| January
2008 |
Julia Wertz, The Fart Party (Atomic Books, 2007); $13.95, paper.
If there is one thing the
world does not need right now it is another diary comic by
another twenty-somethig. For far too long now, this vast
underemployed and over-inflated army have put pen to paper
to tell us about their daily travails—apartment hunting,
job hunting, boyfriend hunting—all in the ostensible
service of hunting for something far more Profound. You
want meaning? Here it is, kids: you’re twenty-three years
old and because of the incredibly slow (and getting slower)
maturation of the homo sapien, you are still a kid wearing
adult body clothing. No reason to be ashamed or to panic.
But no reason to tell us about it as if there were some key
to universal understanding buried like a clue from
The Da
Vinci Code. You’ve been exiled from
Mom & Pop’s, you’re hungry and you’re horny. Putting it
down in black and white with dialogue balloons and thought
bubbles doesn’t make it more any less mundane. It just
makes you more embarrassing to your family and friends.
Which is why we are so very grateful that there is
The Fart
Party, which promises us no
profundities and which fully embraces the infantilism
(rather than the “meaningfulness”) of daily life. And
perhaps because Julia Wertz couldn’t care less about you
think about her or her life, it is the most honest, funny,
and (dare I say it?) profound diary comic out there
today.
Published by
Baltimore’s beloved Atomic Books, Fart Party
collects
comics from Wertz’s webcomic (fartparty.org), where she
posts regular strips detailing the adventures (recently,
for example, her wallet was stolen and she found herself
stranded in Chicago). But the book is more than simply an
anthology; Wertz has selected and organized the strips to
follow the narrative of a crucial period of her life: her
first serious “adult” relationship and the inevitable end
of the relationship as the rip tides of early adulthood
take them both in separate directions. But my account makes
it all sound much more maudlin—or, as Wertz would put it,
“gay”—than
in fact it is. Wertz’s genius lies in the economy of the
comicstrip, reducing life to four-panels and a punchline,
all the more funny (and more vicious) for being so
distilled. Rather than seeking out the meaningful, Wertz
has the oldschool comic stripper’s love of the zinger. And
she is not above Kantzenjammer
Kids-style physical comedy, as
when, in “Don’t Fucking Talk to Me,” she recounts her
fantasy of defecating in the recently severed head of a
particularly annoying coffeehouse patron. If this were Ivan
Brunetti (who also portrays himself in various compromising
positions with severed heads), the force of the fantasy
would be to expose to the light of day the dark soul of its
creator. But Wertz makes it all so innocent and natural,
and the payoff lies in the contended smile on her face as
she returns to her drawing, blissfully unconcerned by the
blood and feces pooling across the table.
For the most part, however, Wertz’s humor has a more quiet
rhythm, and she has a comic’s sense of the power of the
pause. For example, after her boyfriend has decided to move
to Vermont, in a strip titled “Misplaced Worries #1,” she
goes to buy stamps only to discover that there are only
flag stamps left. Wertz portrays herself staring at the
stamps on the counter before breaking into sobs: “But
I hate
those ones!”
If this were your run-of-the-mill diary comic, the silent
panel would be excised, leaving room for a panel in which
the author realizes that she is really crying over the loss
of her boyfriend, not over the stamps. But the title does
that for us, reminding us that despite the fact that the
Julia we see in the comic seems remarkably blind to her own
life and the consequences of her actions, the creator,
Wertz, is well aware of who she is and why—otherwise she
would not be able to make you laugh at her life. And she
most definitely wants us to laugh at her life, because if
one is not laughing, in the world of The Fart
Party, one will surely be
crying (or dismembering).
For those who are wondering, a “Fart Party” involves
farting into balloons before hosting a party, so that when
you are ready for your guests to leave (as guests never
know when to do) you simply pop all the balloons. Martha
Stewart wishes
she came up
with such a brilliant idea. But a “fart party” is also any
occasion in which you take the embarrassing, unpleasant,
noisy or rude aspects of daily life and turn them into
something to laugh at. Part of Wertz’s implicit message in
this book is that instead of looking for the profundity in
the “poetics of everyday life,” we should be looking for
ways of extending our childish capacity to laugh out loud
and together at farts and their many, many close relations:
hangovers, breakups, bad jobs, bad sex, boredom,
loneliness, homesickness, etc. Everyone farts (and barfs,
breaks up, gets fired, gets laid): we can ignore it,
attempt to make meaning out of it, or laugh at it like we
did when we were kids in the back seat. Wertz makes a
strong case for the latter, and I am right there with her,
trying to cut one of my own and hoping I don’t soil myself
in the process.
Webcomics for the most part are not worth the paper they
are printed on (which is really sad, since they are not,
for the most part, printed on paper). But
The Fart
Party (and the recent Perry
Bible Fellowshipvolume, The Trial of Colonel
Sweeto) suggests that while the
future of comics likely does not lie on the internet (sorry
to break your icy heart, Marvel), the future of the comic
strip surely does. God knows there is nothing worth reading
in the newspapers any more, and without the comic strip
life will surely be a poorer thing. I find my daily
pleasures these days at fartparty.org and pbfcomics.com,
and in my volumes of luscious reprints of
Mutt &
Jeff, Krazy Kat
and
Gasoline
Alley. In “Nightmare” Wertz
tells of a particularly bad dream, which at first sounds
like pure bliss: “I dreamed that all the Sunday comics were
comics I actually like, like Patches and P.B.F…” But then
it all goes horribly wrong: “every strip was a tribute to
Cathy!... I kept flipping the pages to see if it was a joke
but it was real and everyone loved Cathy!” After her
impassioned recitation of the nightmare, her brother
responds, appropriately, “You fucking nerd.” But as a
fellow nerd I can only say how glad I am that
Fart
Party and PBF
are
not
in the Sunday
paper, where they would surely be conscripted into doing a
tribute to Cathy.
Instead, in the vast wasteland of webcomics, a select few
are emerging to carry forward the traditions of the masters
of the strip into the twenty-first century. For this
guttergeek, there is reason to hope that a long national
nightmare is finally ending.
