CSotD: Short post, long comic
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I don't have a lot to say about Julia Wertz's cartoon-filled narrative, "The Fart Party's Over," and it's not a short read, so I'm going to explain why I'm sending you there and then … well, then I'm just going to send you there.
It's very compelling, it's very well done, and I don't know if you'll enjoy it in the sense of finding it a pleasant thing, but you'll be glad you read it and you'll carry it around in your head for awhile.
Autobiographical cartooning, like the semi-autobiographical college novels of a generation ago, is easier to do than it is to make interesting.
Holden Caulfield was only interesting because his voice had not been heard before and reflected the time. "The Graduate" was a better movie than it was a novel, but, again, the character was interesting because he was not unique, not because he was, and Dustin Hoffman's often affectless portrayal was appropriate.
I imagine a lot of first readers at publishing houses wish neither novel had been written because I'm sure they've seen a lot of examples of how common experiences can be made uninteresting and very, very few of how they can be fascinating.
Obviously, to tell a good story, you have to be a good storyteller. Even a story with the dramatic potential of Maus or Persepolis would fail if it weren't told well.
And if you're a really good storyteller, you don't need a dramatic setting to make your work interesting. If you take Fun Home apart, it's not that the story is "boring" per se, but it also doesn't involve revolution or concentration camps and there are any number of gay men and women with similar stories to tell. It's Bechdel's narrative and artistic skills that make the book stand out.
Ditto with Raina Telgemeier's Smile.
And, boy, will you encounter a division if you bring up the work of Chris Ware. As a writer who has read Ulysses twice, I understand why artists like Ware's work. Stripped of Joyce's literary fireworks, however, Leopold Bloom is a schlump and Stephan Dedalus is a downer, and, by the same token, if you come to Jimmy Corrigan for the story instead of for the technique, well, there's not much there there.
As it happens, on Friday Derf Backderf announced having signed to do a new book, in the course of which he notes that My Friend Dahmer was a once-in-a-lifetime book that he's not going to be able to top. I do think, however, that what makes that book so extraordinary is the normalcy of having known a person around whom so much mythology has grown.
As with Maus, as with Persepolis, the story plays off the mythic expectations that the reader brings to the book and reduces things, not to the "mundane" but to the personal level where you begin to feel that you could have shared the experience, that it happened to real people in real time in real lives.
Well, there are no concentration camps or dictatorial extremists or serial killers in Julia Wertz's story, but storytelling is still the craft of bringing people into a situation so that they feel it, and that often means taking the ordinary and making it new.
What she has assembled is a collection of her work at different periods, strung together with a narrative about creativity, alcoholism and depression. Her artistic style is deceptively plain, which combines with a straightforward narrative structure that is unsparing if not entirely unapologetic.
And, no, she's not the first person to ever struggle with alcohol and depression. But she sure knows how to tell it. This is good stuff. Go.
I'll see you back here tomorrow.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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