Julia Wertz returns with her first memoir comic in over ten years with Impossible People, about her substance abuse back when she was living in New York making comics like Drinking at the Movies and The Infinite Wait and Other Stories. (She’s since left New York, gotten hitched, had kids, and created the nonfiction comic, Tenements, Towers & Trash.)
It’s also disappointing to say that Impossible People is quite boring and a long way from the quality of the other books mentioned above. Which is a shame because she mentions her alcoholism in her other comics so I’d been waiting a while to read about her experience - and it turns out that it’s very underwhelming (which might explain the possibly expectation-off-setting subtitle, “A Completely Average Recovery Story”).
She was definitely an addict, needing to drink herself to blackout every night, but she was also very productive whilst drunk, getting tons of work done during the day. She talks about being sad in a vague way but her habit never got her into any real trouble. Her brother’s also an addict and he looked like an absolute disaster - that guy would definitely be dead if he hadn’t kicked the drugs. Julia? Eh. She always seemed more-or-less fine and never in any real danger, at least going by this memoir. Wow, I’m on the edge of my seat then.
Sans any real sense of urgency or dramatic stories or insight into addiction, Wertz pads out her bloated book with really dull stories about crap relationships, comics festivals, her Pizza Island days (when she shared a studio with, among others, Kate Beaton and pre-Bojack Lisa Hanawalt), trying to be more social, and urban exploring. It’s more than a lot of padding - it’s largely irrelevant and tedious to read.
Her art is the best I’ve seen to date. The New York architecture in particular is very detailed, perhaps as a result of her last book’s focus on it. Some of the actual drinking memoir (which makes up at most around 25% of the book and even that might be a stretch) and her holiday in Puerto Rico were sorta interesting (she crashes a car there but she was sober and it was fine - more humdrum non-drama). It is not much to recommend reading this hefty book though.
As a fan of Julia Wertz’s work, this isn’t her wertz one - that would be the abysmally unfunny The Fart Party - but Impossible People is definitely down there. A very shallow, forgettable and unimpressive look at addiction that will only bore you with its overabundance of meandering and uninteresting stories. If you’ve not read them and you’re interested in this creator, check out her much better books Drinking at the Movies and The Infinite Wait and Other Stories instead.
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