Of Comics, Children, and Community: In Conversation With Julia Wertz
When you get an opportunity to talk to one of their creative idols, you often imagine the worst before it happens. I assumed I’d say something painfully weird and then have to go into hiding after the fact, but when the person being interviewed is Julia Wertz, the atmosphere is naturally comfortable enough that you walk away having learned that you can use superglue to heal paper-cuts. In fact, when I apologized in advance for the chance that I might act like a dork, she encouraged me to be such a dork.
That’s funny, because our interview opened with her admitting that she’s still waiting for someone to pick up on the “clunkiness” of her writing in her newest graphic memoir, Impossible People. I was surprised to hear this, especially as I consider Wertz’s quality of writing to be a step above when it comes to graphic novels. Ultimately though, I recognized this to be something that all creatives tend to go through, including myself—and the rest of our conversation would go on to reflect this.
It was truly a delight getting to talk to Wertz, and I’m excited to share our conversation with everyone here. If you haven’t already, go check out Impossible People at your nearest bookstore.
Molding, making, and meeting
In totality, Wertz’s career has been somewhat ahead of its time, in the sense that it was largely born from the internet. As shown in her book The Infinite Wait, Wertz never intended to “become” a cartoonist. Bedridden with lupus, she discovered comics at her local library and fell in love with the medium, eventually creating her own and posting them on Flickr when she was 23. Back then, the comics “scene” was still pretty white-male-dominated, so she waded in sight-unseen, making up the rules as she went. She thought of it as a pretty “Dunning-Kruger” way of going about things.
She was on to something with her approach, however, because she wasn’t the only one sharing her work in such a way: She made many friends on the internet during those Flickr days, a coterie of various others sharing their art and comics communally. Once Wertz’s diary comics started gaining recognition, she decided to take a trip across the country and meet these people in person. The end of her “tour” brought her to New York City, where she stayed with her friend Sarah Glidden (whom she still lovingly still references as her best friend) and decided that NYC was the place to be.
Eventually, she, Glidden, and Domitille Collardey founded “Pizza Island,” a group of women making cartoons in a shared studio in Greenpoint that they collectively paid rent for. Along with the original three, Pizza Island consisted of Kate Beaton, Meredith Gran, Lisa Hanawalt, Karen Sneider, and Deana Sobel Lederman. Though they have been referred to (much to their amusement) as a “comics collective of women,” ultimately Pizza Island was founded to get them out of their own homes and create in a space that was entirely dedicated to their art. They’d work on their own projects while shooting the shit and hanging out all day. To this day, they’re all still friends and talk daily.
The interesting thing is that Wertz was an artist during a really cool part of NYC’s artistic history, meaning she rubbed elbows with a lot of similarly cool people. She swears that she doesn’t name drop these people to seem cool herself, and that they were genuinely her friends—and I believe her, as Wertz was incredibly genuine throughout our entire conversation. But the novelty still struck me every time she’d casually mention people like Jeffrey Lewis, or Claudia Gonson. She and her brother even had dinner with Moby—that Moby, whom I was too young to remember, but who garnered a gasp when I mentioned him to my parents. “She had dinner with that Moby?!” Oh, yes she did.
Overall though, it wasn’t ever about coolness. It was about connection, and how comics and art were ideal conduits for said connection. Something about the medium brought out everyone’s funniest, most amiable selves, and though there was a level of uncertainty regarding which way the “comics boom” would go, ultimately Wertz and her friends rode the wave well. She’s still waiting for the “other shoe to drop,” so to speak, in the sense that the novelty of her job still astounds her sometimes. She’s gotten this far, though—I don’t think it’ll drop anytime soon, if ever.
Raising Felix and stories on motherhood
Impossible People was a decade in the making, as well as Wertz’s third graphic memoir. That said, she’s always made her personal life the subject of her work, a fact which she is comfortable with, considering we only see what she wants us to see. However, it has been somewhat startling, in an amusing way, for fans to approach her and reference parts of her life that she forgot she even shared.
Perhaps most prominent, in this regard, has been her relationship with Oliver: the subject of her first series of comics, The Fart Party (which have all been recently re-released as a collection titled Museum of Mistakes—go check it out!). With a laugh, she told me how funny it was to see fans’ reactions to the news that her husband, and the father of her son, Felix, is, in fact, that same Oliver.
And after such a storied life and career, I was hesitant to ask her too many questions about motherhood, considering how often the media tends to forget a woman’s accomplishments once she becomes a mother. However, in Wertz’s case, talking about new motherhood was not only easy, it was essential.
