Drinking at the Movies by Julia Wertz
Drinking at the Movies is a tour-de-force of a graphic novel written and drawn by Julia Wertz. It explores Wertz’s life through her twenties during the first year that she moved to New York City. You will laugh, you might cry, you will squirm, and you will say “aww” multiple times reading this book. Before we begin with the review though, I just want to take a second to give major props to Janeane Garofalo’s brilliant foreword that appears before Julia’s book. It is unlike any forward you or I have ever read before and will remain a true gem and hidden treasure to all foreword enthusiasts for millions of years. If you are interested in forewords and hate graphic novels, this book is still for you…just for this foreword. I don’t know anyone who only reads forewords. I wonder who that is. If that is you, please leave a comment on this post.
Story
The book is a memoir following Julia Wertz’s first year in NYC. The story is pretty linear and includes several of her moves around the city into new apartments and jobs. While it’s unclear if the book was written during the events taking place, an interesting part of the storytelling is the way it jumps around from point to point almost like Wertz’s life is being told by a person spouting nonstop stream of consciousness. And since Wertz’s life during this time is a little chaotic and disorganized, it’s fitting that the story follows this theme. There are many characters that sort of pop-up, and some characters that disappear. The book perfectly captures the feelings of someone who is moving to a city for the first year and trying to find a place to fit in. As someone who has done this, I related to the sudden changes in environment, friends, experiences and lack of routine. Another theme in the book is loneliness and that dread of having left home. Wertz also delves into issues of substance abuse from the perspective of the outside watching her brother’s struggles as well as with her own personal denial. The book deals with serious themes almost consistently but does so through a lens of black absurdist humor fused existentialism.
Art
The art of the book is pretty cartoony. Wertz has a commanding style and storytelling technique. The pages are done in rigid grid layout. They are mainly done with six panels per page, but now and then a rapid sequence of events will yield extra panels. There are also chapter headings in the book that include Wertz’s sketch drawings of her environments. These drawings are done in extra detail and show off the author’s commanding artistic abilities. One unique point in the art is that similar character types really look identical to each other. Bums in San Francisco in the book are identical to bums in New York. This is replicated with other random characters. This makes the book almost read like a play on a blackbox stage, with one actor playing multiple background parts. This also connected the themes of the book together more cohesively, by almost tricking the reader into thinking that there could be character development with these different stereotypes.
Color
The book is done in black and white. The lack of color did not really enhance or detract from the storytelling.
Lettering
The book appears to be hand-lettered by Wertz.
je ne sais quoi
Besides the included foreword by Janeane Garofalo, the strongest part of this book is the truthfulness of it’s storytelling. The humor is real because the author has made sure to include little notes about how she wished she’d known a detail at the time or what was happening elsewhere that she would later learn. There are also tip-offs from her future narrator self that indicate that the author has come to realize the irony of her actions vs. feelings. The humor in the book balances between relatable, self-deprecating, and absurdity. A lot of the best moments are details about random real-life happenings that seem so outlandish or impossible that it’s hard not to just laugh at them. We all live through embarrassments, it’s rare that we are given the gift of an invitation into another person’s moments of crisis.
On a scale between a low “lizard kings destroying the last tunnels of free-humans to become true overlords of the Earth”, and a high “peaceful Kaiju eating the pollutants from the atmosphere and oceans to restore the planet to balance” we give this graphic novel a strong “tomato plants that pick themselves when they ripen”…it may not be world-changing, but it’s perfectly neat and should be checked out by everyone!