That we here at guttergeek are endlessly devoted
to all things Julia Wertz would come as no
surprise to our long-time readers, in the event we had
any. But when I first heard from her that she was
working on this project, I must confess, I was dubious.
It sounded at once too cutesy and too high-concept for
the author of Fart Party. As is so often the
case, however, my gut instinct was totally and
completely wrong (in the interests of full disclosure it
must be said that in the Spring of 2007 I confidently
prophesied the imminent failure of the
soon-to-be-released iPhone). In I Saw You...,
Wertz brings together scores of well-known and
relatively unknown cartoonists to work with a shared
constraint: writing a short comic inspired by the
“Missed Connections” ads in Craigslist or in local
freepapers. The results range from humorous and playful
to emotionally devastating—and only occasionally a bit
cruel. And most surprisingly of all, the results are
remarkably rich, consistent and endlessly entertaining,
a testament to Wertz’s talents as an editor as well as
the range of talent from which she was able to draw for
this project.
Given that many of the cartoonists involved in the project
specialize in autobiographical comics, several of the
entries seem to be inspired from personal experiences. One
of my favorites, for example, is by Liz Prince, in which
her fantasies about a guy making eyes at her in a coffee
shop seem confirmed by a Craigslist entry, until she gets
into the fine-print and discovers the eyes were for the
girl with the macbook and not for her after all. Or, from
another master of the form, the final entry in the
collection is from Jeffrey Brown, in which he realizes that
his own eye-making habits have teetered over what he
rightly describes as the “fine line between ‘hopeless
romantic’ and ‘creepy.’” It is in fact this fine line that
this entire collection dances along, sometimes falling
cleanly onto one side or the other, only to jumble the
categories and the attendant emotions once again.
In addition to terrific entries from familiar faces such as
Brown, Prince, Wertz, Gabrielle Bell, Peter Bagge, Sarah
Glidden, and Keith Knight, some of the most moving pieces
in the collection came from cartoonists who were new to me.
Lucy Knisley’s meditation on the processes of imagination
that circulate around the Missed Connections was a perfect
opening to the collection, for example. Ken Dahl has a
couple of entries in the collection that are simultaneously
dark and brilliantly witty. In fact, even leaving behind
the concept of the collection (which like the iPhone turned
out to be a very good idea indeed), the collection is to be
recommended to all readers interesting in catching a
glimpse of a wide range of the talented younger cartoonists
out there.
But more than any individual story within the collection,
the most impressive aspect of the book is the quality of
the whole that stays with you long after you have closed
its pages. The book is funny, loving and mean without ever
being mean-spirited, and it will summon up for you
(assuming the history of your fantasy life has run anything
like mine, which we all know it has) all of your most
cherished and most loathed encounters with strangers that
had the unrealized potential to become a new chapter—but
which remained (because of fate, because of your
inhibitions, because of your/his/her hairlip, etc.) only
missed connections.
