Drinking at the Movies
by Julia Wertz
Three Rivers Press

There’s something to be said for having goals. For being responsible and readying yourself for the next big challenge and having your ducks more or less in a row. For growing up smart and successful and being in a good position to take advantage of opportunities whenever they are presented to you in life.

That sounds like nice work if you can get it. But is there any help or advice for us poor fuck ups?

Drinking at the Movies says to me, well, if you can’t put yourself together the best you can do is hang on and see what happens.  Rings true enough.

After a string of bad jobs and empty bottles of bourbon Julia Wertz finds herself, by the end of the book, in a pretty good place. After not so much learning and growing as just staying true to herself and, frankly, being lucky.

Those familiar with Wertz’s webcomic and its ups and downs will vaguely remember her past life back in San Francisco.

‘Oh, that Julia Wertz?  When she had a boyfriend and her brother and mom were like her best friends and she said awesome crazy shit all of the time?  I remember and liked her.  Sure.’

Clearly, since moving to New York in 2007 a lot has happened for her.  She’s gotten more exposure through publishing and it wouldn’t surprise me if the people coming to her books now — books like I Saw You…Missed Connections Comics which she edited and Drinking at the Movies which she wrote — were completely unaware of her early work. However, though Drinking at the Movies relies heavily on the reader knowing how good she had it to appreciate how far she fell, I do think she succeeds in bringing the newbie Wertz reader up to speed.

The book works for us obsessive fans too, answering questions like ‘WELL WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN, JULIA WHAT DOES IT MEAN?’  Because obviously her move to blogging, cessation of drinking and desire to disassociate from the fartparty.org webcomic that launched her must mean something, right?  Sure it does.  And this book lays it out for us: a lot of her memories from that period just fucking suck!  Poor Wertzie.  This book looks like a prelude to homelessness.

Without saying it straight, she’s definitely alluding to the fact that years of her life have been spent somehow, miraculously, not hitting rock bottom.  She pushes away relationships — you could read that generally as people who would look out for her — in favor of friendships that allow her to indulge in bad habits like drinking.  Constantly.  She self-destructs regularly in the workplace.  She takes no pride in herself physically.  It’s funny in the right context — this context — but her constant brushes with the homeless and crazy in the book also remind you that if she didn’t have some percentage of a good head on her shoulders she could easily slip and be one of them.

So what does it all mean?  It means she had a pretty good life for a bit, and so did those around her, until finally shit went crazy and when it all came back together it’s a miracle nobody died.  Her move to New York was hard, finding work was hard, being a good sister to her drug-addled brother was hard.  But somehow it all worked out.  And she did it all alone too.

It’s evident through this book, and kind of shocking, how much she must have relied on Oliver back in San Francisco.  Wertz is a wily bitch and me and my friends admire her a lot for that.  But I guess there was something significant about that relationship at that time in her life that made losing it really hard.  From the looks of it, she took years to recover.

It sucks.  The first time you lose something you thought you could hang on to.  The first time you free fall and try to make a life for yourself.  Some people thrive under these circumstances and some people are lucky to just stay afloat — even if on a sea of booze.  Miraculously, through it all, she managed to make friends, have new experiences, create art that is meaningful to people and have her work published.  We learn in the book that someone even wants to turn her story into a television series, one that she would get to write.  How cool is that?

So what’s weird to me as a reader and a Wertz fan is that the only time I really wanted to shake her like a baby and speak sense to her was when she decides not to commit to the TV show.  ‘WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU TV IS AWESOME WHY DON’T YOU WANT TO WRITE FOR TV?’  But, you know.  It’s not my life.  And if I’d been at the helm, probably I wouldn’t have made it half so successful.  Probably I would have stayed in San Francisco, sweeping up the remains of my brother’s life, feeling abandoned, living in an apartment I couldn’t afford, feeling sorry for myself and by all accounts miserable.

So while it may look like, geez, Drinking at the Movies is demonstrable proof of fuck-up-ery I’d say it’s definitely not.  I’d say being risky and open to change and finding ways to accept and deal with change is something a person with a really bright future would do.  As always, I look forward to Wertz’s next steps.  As a cartoon character or a blogger or (PLEASE PLEASE) as a screenwriter.

– Sarah Morean

I Saw You…Missed Connection Comics
Edited by Julia Wertz
Three Rivers Press

Missed connections ads are a mixed bag of emotions: they’re at once funny, sad, creepy, and inspiring. So perhaps it’s only natural that we should turn to them for inspiration and for the creation of great and strange stories. Still, it’s an idea I would never have thought of. Luckily, Julia Wertz did.

Wertz, the creator of the hilarious autobiographical comic The Fart Party, started to find herself obsessed with reading missed connections ads a few years ago, and was struck by the idea of creating comics based on them. She put a call out to fellow cartoonists and received an overwhelming number of submissions, which led to the creation of a mini-comic, which led to a book, appropriately (if unexcitingly) titled I Saw You…, published by Three Rivers Press. As with pages of missed connections ads in newspapers or on Craigslist, I Saw You… is eclectic in terms of the length of the pieces, their tone, and their approach to the assignment. It is also great. The diversity of the content, as well as the overall talent of the contributors, make it an extremely enjoyable read.

The book is divided into six thematic parts that mostly just seem put there to impose some semblance of structure on contents that might otherwise ramble. Reading it is like reading a book of missed connections ads (inevitably entertaining), except better, because there’s more to each piece—each has two personalities (the author of the ad and the artist/interpreter, except for a handful of first-person contributions). Some of the best pieces are the ones that play on this fact, with the cartoonists creating clever stories that add a new layer to the ads from which they are born.

A prime example is one of Laura Park’s contributions, “The Three Women of Sunday,” in which a man whose ad talks about spending Sunday “watching and eating movies with three kind women” (his words) is actually a creepy guy parked outside the window of a ground-floor apartment, voyeuristically peering in and grinning while he sips a drink. David Malki’s piece, “Same Ol’ Saturday Night…” has a similarly witty twist, as the two people who shake with “damp hands” outside a bar bathroom and then go their separate ways to different birthday parties turn out to be clowns, with a particularly great (and slightly disturbing?) end panel of the two clowns having sex against a bathroom sink, of course in costume.

Beyond the twist factor, stories in the book stand out for countless other reasons. Some contributors get points for being charmingly creative—Nate Doyle, Kazimir Strzepek, and Kenny Keil among them—some are just plain funny, including the Daily Cross Hatch’s own Sarah Morean, Wertz (both of hers are quite amusing), Aron Nels Steinke, and a personal favorite, Jeffrey Brown; and still others really show off their artistic talent: Maria Sequeira’s fluid, almost swirling style; Rama Hughes’s bold panels that read almost like sequence of photographs; Aaron Renier’s pages, buzzing and full and nearly bursting.

And then of course there are the cartoonists who found such amazing ads that you wonder whether they spent whole days looking or just got lucky. These range from someone seeking out the doctor who performed her colonscopy (“I thought we hit it off!”) to a man who laments that the cute girl he eyed in the coffee shop pulled out a Mac (“you’ve been deceived by their cheesy ads and mediocre hardware”), to an ad looking for the “gore queen at the S&M party.” It begins, like a kind of craigslist fairy tale, “You were the Asian girl with the hacksaw torturing the helpless child…”

–Jillian Steinhauer