Eli Bishop's Reviews > Impossible People: A Completely Average Recovery Story

To save time I'll mostly just agree with what Rob Clough wrote about this very good book, a review that gets why this approach to a recovery memoir (that's also about friendship and New York and other stuff) works so well. The main thing I disagree with Clough about is that I don't think visual character design is a particular weakness here. I've been reading Wertz's comics for a long time, and even though her basic approach to drawing people has stayed pretty simple (which is obviously a choice, since her backgrounds are now way more detailed—I agree with Clough that all the cityscape stuff in this is fantastic), I think there's a lot more subtlety in how she uses those simple faces, an understanding of how much of an effect can be had from a little bit of eye movement or body language. If someone is inexpressive in this, it's because they're supposed to be inexpressive at that point. It might not work with someone else's writing but it's well tuned for this.

What does bother me a little—as in, I feel like it might be a more effective comic if this thing were done differently, and Wertz is totally capable of other approaches, but she just has different tastes than I do—is the occasional ginormous block of text in a nearly-full-page word balloon. I do appreciate the perversity of this kind of anti-craft gesture, like "comics schmomics, I just want to write a monologue here, I could break it up with more pictures or design choices but then it would be different"... and those monologues mostly do work well & are funny, I just can't help shuddering a little when I see that balloon. That's a pretty small amount of the book though.