Thursday, February 6, 2014
Julia Wertz
Here's a YouTube video of Julia Wertz talking about being an artist with Lupus and no health insurance. This is part of her life story; it's also a part of her memoir comic.
Wertz's website with lots of links: http://www.juliawertz.com/
A great article by Wertz on the pressure to be funny as a memoirist and cartoonist.
http://narrative.ly/so-funny-it-hurts/the-fart-party-really-stinks/
Her Tumblr: http://juliawertz.tumblr.com/
An interview with Wertz from The Comics Reporter: http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/cr_sunday_interview_julia_wertz/
As you read Drinking At the Movies, peruse these other resources (above) that provide insight into the life and experiences of Julia Wertz, and closely examine her art style for meaning. I expect you to develop a sense, as a reader, of how these memoir comics compare when held next to Jeffrey Brown's. It's exciting to now have two points of comparison, so please, tell us this week about your response to Drinking at the Movies. Please use the discourse of comics in your 300 word response, being sure to make connections, where relevant, to McCloud and Brown and even to concepts in Gabriel's essay.
I look forward to reading your writing this week.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I love Julia Wertz and her sense of humor. I love her artistic style of black and white drawings. I find that her drawing style is much more cartoony and bubbly as compared to Brown’s. Wertz also has a more linear point of time throughout the novel compared to Brown’s jump around style. I will say that both styles work, but for me Wertz is much more enjoyable. Wertz’s background images are much less chaotic and contain far fewer lines than Brown’s, which I think help lends itself to the cartoony feel. Wertz also incorporates a lot more filled in black images than Brown (I’m not sure I’d call it shading). I feel that it is Wertz’s simple cartoony style that allows the reader to feel more intimately linked with the memoir. Wertz’s cute bubbly cartoon style pairs nicely with her dark humor and bluntness.
ReplyDeleteWertz discusses a lot of topics that embarrass people and the humor she projects into it makes the topic that much more approachable.
I have been on Wertz’s website and tumblr in the past. She also has a pretty cool etsy shop and Instagram of photos and sketches! When looking at the websites and it just further illustrates her quirkiness and love for all things dark and awkward. The YouTube video lends a different feel for me. She seems much more fragile in the video and not quite so candid in a humorous way. I feel for her and her battle with Lupus, its remission, its endless need for doctor’s visits, and the countless blood draws. My mother was diagnosed with systematic Lupus ten years ago and also does not qualify for Medicaid so I can completely relate to her video.
As with Jeff Brown, I love the humor in Julia Wertz’s memoir. When I first saw her artwork, it reminded me a lot of those old 5os styled cartoons. It was a bit of a transition after reading Brown’s work, but a pleasant one nonetheless. I appreciated her honesty and willingness to express herself, even at her lowest points.
ReplyDeleteTo me, Wertz’s memoir actually feels like a comic, it’s very cartoony, very simple, and the characters are pleasing to look at. Despite the comically simplistic characters, the topics about her alcoholism and daily life are very honest. I particularly love the expressions, especially the scene where she is talking to the homeless men. I also sympathized with her when one ‘gentleman’ was comparing women in the subway and called her a child. I laughed a little more than I thought I would. As Amanda states, “Wertz discusses a lot of topics that embarrass people and the humor she projects into it makes the topic that much more approachable.” I completely agree. As with Brown, both the art style and the humor put into their works make even the most serious of subjects a little more approachable, and easier to sympathize with.
One thing I noticed about her comics is that she seems to like conversation split comics, subject to subject maybe? Each panel may contain a similar or the same image with the conversation continuing. This scene in particular, http://comicsgrinder.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/julia-wertz-drinking-at-the-movies-2010.jpg, she manipulates time through the amount of glasses that she drinks. I thought this was a brilliant means to express the passing of time and makes her drunken state at the end of the panel better explained had she only done the first panel. However, even with the increase in bottles, the first four images look almost identical. I noticed she does this again in another little comic she did for fun that she posted on her Tumblr: http://juliawertz.tumblr.com/post/75482241682/im-supposed-to-be-working-on-paid-illustration.
I had no idea she had a Tumblr, and, as a Tumblr addict, I instantly followed her! Even on her blog she is raw and hilarious, much like the character she depicts herself in her book.
However, in her video she seemed like a fairly different person. She seemed more delicate, while still remaining very honest. Without health care, she is in a predicament no one should have to be in. I felt a great sense of pity knowing that so many of her friends who are also comic artists are also unable to obtain health care. It is amazing how authors depict themselves through their writing. She seems so happy go lucky, especially if you read some of her Tumblr posts.
