly sober meditation on how & why children attach meaning to certain events. In this case, the unthinkable death of a friend of theirs from cancer was shifted into their ongoing angst about the creatures they thought lived at the top of the mountain near their house. It's about the rituals children use to ward off the unexplained, about the feeling of being kept in the dark by adults and wondering about how to gain access to the world's real secrets. This mini is an interesting fit with the rest of Wertz's work, since one can't fully pigeonhole her. Most of her work is funny, but it also has a diary strip quality to it, as well as days where it's more a straight rant than a punchline. Still other days are expressions of pure joy, once again with no punchline. Wertz took a fairly common internet phenomenon and has carved out a unique identity for herself.

UNLUCKY #3 & #4, by Matthew Hawkins and various artists. Hawkins does Harvey Pekar-style autobio collaborations with a variety of artists, focusing almost solely on stories about his own misfortunes or the very strange things he's seen. He has a raunchy, visceral wit as he zips back and forth in time for these short anecdotes. Issue #3 matches a story with scatological and broken-heart elements with Matthew Bernier's minimalist (almost symbolic) art, which fortunately blunted the gross-out factor of the story while playing up its humor. I thought Dave Savage's scrawled-out art for a story about the various weirdos he knew in school was another appropriate choice, looking as though it had been scribbled on someone's book cover. Hawkins' stories seem to go best with collaborators whose art is heavily stylized (which is why I thought Toby Craig's moody but naturalistic art was a bad fit), partly because Hawkins' writing has a certain deadpan quality to it no matter how weird the situation he describes. That matter-of-fact storytelling style is perhaps his greatest strength; he never oversells his premises but rather lets them play out with restraint on his end, allowing his artists to go hog wild. I'd like to see Hawkins illustrate one of his own stories--he's certainly got the chops to do so.