“Really super good.
This year I’ve made it a point to look out for comics that are good alternatives to canon titles and that have good female characters. This one hits both.
This book is a really great alternative to some of those titles like Persepolis or Blankets in that it’s good comics, a simple story, and it’s all told very well. There are genuine laughs, and there’s a true style to both the writing and the art.
Okay, it doesn’t seem like it’s telling an important story. It’s not one of those NPR books so much. But this is a plus for me. I feel like I’ve read a lot of really good, slice of life memoirs in comic forms that are better than the ones I’ve read in pure text. It just works better. You can get such a great sense of a person from this kind of material, and you can have that experience where the mundane is also kind of magical. Which I hate myself for saying, but it’s true.
As for female characters, Wertz, as herself, is likable in her unlikability, if that makes sense. She’s this curmudgeonly figure who is more interested in pizza than dudes, and I don’t think I’ve read a lot of books with so little love story, so little dating or romance, and that’s what made it so great. It’s like a Jeffrey Brown but without the angst, a Peter Bagge without the gross sexual stuff. I love those dudes, but this offered something pretty different.
There’s this thing that can happen in stories sometimes, when a really good writer is trying to figure herself out and she works through it on the page. It’s not great to see the ending or these bold conclusions, but those clumsy attempts at self-discovery, those are so illuminating to see on the page. I really have a lot of respect for artists who do that, who go through that figuring out in the book and take us along with them, and especially when they’re okay not necessarily coming to a conclusion.”