Overall, I love her work so far, and I am glad that I can continue to follow her work even after reading her graphic memoir.
Apologies, I meant to say "moment to moment" not "subject to subject".
DeleteDrinking at the Movies is drawn in a similar style to Funny Misshapen Body. The panels are drawn with free-form borders and the characters are simplified in a cartoon style rather than a highly detailed realistic characters. A difference in panels, which I thought was beneficial to the underlying narrative, was Wertz's wavy panel borders as a way of representing a flashback sequence (pg. 20). The simplistic drawing style, as well as the hand-drawn panels could represent the instability in Wertz's life, as Gabriel asserts in his essay about Brown. Drinking at the Movies is also broken up into little episodes similar to Funny Misshapen Body, however Wertz seems to follow a more chronological time structure. Wertz often personifies inanimate objects like the beer bottles, her brain, and her wallet. While these panels offer some levity to her rather dark memoir, it's not something that sat well with me. It seemed like a really juvenile move, and while I can appreciate the attempt at comic relief, the personification of the inanimate objects didn't really add or detract from the narrative. Wertz also used a monochrome, black and white color scheme. This style, similar to Brown's, accentuates the simplicity of the art style. Wertz has a balance between overly wordy panels as well as scarcely worded panels. Like Brown, Wertz uses a combination of text boxes for narration, speech bubbles for speech and thought bubbles for thoughts. Comparing the two, I like Wertz's memoir better. I appreciated her varying panels, her apartment schematics and her chronological order. However I liked Brown's art style better. I still find it difficult to distinguish certain transition styles, but in Wertz's memoir I found that the variety of panel sizes seemed to override the necessity to pinpoint a particular transition style. However, it is obvious that Wertz uses differing transitions, but she seems to favor action-to-action.
ReplyDeleteOn to the second memoir. Julia Wertz’ memoir Drinking at the Movies obviously draws many comparisons to Jeffrey Brown’s Funny Misshapen Body. The first comparison is the utmost honesty that both memoirs are told with. These two author’s invite us into some of the most personal things in their lives and give us a real image of how they went through some turbulent times in their existences. But, probably the biggest similarity to me is the way that the two authors draw themselves. It is very simple, while the background can sometimes be very detailed, such as the wood paneling in Brown’s and the inside apartment pictures from Wertz.
ReplyDeleteIn an interview we read of Wertz, she says that the simple art style of her characters allows the audience to relate and transport themselves into the characters, becoming one with them. This is also something that John Taylor Gabriel addresses in his essay “Minimalism and Explicitness in the Graphic Memoirs of Jeffrey Brown”. Addressing the simple art style, Gabriel says “The combination of the minimalism and explicitness in Brown’s memoirs makes his life accessible, creating a uniquely emotional experience for his readers.”(52) This is exactly the type of thing that Scott McCloud, “the ambassador of comics” (as I refer to him), addresses in Understanding Comics.
To throw in my personal opinion I connected very well with both Julia Wertz and Jeffrey Brown not simply because of their experiences, but also the simplicity in their art style. I found this to be especially unexpected in Wertz’ comics because (not to sound sexist), she is a female, and I am not. But, as the experts had stated, simplicity in the art creates an almost every man effect and even though I have always had a hard time truly connecting with female musicians, vocalists, and authors, I find myself transported into Wertz’ Brooklyn experience. Especially since I have spent a weekend or two drinking on the floor of a friend’s rat infested Brooklyn apartment that they paid for by panhandling with their guitars in the subway stations.
These two authors have really begun to draw me into the world of comics and I am excited to dig deeper. Yes “draw” was put there on purpose. Winky face.
While reading the graphic memoir Drinking at the Movies, I have noticed some similarities and distinct differences from our first memoir Funny Misshapen Body. Like Brown’s style, Wertz uses a cartoon style animation in black and white. Also, the panels are not perfectly straight and appear hand drawn just like Brown’s panels. One thing I noticed right away that differs from Funny Misshapen Body is that some of the pages have titles above the panels that disclose information about the topic of the panels. For example, on page 53 “When Drinking Goes Wrong” is written at the top of the page and is then followed by six panels that illustrate the protagonists bad experiences with drinking. The following page is titled “When Drinking Goes Wrong But it’s All Okay.” In comparison to the previous page, this page illustrates the protagonist’s same experiences except in these same scenarios things turned out okay. This is something we did not see in Brown’s memoir. It seems that many of the pages tell a unique story per page. On these pages, it becomes a scene to scene transition when moving on to the next page. Although there are many scene to scene transitions in the novel, I noticed that Drinking at the Movies is told in a chronological order unlike Brown’s Funny Misshapen Body. Wertz tells her story from start to finish with only a few flashbacks thrown in-between. Another connection I noticed between Funny Misshapen Body and Drinking at the Movies is that both authors come off as honest storytellers, and both authors use humor as part of their style. Just like Brown, Wertz also has chronic health problems that she shares with the reader. When she is forced to go to the ER due to the rash on her behind, she told the story in a way that she was able to laugh at herself. Her honest openness with the reader makes her a sympathetic character.
ReplyDeleteI really loved Wertz and her style. I especially liked her humor, as it was a little more ironic than Brown’s. Something I noticed between Brown and Wertz was that they both made heavier material lighthearted, although I think Wertz was even more lighthearted than Brown’s.
ReplyDeleteThere were a few things that Wertz did in her graphic memoir that I really enjoyed, and one in particular was the humorous disharmony at times between the narrative text boxes and the art, or the narrative text boxes and the speech bubbles, or thought bubbles. On page 134, one of the text bubbles says, “Discussed important issues while working on accomplished works of art,” and the panel features cartooning of Julia and a friend talking about God’s wrath about raisins while drawing comics.
I also again enjoyed this art style. I think the simplicity, as with Brown’s is a little more accessible than it would be otherwise. When reading Wertz’s memoir I get the sense that her goal is not trying to impress me with her artistic abilities (although I am impressed) but that she’s more interested in telling me the story behind it and relating to people.
Wertz’s panel use and size is pretty regular, 6 panels a page, except for when she starts a new chapter and then she usually fills the page with one very large image. Sometimes she doesn’t use panels at all, like on page 83.On this page she uses 3 first initial panels, but then the cartooning is done as if the panels were there invisibly. This has a neat effect like it renders the moment(s) uncontrolled or very expansive.
There are also certain times where Wertz chanes up the shape of the panels. On page 20, the panels are kind of wavy, and this makes the page a little more playful than it would be otherwise, which is interesting considering one of the wavy panels features cartooning of Julia finding an old woman who cracked her head on the sidewalk, in which someone is shouting “Someone call 911!”
One major difference I noticed between Brown and Wertz's memoirs is the way they are structured. Brown presented his memoir by examining certain situations throughout his life. Wertz, on the other hand, presented her memoir in chronological order through approximately one year of her life. Through Wertz's focus on a specific period of her life for the entire memoir she is able to focus in on situations which sometimes seem useless, but in actuality all these situations are relevant to her story. Brown does not throw these little tidbits of his life into his memoir like Wertz does. In order to include these parts of her life Wertz composes her memoir into chapters and then further into subchapters. Brown focuses on specific situations throughout his life.
ReplyDeleteI found Wertz's artistic style very interesting. Her simplistic style of drawing herself reminded me of McCloud's theory of when a person sees the face of a cartoon they place themselves in the cartoon. I found myself relating to Julia, and I think it might be because of Wertz's cartooning style. Before I started reading Drinking at the Movies I did not think that I would relate to the story because it seemed like a coming of age story for a woman and I am a man therefore it seemed logical that I would not relate to Wertz. However, this was not the case, and I found myself relating to Wertz in many situations, and I cannot help but think that part of the reason is because of Wertz's artistic style.
Julia Wertz’s style is highly cartoony, that is to say leaning towards the “iconic” part of McCloud’s style pyramid. She also seems to use moment-to-moment transitions more than other transitions. Wertz’s drawings are also allot smoother looking than Browns rough drawings. Like Brown, her panels are very traditional. Her panels are usually the same size, and almost always have a two-by-three layout. Though in many ways her drawings are “neater” looking than Brown’s drawings, her panel lines often look very sloppy. Unlike Brown her story is told in chronological order, and over a shorter and more precise period of time.
ReplyDeleteForgot to mention, although her panels are usually very traditional, she does occasionally use borderless panels.
