My enjoyment of Walter Scott’s brilliant Wendy books, in which a millennial arts graduate with a self-destructive streak as wide as the Yukon River pings like a pinball around various Canadian cities, is at this point almost indecent. Truly, I could not enjoy them more if I tried. For one thing, they’re so painfully funny, hovering as they do between slapstick and existential crisis (like everyone else in the world, Wendy is addicted to her mobile, and thanks to this, her life – a bit like her art – is increasingly abstract). For another, they’re kind of valiant. Scott, a practising artist himself, satirises our topsy-turvy culture with a daring you won’t find elsewhere in publishing. Poor old Wendy. Some days, she has only to open her mouth for the identity police to descend, demanding to know her pronouns.
In her latest adventure – this is the fourth book in the series – Wendy’s comic strip, Wanda, is nominated for the coveted National FoodHut Contemporary Art prize. But if stardom now appears at last to be within sight, the path towards it is far from straightforward. Gen z simply will not play nicely with her. “More cis woman nonsense,” reads the first comment below the interview she does (with an overworked intern via Zoom) to mark her shortlisting. “The amount of unchecked privilege this artist flexes, I am literally shaking,” reads the next. With the exception of her longstanding friend, Winona, who’s also made the prize list, her fellow nominees are little short of terrifying. What to say to the much-pierced Zima, “a 3-spirit artist of Indigenous and settler descent known for their seed-mailing collective”? What on earth to make of the forthcoming collaboration of Moonstone (“Zendaya follows me on Instagram”) with Crocs?
