Around five million billion autobiographical comics are published every day. Some are masterfully drawn, others extremely well written. The Undrinkables is neither one nor the other. We could start this article this way, by shamelessly plagiarizing Peter Bagge’s foreword The museum of my mistakesa colossal collection of smutty webcomics that started it all for California author Julia Wertz in the late 2000s. In case of doubt, Bagge specifies: “Julia Wertz draws like a mentally retarded person, and her writing style is as subtle and complex as exploding vomit.” The author was in her twenties at the time, with a fairly constant preference from San Francisco to New York, for apartments and grumpy guys, but also for self-irony, absurd jobs, medication and alcohol. In short: everything it takes to create hilarious comics – we always prefer reading them Memories of a disgusting old man What an old estate in every way, right? Released from the short format in 2010, Wertz confirmed his undeniable talent for the story of his mouse Drinking at the cinema(Title Whiskey & New York in France) a success that earned him his first nomination for the Eisner Awards two years later the endless waitingwhere an autoimmune disease is added to the list of problems as the be-all and end-all, as the young woman, bedridden due to her lupus, discovered the comic genre and began as a completely self-taught artist.
Today, at just 41 years old, she gave up drinking long ago and lives happy days (Instagram as proof) with her boyfriend and their big blonde baby. Wertz started from this place in his life the undrinkable onesHe thinks about the story of his withdrawal as if he were reading it again Whiskey & New York with more perspective. The self-wink is obvious: while W&NY began with a realization, on his 25th birthday, at 3 a.m., in a laundromat, the undrinkable ones opens with a “BUT the hell?!” thundering, on his 30th birthday, “Lost on a hill after a car crashed”. If there are still punchlines in places, they are diluted in much more detailed dialogues where a genuine interest in pedagogy shines through – with the author exposing the patterns of toxic relationships and all the effects of addiction that go beyond simple murder, He offers valuable help in understanding the pitfalls of healing. Yes, we’ll laugh less and skip a few lengths, but the undrinkable ones can be appreciated, from the perspective of a work spanning fifteen years, as a fascinating testimony to the maturation of a view of oneself.
