Julia Wertz and the Art of the Possible

There are comic book artists you read and then forget soon after your eyes slide over the last page.  And then there are unforgettable artists like Julia Wertz, artists who change you, who grab from the first look and pull you–sometimes roughly– into their world, holding you close while they make you see the world they do.  And then, when you are done, they are not done with you. Long after you read the last page the memories of the pages you read bounce around your synapses, changing the wiring of your thoughts – and lenses on your eyes. All of my favorite graphic novelists do this: Art Spiegelman (Maus), Alison Bechdel (Fun Home), Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis)–and Julia Wertz.

As I write this, I have just finished reading for the second time her latest graphic memoir, Impossible People: A Completely Average Recovery Story. My head is still buzzing. I am in that half-in-this-world-half-somewhere-else state I usually feel after a night of intense dreams.  And I just spent the last half hour looking for a used copy of her out-of-print book, The Infinite Wait and Other Stories, and I was so excited to find a copy I immediately bought it–and another book I only kind of wanted–so I could save a little more than five dollars on shipping charges.

The book made lots of the Best Books of 2023 lists: NPR, the New Yorker, Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Public Library, Bookshop.org, Powells, Library Journal. There are a lot of us out there with images from Wertz’s book dancing in our heads. And I had the pleasure of speaking to Wertz in late September 2023, and got to know the person responsible for such a uniquely memorable book.

Wertz came to cartooning late. She was not one of those artists who spent their childhoods consuming stacks of comics and drawing pictures in notebooks — and it shows. Her early cartoons have that rough, I’m-still-learning-how-to-do-this style favored by DIY cartoonists. Wertz only got into graphic novels in her late teens, early 20s. But there was something about graphic novels that hooked her, she told me: “People who were doing this work, they were being so honest, but about things that were really mundane and gross.  It was the first time I saw people just writing about their daily lives.” The first graphic novel she recalls really getting into was Julie Doucet’s My New York Diary.

In the early 2000s she started making comics for herself and then showing them to her friends. “I had always enjoyed drawing but wasn’t very good at it. I had always enjoyed writing but wasn’t very good at that. But something about marrying the two together immediately made sense.” The early cartoons are rough and simple, modeled on the strips in the funny pages, though not as carefully drawn – a couple of panels, all centered on the adventures of Wertz’s cartoon alter ego,  leading to a punchline, sometimes an ironic observation.   or other punchline.

Someone suggested she start a website. “So, I had my partner at the time built me a website on Dreamweaver, which was like the most janky website.”  She called the first comics she put online Fart Party. “Because I didn’t think anyone was going to read them.”

Wertz was wrong. Janky or not, Fart Party attracted hits – (How could anyone resist visiting a site named Fart Party?) – and “kind of took off.” Wertz was surprised. “I was like, these are just comics I’m like, making, you know, on the back of bagel orders at work, and in the back of the classroom.”

Still, she gathered her cartoons into zines, and then a small press (Atomic Book Company) offered to put those zines into a book. “I was like, well, if I can do a book, maybe I can do this as a career. So, I just went for it.”

This part of her life Wertz chronicles in Drinking at the Movies: her move from San Francisco to New York, her first steps to becoming a full-time cartoonist, her descent into full-blown alcoholism, and commitment withdrawal from the world.   Impossible People chronicles her transformation from an emotionally stunted someone who did almost nothing but draw cartoons 16 hours a day and drink, to a quirky, productive, open, more or less emotionally available cartoonist.

It was Drinking at the Movies that got me hooked on Wertz.  It is in many ways a companion to Impossible People. Both books begin the same way: Wertz shows us a panel of her cartoon-self confronting a mind-boggling situation (waking up in an unfamiliar place, staring at her car stuck in a ditch) with the same expression “What the Fuck”) and then flashing back to tell us how she got there.

But for all its strengths, Drinking at the Movies is a messy story about a messy time in Wertz’s life. The chaos of her crazy life is fascinating. She drinks way too much, gets blackout drunk way too often. But she tells us about her life with amazing candor. Her heart is open, and she tells her story with a disarming simplicity and honesty–without either laughing away her addiction (the way movies like “Arthur” do) or descending into self-loathing. But the potential for self-destruction or disaster always hovers in the wings. Wertz’s rough-hewn, self-taught drawing style reflects the edgy world she lives in.

Wertz drawings in Impossible People are more polished and draftsman-like.  Wertz’s cartoon-self remains the same awkward avatar she has always been. A helmet of black hair, big, black comic book eyes, comical nose, simple, well worn, often dirty jeans and a t-shirt top covering a boyish-looking body. But in the background Wertz has filled her book with lovingly detailed drawings of New York City storefronts or various interiors of her tchotchke-filled illegal garden apartment.  This attention to detail reflects Wertz’s fascination with the city.  As she reveals in Impossible People, and her coffee-table sized valentine to New York’s cityscape, Tenements, Towers, and Trash, she is an avid urban explorer.

It also reflects a change in Wertz’s soul. Her recovery was only the first step in a series of transformations. Over the course of the book she flowers, becoming more social–she is virtually a recluse in Drinking at the Movies. She ventures out into the perilous dating world, finds a new, dangerous, hobby–exploring abandoned buildings–and through it all, keeps on cartooning.

Wertz credits her cartooning with saving her life. She told me, “I don’t think I would have gotten through all that had I not had comics because my only other skill is working in the restaurant industry and that is a very difficult industry to get clean in because it’s, you know, it’s at nighttime, you’re out late. And there’s not really any time for self-reflection and because I was making work about my life there were many instances where I would make a comic, and I’m like making fun of my own substance abuse issues, and then six months later I’m like oh that that might be a problem. I need to probably look into that a little bit more.”

Once she was sober, however, Wertz, for a time, found it hard to keep cartooning. “I straight quit for like two years and I thought I wasn’t gonna go back to it.  I just couldn’t sit down at my desk and do it.” But the urge to cartoon was too strong. Today she draws a monthly cartoon for The New Yorker and is working on a new book, about her experiences as a mother.

“It’s going to be a lot looser and funnier than Impossible People. Impossible People was a real motherfucker to work on–a big book, it’s very dense. The new book itself is actually going to be a little bit more lighthearted. I did one comic for it called Bury Me Already and then in parentheses It’s Nice Down Here. That’s how I felt during early motherhood. So miserable, but so happy.  It’s that feeling of being buried alive and loving it. Like at night, you’re just like, oh my God, just fucking go to sleep. I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to see you. And then 10 minutes later, you’re like, oh, I miss my kid. And you’re just looking at photos of them. It’s insane. “