Honest Wertz: class anxiety, gentrification, and bodily space in panels

My favorite part of this graphic novel was the architecture. The spatial drawings were incredibly detailed and unique, and I loved each of the four apartments, especially the first and last. It reminded me how much a space can impress upon the mind a multitude of things, and this story about a woman moving to New York was about just that--a shifting in place that's parallel to a shifting in the mind--and I appreciated Wertz just for that: her honesty.

I felt like these four full-fledge panels depicted so much characterization of Julia when her visual description was stark and simplistic. Her eyes were the most distinct feature of her, most likely revealing that hint of tomfoolery and honesty in Julia. But her apartments--they showed who she was impressively, from the queen-size bed, the detailed rugs, plants, flowers, books, book shelves, and etc. It was interesting to see how much a living space can and does affect one's mindscape, and how his/her working space, in turn, affects one's art. I found a really interesting blog detailing Julia's workspace, and I wanted to share it here:

http://fromyourdesks.com/2010/12/11/julia-wertz/

Back to the blog prompt. I felt like Wertz's conversations, or at least awareness, of her whiteness and privilege and in-between class statuses was interesting, but it really only scratched the surface of these problems. She ran with her white guilt with humor and ease, and at the end of the day, I really just saw them as an openness to understand differing social ills but never, really, dealing with them in any tangible or mental or crucial way. She reads up on news and complains (she calls it 'just hating' when Obama wins), but goes about her life like nothing had change. She mentions her white privilege and then cracks a few jokes about it, mentioning that she is poor, too. To me, this was interesting and I liked that there was more awareness than Gabrielle Bell's "Lucky," but it still struck a cord that sounded too familiar, specially here in the Bay Area. But--again, unlike Bell--she is at least open. She's honest. She's willing to learn about a myriad of things, and maybe, sometimes, that's enough.

My favorite panel was page 148. The iconic image of the Vietnam War haunts me. Here is the real photograph by Eddie Adams:

The image has become iconic for its anti-war message. But, it's an Western impression, as Adams wrote in Time:

“The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. ... What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American people?'"

This makes me think of Julia Wertz's simplistic drawings. They're black and white. Sometimes she uses shading, like the panel in Chicago. She uses slanted lines to express nightfall or darkness. But overall, what did her use of portraying Barack Obama as a political symbol, or Marilyn Monroe as entertainment, or Adams's photograph as war, do or implicate, and what do her simplistic lines implicate? I guess I just wanted more from this memoir. Images speak. They do. Like Adams alluded to. There is an unspoken power to visuality.

I don't know what this memoir left me with. I feel like I'm still questioning it after I put it down.