I Saw You... by Julia Wertz

The Web site for the award-winning alternative weekly, the Philadelphia City Paper.

options

I Saw You... by Julia Wertz

POSTED: Thursday, February 12, 2009, 2:30 PM

Drawing from desperation, sketching out a chance for romance

“It's a fine line between 'hopeless romantic' and 'creepy.'“ So reads the final panel of the last comic in Julia Wertz's I Saw You... Comics Inspired by Real-Life Missed Connections (out last week from Three Rivers Press), and it's a good summation of why craigslist.org's Missed Connections section makes for such compelling reading. Any given posting, containing the often vaguely-sketched details of an anonymous encounter, could potentially come across as endearing or unnerving, hopeless or hope-inspiring, sympathetic or simply pathetic. As imagined and fleshed out by some 80 different comic artists, the episodes in this collection (taken from craigslist, print publications and other sources, but all ostensibly “real-life”) run that gamut and then some.

The comix medium is brilliant for presenting variably-interpretable situations with distinct and specific emotional overtones, and the wild array of styles on display here makes for a particularly broad range of inflections, but it still often allows room for varying responses, depending on how charitable or cynical you might be. The note from a 29-year-old male “thanking” his bank teller for a peek down her blouse is straight-up icky subject matter, but Corinne Mucha's simple, charming rendering of the story is so sweet and affable that it's hard not to appreciate, at least, the genuineness and humanity in his humble, fumbling message. Many of the artists use visual details to inject some wry humor and dramatic irony into their situations, like the fact that the English-accented “handsome male” for whom Dan Henrick's w4m swoons is reading “Out in Chicago.”

Some take mundane or cryptic messages merely as imaginative springboards for wholly invented scenarios, as with Shannon O'Leary's tight-assed English professor, pedantically correcting the grammar and usage of a missed connections post, oblivious that he is its subject.

Incidentally, there are relatively few recognizable Philly-area stories here — not surprisingly, San Francisco and New York locales predominate, though there also seems to be a particular abundance of D.C. inclusions — but local artist Josh Frees provides one of the collection's most heart-tugging pieces, which opens with his roughly-drawn protagonist sitting at an R5 station, reading the Inquirer.

Though editor Julia Wertz (of fartparty.org) definitely deserves credit for realizing an ingenious concept (so self-evidently brilliant that, despite her rebuffing an agent's interest in it four times, the book was sold less than a week after she finally relented), the great thing about I Saw You... is how completely, complexly collaborative it is. If feels not so much like the work of an individual or group of individuals as truly a product of its times (and places, especially urban ones.) A disparate assortment of everyday moments, arbitrary intersections with random strangers, captured by ambiguously-intentioned unknowns, and refracted through artistic sensibilities of dozens of writers and drawers, it adds up to a fascinating and multivalent overview of our society — or of certain cross-sections, but it gets broader than you might expect — and the strange things that happen when we find ourselves looking for love, and connection, out there in our weird modern world. Of course, that's only if you choose to see it that way. You might just find that it's good for a chuckle and a warm smile — but sometimes that's all you need.

Posted by K. Ross Hoffman @ 2:30 PM Permalink | Post a comment

Comments (0)

Q&A with SHARI SOLANIS: "The goal isn't pornography"
What we're trying to do this weekend
SEXY TIME Q&A: I've never had an orgasm during sex with a man — and I'm 30!
NOW SEE THIS: Transit cop arrests marijuana activist for alleged disorderly conduct.
Q&A with Tony Goldwyn: "Life is gray, and relationships are, too"
CONCERT REVIEW: Primus (3D & quadraphonic sound) @ The Tower 10/17
ICEPACK ILLUSTRATED: The Archbishop meets the Geator, the Mayor goes suit shopping, Le Bec Fin fin.
SWIMMING HOLES: Some of our favorite places to get wet
ICEPACK ILLUSTRATED: Indian fare rules, Dunder Mifflin lives on, Tom Jones is a god
ICE CUBE: In Memoriam: Joe Tartaglia

About this blog

Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

Follow Critical Mass editors Patrick Rapa and Emily Guendelsberger on Twitter:

@mission2denmark | @emilygee

Search this blog:

Topics:

Blog archives:

May
April
March

February
January

Past Archives: