Eating Cheese With Julia Wertz

Wait a sec, was that a Les Miz reference? Julia Wertz is looking at me incredulously.  We’ve just been talking about ways that New Yorkers can save money — buy child tickets for movies at the kiosk, buy one-day-past the expiration date milk, etc. — when she brings up the idea of asking bakeries to give you baked goods they were planning on throwing out.  She mentions that people might be embarrassed to do that; I mention that it might make them feel like Jean Valjean.

It turns out that Julia Wertz is, amongst other things, a giant fan of Les Miserables, both the book and the musical.  It might surprise you that the woman whose dark, cynical, hilarious heart is on full display in her autobiographical comic The Fart Party might love something as sincere and over-the-top as Les Miz, but it turns out there’s a lot about Julia Wertz you probably don’t know.

In The Fart Party, Wertz adopts a persona — a portion of herself — which she says is “a distilled version of me. It’s the obnoxious, beer-drinking, vulgar side. In real life, I’m a lot quieter. I’m a lot nicer than I come across. It’s so easy to just tear people a new asshole on the Internet and then go eat a bagel or whatever the fuck you do, but that’s not how I act in real life.”

The contrast between herself in person and herself in the comic has lead to some touchy interactions with readers. “I think [when people meet me] they want more of the show; they want the cartoon character on a popsicle stick, and I can’t just bring that out for strangers. That’s me once you’ve gotten to know someone, once you’re…friends with someone… To some extent, I feel bad; I feel guilty that I’ve let them down.”

It took a serious illness to make Julia Wertz an artist.  While she was in college, she was diagnosed with systemic Lupus, an auto-immune disease. Little did she know she’d discover her vocation while convalescing.

“I had no concentration whatsoever,” Wertz told me in a recent interview in her Greenpoint apartment, “so I was like, ‘I’ll just go the library and get comics’ because I couldn’t read normal…books. I think I got Tenement Stories. It was weird. It was a mostly Chinese library, so they only had the basics, but I got them there.  I got Will Eisner and Julie Ducet. I was like,`Wait a minute, this is what I’ve been looking for forever!’ It was actual true stories and it was cool to look at.”

Soon, she started drawing comics, doodling in the back of her college courses.  She showed them to her boyfriend at the time and some friends, and they convinced her to launch a website and eventually a Zine.  That project, The Fart Party, is a series of hilarious, crude, autobiographical comics chronicling Wertz’s misadventures through college, a serious relationship, a major break-up, moving to and surviving in New York City, and more.

I’m going to make an assertion here that you might not be happy with, dear reader: For all its vaunted crudity, The Fart Party is, in fact, art made with a great deal of craft. Art is the process of condensing and elevating raw materials.  We strip down life to its raw essence and then, through focus, craft, and creativity, elevate that distilled essence into art. Think about the dialogue to a play; even in “realistic” plays, it never sounds like how real people talk. It sounds better: smarter, more sophisticated, designed, funnier, less mumbling, more focused…  The Fart Party also engages in this process with hilarious results. Make no mistake: Julia Wertz is hilarious, and her blunt, self-effacing, angry attitude is the comic’s equivalent of great punk rock. Describing a comic is a little like explaining a joke without telling it, so see for yourself by clicking here, here and here.

Wertz’s simple, childlike drawing style evokes the Sunday funnies (Wertz has elsewhere listed Calvin and Hobbes as a formative influence) and conjures up the way that we see the world both as adults and as children simultaneously.  The comics all feature Julia and walk us through one of her many seemingly mundane misadventures.  “I’m the kind of person who can only write from stuff that I’ve experienced. I have a very vivid imagination, but I have trouble getting that on paper in a readable form, so I have to draw from experiences that I’ve gone through. What goes in is the mundane things that I think about every day. I think that’s why people think I do put a lot of myself on the Internet, because they’re the things everyone goes through. Like when you stay home on a Saturday and you’re thinking, `Oh god, this is so pathetic.’”

The last year and a half have seen a lot of changes for Wertz.  The web comic has grown in readership, she published the first collection of Fart Party comics, and has edited a forthcoming anthology of comics based on Missed Connections personals.  She has also moved from San Francisco to New York, a move that was difficult at first but that she’s now grateful for. “I love it now. I hated it the first couple of months I lived here. I was in three different apartments, I had six jobs, I was fired twice. At first, I was like, ‘This place is a shit-hole and there are chicken bones everywhere.’  Now, I really like New York. If you’re just here as a normal person and do what I do — sometimes I bartend, sometimes I waitress, sometimes I write for magazines — and keep making comics, then it’s not the nasty city everyone makes it out to be.”

Future plans include a longer-form autobiographical comic that chronicles her life from the ages four to seven, documenting the universal experiences of kids in that age group. She also is working on her non-Fart Party drawing style. Wertz is completely self-taught (she took one art class in college as an excuse to go to Italy on the cheap and did none of the homework).  “Because I am self-taught, I feel like [my other projects] take longer because it’s like being taught by a lazy alcoholic teacher who can’t get their shit together and some days just wants to watch Gilmore Girls all day. So it’s a slow process.”

Isaac Butler writes at Parabasis and occasionally blogs for Time Out New York. He’s also a freelance theatre director and he loves comic books.