DeleteFirst of all I found this book to be super relatable as a 20 something reading it. I thought her story was just as honest and open as Brown, which made her character likeable in the same ways I found his to be. Obviously their drawing style is different where Brown’s is scraggly hers is fluid. Also, she has a much more stable set of panels throughout the pages. Usually two columns of three that are all the same size where Brown’s were obviously hand drawn. I really enjoyed the way she had titles for her comics at the top of the page rather than segmenting it into chapters like Brown did. I also liked how she drew a layout of each apartment for when she moved into it. She did a lot of drawing involving not only just herself, where I found Brown’s panels to mostly be filled with his character. I liked the way that she depicted herself, super cartoonesque. Sort of like the way she doesn’t really take herself seriously throughout the story; the image really shows that to the reader. I think that coincides a little with McCloud saying the less realistic the more people can relate into the character. Like I said, I found it relatable because I’m also a 20 something searching for changes. For example, scenes where she’s laying in bed and talks about how she thought about everything under the sun, I think everyone can put themselves into that position. The fact she looks super cartoonish is what helps that as well, you just sort of feel as though she’s just a little blip on the radar trying to make her way through life. Overall I enjoyed her story because there was so much to it. Her willingness to be so introspective added a genuine quality to the memoir.
ReplyDeleteAs of writing this post, my book hasn't arrived yet from Amazon. However, I was able to read (roughly) the first 50 or so pages through the Amazon preview. So I'm able to comment on that.
ReplyDeleteApologies to Mr. Brown, but I can already tell I'm going to enjoy Wertz's book much more. Her art is much easier on the eyes, which presents less of a barrier to the reader's enjoyment and attachment to the story. It's also much more, for lack of a better word, optimistic than Funny Misshapen Body. Julia has plenty of trouble adjusting to new situations, such as her move to New York, dealing with her Lupus, etc. But she treats it with a much more laissez-faire attitude. She'll be momentarily depressed in one panel, then making a joke in the next.
I utterly adore the little details she puts in the panel backgrounds. When she describes the sweltering heat of NYC, there are eggs frying on the sidewalk. Her comparison of various NYC and San Fransisco institutions is currently my personal highlight.
her panels stay relatively consistent, fluctuating between 6 and 9 panel grids, occasionally and delightfully interrupted by a full page of artwork on a new apartment or year in her life. It gives the story a sense of slow motion, but never feels like it's moving away from the reader. There's no real overarching plot (ant least none I can ascertain so far) which makes this memoir a wonderfully poignant, yet fun read.
Julia Wertz’s comic is similar to Brown’s in a number of ways, specifically when it comes to the content of the comic itself. Both artists are concerned with depicting their lives in a humorous, self-deprecating manor and are quick to remind the reader about their shortcomings. Both often talk about food and bodily functions and their relations with (or lack thereof) the opposite sex.
ReplyDeleteStylistically, both artists’ works appear similar as well. Wertz, like Brown, opts for a black-and-white style with simple line drawings. Unlike Brown’s, Wertz’s appears more refined and less like a sketch. However, as we discussed with Brown’s drawings, Wertz uses curvy “Adventure Timey” lines more often than not. Also, the borders to her panels are uneven and obviously hand-drawn. Lastly, most often, Wertz employs a six-panel page style, just like Brown in Funny Misshapen Body.
Of course, Brown and Wertz do have some distinct differences in their styles. As mentioned earlier, Wertz’s style, while simplistic, is more refined than Brown’s. However, I would also argue that Wertz’s style is more simplistic than Brown’s. Engaging in the tracing activity has taught me to look more closely at the details in the work, and Wertz’s comic seems distinctly less detailed than Brown’s. However, the details she does choose to include almost always add to the humor of the panel, such as fake movie titles or names of bars and restaurants.
Wertz divides her memoir into different parts using different techniques. Most strikingly, she employs full-page illustrations to designate between the seasons and years that she writes about. She breaks these segments down further by using headings outside of the panels at the top of the page. Such headings are often a number in a series, such as her “Jobs” and “Apartments”. She also does other pages which are not necessarily part of her narrative but convey parts of her personality or experience in a non-linear manner, such as her pages of comparisons between L.A. and Brooklyn. Overall, I have enjoyed Wertz’s comic IMMENSELY because I think she is hilarious, and her artistic style, writing, and the nuances throughout each highlight this in a really wonderful way in Drinking at the Movies.
I found Julia Wertz’s style even more simplistic and basic than that of Jeffery Brown glancing through it after reading it I find the characters nearly nondescript and child-like where as Brown’s work seems over all simple in nature there is an abundance of shading and detail to himself the setting and the other characters he interacts with. I found Wertz’s style a little off putting at times as I couldn’t decipher the emotions that characters held on their face and the references made throughout the graphic novel itself were not always helpful to what the scene was describing (Pg 37 in particular. I’m not really sure whats going on)
ReplyDeleteWertz also mentions in the comic that she has an affinity and a need to read Family Circus daily and it seems like her style almost mimics that as well.