While she never saw herself becoming a mother when she was younger, the decision to have a baby happened somewhat naturally as she and Oliver entered their mid-30s. What they definitely didn’t anticipate was COVID and quarantine: Wertz’s due date was May 2020, not long after lockdown began. That’s a yikes in and of itself, but his birth was also traumatic, and not long after he was born, Northern California faced a slew of terrifying wildfires. She describes this time as being intensely frightening and isolating, especially since, as a new parent, she couldn’t afford to set time aside to focus on her work.
However, if anything was made clear to me during this interview, it was how cool of a kid Felix is, and how much she loves being his mom. Per Wertz’s words, he’s very much “the best little kid,” which she acknowledged most moms believe about their children, but nonetheless holds to be true. Felix has apparently been a consistently fun, happy, and excitable little guy—even during all the chaos the world has endured for the last three years! Their escapades during this period were recorded in sketchy diary-comics throughout quarantine, first posted on her social media, then later shared with The New Yorker, whom she began writing for in 2015. One such escapade that she found especially funny was when, on a road trip, their car hit a bump, and Felix loudly proclaimed (out of concern for his chicken nuggets), “That’s gonna hurt my nuggets!!”
The process of raising her son, both as a mother who didn’t expect to be a mother for most of her life and as a new parent during covid, will be the subject of her next book, titled Bury Me Already (It’s Nice Down Here). I’m excited to see even more of her perspective on motherhood, especially because, in her words, she never felt like she “lost herself” in the process of becoming a mother. She felt very much like the same person, just with another little person attached to her. And I think that’s really lovely.
Reflections on now
To wrap this article up, I wanted to share Wertz’s thoughts on the current state of comics and how the internet plays into it all. It can be easy to look back on the past and wish things were different now, especially with so much negativity in the news these days, but Wertz was able to provide a refreshingly optimistic view of both the future of comics and how the internet continues to play a role within it.
She recently shared, on her Patreon, a few panels that got cut from Impossible People, detailing a recent comics expo she attended (SPX) where she was astounded to find that many of the younger artists were students—that is to say, students of comics. The fact that people could now go to school to learn about the medium and grow within it made her, admittedly, a little jealous. Her generation, described by writer Rob Clough as the “Kramer’s Generation,” was at the forefront of “when the current renaissance of alt-comics was just beginning to flower.” They had to hustle hardcore between day-jobs and gigs, and they had to learn as they went. The most she ever learned about comics in an academic setting was a brief study of Uzumaki by Junji Ito in one of her humanities courses.
The fact that students can now wholly pursue comics as their main course of study blows her mind. However, she also recognizes it as something pretty special, as kids are becoming exposed to comics at a younger age due to social media. (Clough calls the current gen the “Tumblr Generation,” which is apt, considering I discovered so many cartoonists specifically through Tumblr when I was younger.)This, in turn, is resulting in a larger, more diverse comics scene, which Wertz is incredibly thrilled to see. Comics is no longer such a cloistered medium, only known to a handful of people; it now encompasses all kinds of life experiences, and that’s a beautiful thing. So beautiful that it makes me a little envious—I’ve been watching some of my favorite artists post about their experiences at Chicago’s CAKE, and I wish I could have attended!
And none of this would have been possible (at least, not so rapidly) without the internet, and how it connects us all. I grew up only ever hearing about how the internet “ruined” my own generation, so it was really great to be reminded of all the good that can happen through it. “What a thrill,” Wertz said, “to just be able to talk to people you normally wouldn’t be able to talk to.” Even now, the increased connectivity continues to affect Wertz: Her work was exposed to comics saint Roz Chast, who then directly approached Wertz at an event and enthusiastically asked to connect. Now, the two are friends—imagine being friends with Roz Chast, and all because she happened to see your comics online!
All of this only further cements my own belief that comics has been, currently is, and will only continue to be one of the most communal, authentic, and consistently cool mediums out there. The heightened accessibility and visibility has only served to better the medium, as we now have so many stories being told and shared that have touched their readers in deeply personal ways. I know, on my end, comics have guided me through long, sleepless nights, as well as uncertain and gloomy days, because there’s just something uniquely raw and profound about the medium. And with that said, I can only be grateful for having the privilege to talk to someone who was there at the start of it all, toeing the line, even if she didn’t realize it at the time.
If you, too, want to hear Wertz’s stories in-person, be sure to check out her book tour and see if she’ll be visiting a bookstore near you!
(featured image: Black Dog & Leventhal)
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