Cartoonist Julia Wertz, whose comics lampoon both the serious and the absurd aspects of her life, has not one but two new books heading to shelves in the next few weeks.
On May 10, Black Dog and Leventhal will publish Impossible People: A Completely Average Recovery Story, a memoir of her years of drinking and sobriety. Wertz chronicled part of that story in Drinking at the Movies, which was nominated for a 2011 Eisner Award. On her website, Wertz describes Impossible People this way: “This book isn’t really about recovery, it’s about being young(ish) and lost and having bad coping mechanisms, and learning how to not be an asshole. It’s about all the stuff that happened while I was slowly getting better over an eight year period- a bad relationship, making friends, urban exploring, making bad decisions, making good ones, career stuff, crashing a car, meeting famous people, family shit, getting evicted, etc- before I left New York. I also make a lot of jokes, my only enduring coping mechanism.” The 320-page hardcover will be released on May 10 with an MSRP of $30.
Then on June 6, Uncivilized Books will publish a giant collection of Wertz’s early work, Museum of Mistakes: The Definitive Fart Party Collection. Her first published work was The Fart Party, which Atomic Books collected in two volumes in 2007 and 2009; in 2014 they brought out Museum of Mistakes: A Fart Party Collection, a 400-page volume that included both the previous Fart Party volumes plus some new material. The Uncivilized book goes beyond that, with 526 pages of published and previously unpublished work. The paperback, which will be black and white with some color sections, will be published on June 6.
Wertz’s other work includes The Infinite Wait, published by Koyama Press in 2012, which was also nominated for an Eisner Award, and Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City, released by Black Dog & Leventhal in 2017.
Source: ICv2
