Julia Wertz made a lot of short gag strips early in her comics career which got collected in the books The Fart Party, Volumes 1 and 2, and are collected here in Museum of Mistakes, along with the unpublished Volume 3 and a buncha miscellaneous crapola.
Wertz is actually a really good cartoonist and I enjoyed Drinking at the Movies and The Infinite Wait a lot but her Fart Party stuff is complete and utter drek!
The strips are about being in her early 20s and are effectively her learning how to cartoon. The “gags” are tediously repetitive: she’s always the butt of the joke, always being drunk and silly, she’s insecure, a slob, antisocial, blah blah blah. She’s so “unladylike” - woah, what an outlaw! None of the strips are the least bit funny and it’s amazing there was an audience at all for this rubbish.
Padding out this (now out of print but apparently a new version is coming back to print soon for unfathomable reasons) edition are sketchbook pages, mixtape lists and unreadable comics from her teenage years (these are the wertzst part of this most boring of books).
It was interesting looking up what Wertz is doing these days. She ended up marrying the boyfriend she broke up with at the end of the first Fart Party book and they now have a baby together! She’s also working on a new long form autobio comic that’s soon to be published.
The extracts from Drinking at the Movies and The Infinite Wait included at the end of this collection reminded me how good a cartoonist she can be so I’m all in for the new book. In the meantime, if you’re interested in this creator’s work, definitely don’t bother with the instantly-forgettable Fart Party strips and check out Drinking at the Movies and The Infinite Wait instead.
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