The Infinite Wait and Other Stories (2012) by Julia Wertz: Three pieces make up this comics collection from Julia Wertz.
The first, entitled "Industry," chronicles the jobs she's had over two decades and two coasts, from a lot of waitressing and bartending jobs to her later days as a professional cartoonist who doesn't have to hold down another job.
The second, the eponymous "The Infinite Wait," covers Wertz's move to San Francisco from Napa in 2002 and her subsequent diagnosis of having the auto-immune disease Lupus. The third, "A Strange and Curious Place," is, in Wertz's own words, "basically just a love letter to my hometown library and everything it taught me."
"Industry" probably has the most laughs per panel, even as Wertz starts to lose jobs because of her incessant drinking. The publishing success of her first two books, Fart Party I and II, moves "Industry" to an often hilarious evaluation of how Hollywood tries to adapt work, and specifically autobiographical work.
"The Infinite Wait," Wertz informs the reader, was a title chosen for its pretension and "seriousness" as a joke related to the decidedly unpretentious tale of Wertz vs. Lupus. This is certainly one of the funniest comics stories ever created about an incurable auto-immune disease. Well, any disease, any sickness. It may catch at the heart, but the story never stops presenting situations of high wit and low comedy.
Then there's "A Strange and Curious Place," the shortest piece in the book. It is indeed a paean to Wertz's hometown library, and to the joys of reading for a child. The depiction of Julia and her brother's excitement at the annual library book sale is a gem of humourous, pithily observed sentiment. The book, too, is a gem of autobiographical self-evaluation and often raunchy, sometimes obscene brilliance. Highly recommended.
Drinking At the Movies (2010/ This edition 2015): written and illustrated by Julia Wertz: Julia Wertz is one of a handful or so of the funniest cartoonists currently working, and has been since she began her career on the Internet back in the mid-oughts. Mid-oughts? Whatever.
It's a trick to make autobiography funny without avoiding the horrors of being alive. Wertz has got that trick. Her autobiographical works deal with her alcoholism, her brother's drug problems, and her life with lupus after being diagnosed with same at the age of 20 (in 2002).
This volume was Wertz's first full-length 'graphic novel,' coming in at a dialogue-dense 200 pages or so. Drinking At the Movies covers Wertz's first year in New York City in the late oughts after a move from San Francisco. Her comics career has begun to take off. That doesn't save her from dead-end jobs and squalid apartments. Wertz is a comic commentator on urban life at the edge of poverty, all of it alcohol-soaked in this volume. Sobriety would come later.
Wertz is a deceptively simple cartoonist. She can draw complex representations of the real when she wants to, as her renditions of the various apartments and streets of Brooklyn shows throughout Drinking At the Movies. The characters are much simpler, in the tradition of comic strips, with a simple six panels per page for much of the volume. It all works beautifully. Also, there's something really funny about the way Wertz draws arms when people are sitting at a table with arms bent.
Through four apartments and seven apartments, Wertz drinks a lot, comments a lot, and worries over family problems back on the West Coast (one brother is a drug addict). She gets shingles, manages her Lupus, discovers that being a bike courier sucks, teaches comics to kids at a library in the Bronx... well, many things happen.
Moments of self-evaluation and sorrow burst forth throughout. But Wertz is a fabulous entertainer at heart with the critical eye of the jester. I don't recall when I've laughed so much at a volume of anything, comics or writing or whatever. Highly recommended.
My Autobiography (1964/ This edition with new introduction 2007) by Charlie Chaplin: The first third of Charlie Chaplin's autobiography was excerpted and sold as its own book, My Early Life. This suggests that Chaplin (or someone in his estate) knew that his autobiography was excellent pretty much right up to the point that he became the most famous person, film star or otherwise, on Earth -- in 1916, roughly speaking.
The first third details Chaplin's Dickensian childhood in London, England. And it is detailed, and marvelously described. Chaplin didn't use a ghost writer -- the prose is all his, with some corrections for spelling and grammar. He's a gifted memoirist, at least until he becomes famous. Then he becomes an anecdotalist, with the narrative switching to an exhausting string of Chaplin's encounters with famous people.
The first third of My Autobiography, though, is dynamite. Chaplin draws a picture of late Victorian England that is grimy but often full of life and heartbreak. His early adventures on the stage as a member of a travelling acrobatic troupe, as an actor, and ultimately as a dance-hall comedian are memorable and informative.
The introduction to this edition -- written 40 years after the initial mid-1960's release -- notes some of Chaplin's curious omissions. Unless his long-time collaborators are actresses, he omits them almost entirely. He also omits almost any mention of the process of making his films, especially once he's on his own. His first two wives get less than a page's worth between them. He does deal with his 1940's trial and subsequent exile to Switzerland, along with his last marriage, to the then-18-year-old daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill when Chaplin was in his mid-50's. He fails to mention his last movie -- A King in New York -- at all.
Oh, well. Some of the anecdotes are interesting, depending on your tolerance for name-dropping, especially when many of those names have faded into history. The several pages devoted to Chaplin's relationship with William Randolph Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies are probably the most rewarding of the lot.
One thing is certain -- Chaplin was no Communist, even if he did get branded as such for some of the speechifying he did in person and on film. He really, really loves money and he lets it show. Given his impoverished background, it all makes sense.
In all, My Autobiography is immensely rewarding for the first 150 pages or so. After that, one really must proceed at one's own risk. Recommended.