She uses different types of panels in her books, sometimes ones with squiggly lines s nearly representing a dream cloud when it’s showing us images that happened in the past back in san Francisco or other times having various tasks occurring with no panels at all. But it seems as though the majority of her pages are filled with six or more panels creating very quick pacing.
-Kelsey Perkins
I was really interested in reading the article about Julia Wertz and her relationship with humor. Both of the graphic memoirs we have read up to this point have made significant use of humor while writing about sometimes very dark subject matter, and while I suspect this tendency will not be quite as apparent in all the books we read over the rest of the semester, I wonder how intrinsically linked humor and the comics format are. The word "comic" immediately suggests comedy and, perhaps largely fostered by our familiarity with the newspaper's "funny pages" most of us, when thinking of the traditional comic, expect to laugh.
ReplyDeleteWertz, more than Jeff Brown, goes for a more obvious, exaggerated sense of humor. In fact, some of her sequences enter the realm of the absurdly surreal, such as when she depicts her brain and her wallet escaping and having various imagined comedic adventures. Is Wertz right when she says that comedians and cartoonists are often depressed? Is tragedy ripe material for comedy? (And, on a tangentially related note, does memoir stem from tragedy?) Or is humor a way of coping with trauma? Or do we, the readers, need the lightness of humor to soften the sharp bite of the very dark, very real, visually depicted accounts graphic memoirists are usually dealing with? It really can be more difficult to stomach disturbing and explicit material in visual format. (There's a reason we have a content rating system for films but not for books.)
From the article: "So the question that probably didn’t cross your mind until I put it there is, if I’m happy and healthy, does it have a negative effect on my comedic work? And the answer is that I don’t know. And I don’t particularly care. If being a good comedy writer means I have to be depressed, then fuck it, I quit." Do comics have to be funny? I don't think so, but I definitely see the pressure there. Certainly when I sat down to pen our mini-memoir assignment this week, I was thinking about humor. I think it does make a rather neat envelope for both memoir and visual-textual media. I see its value, both as entertainment and as a distancing or reflective element. Are there other techniques available to memoirists, and specifically graphic memoirists, which can serve some of these same purposes?
Some of the differences I noticed between Julia Wertz and Jeffrey Brown’s works were Wertz’s use of sign text, her visual representation (or lack there of) the passing of time, and her writing in the gutters.
ReplyDeleteAs some people have already pointed out, there is a hilarious irony in Wertz’s coupling of images and text, but what makes her irony more engaging, is the frequently satirical text that appears in the background which requires the reader to slow down and pay attention to detail. If you don’t pay close attention to all signs, book titles, radio blurbs, T.V. broadcast bubbles, etc., not only will you miss some pretty hilarious stuff, but you might also miss subtle cues indicating a flashback, memory, or contemplation. Her use of background information to communicate a shift in her otherwise linear narrative, is another major change from Funny Misshapen Body.
Lastly, what also stood out to me was her writing in the gutter (is the space above the top panels considered the gutter too)? I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it all the time; at times it felt like an additional title to the obvious ones that specified a change in space or progression of time. These “mini-titles” also functioned as part of the irony and comedy as they often contradicted what took place below.
While I did find Drinking at the Movies enjoyable in that it was witty and honest, I did not find it as relatable as some other people did. In her interview with Spurgeon, Wertz made the following commentary about her artwork: “ . . . I choose to [draw] it simple because that's the way people connect to it, they can project themselves into it more than a very detailed image . . .” Despite the simplistic art style, her story was far too foreign of an experience to me. I respect Wertz for owning her white privilege in many instances, while equally acknowledging her troubled childhood, but that didn’t change the fact that much of what she experienced in her twenties was unlike anything that I experienced.
*book titles didn't italicize
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading “Drinking at the Movies”, mostly because of the humor. I find Julia Wertz hilarious. I found the memoir to be enjoyable because Wertz makes herself such a free spirited character that even when she is facing life problems the reader doesn’t feel any negative emotion. After reading her blog and realizing she has many health issues I understood the memoir more. The character we get to know doesn’t display alcoholism or her health issues. It seems like she doesn’t use her writing to express her emotions, she uses her writing to escape them. While Scott Mccloud says that cartooning allows artist to simplify an image Wertz uses cartooning to emotionally detach herself from her character. I enjoyed her style of drawing a lot more than I did Jeffrey Browns. I didn’t like the size of the small panels in “Funny Misshapen Body”. The text and the pictures always seemed crowed. Then some panels had lines going all across. I just felt like it was too much going on sometimes. I liked the panels of just drawing Julia included, especially the ones of her apartment that were extremely detailed. I took them as an invite to the inside of her home.
ReplyDelete