This critique of the art world will have you crying with laughter
In Wendy’s Revenge, Scott’s titular heroine returns with a fresh set of awkward misadventures and messy nights out. When the book opens, aspiring artist Wendy has decided to move to the west coast to clear her head.
She plans on getting some quality time with her collaborator and friend Winona, only to find Winona packing up to leave, having decided to move back in with her mom on the rez. All alone, Wendy endeavours to foster community in Vancouver’s bleak art scene. When her hope and optimism are all used up, she packs her bags for an artist residency in Japan. Wendy then gallery hops and parties around the globe until she stumbles upon the opportunity to unite with former foe Paloma. Together they enact revenge on VVURST, the German publication that once tore her performance art to shreds.
Young artists struggle with mental health issues, they get wasted and hook up with men with gross piercings, and they’re afflicted with an insatiable longing for a stable identity—stability they themselves undermine. Scott’s deceptively simple, inky character drawings evoke millennial culture with such Jungian accuracy that you can’t help but stare and giggle in equal measure. Praised by The New Yorker, Guardian, Globe and Mail, and with an appearance in the Best American Comics anthology, it’s clear why Walter Scott’s Wendy comics have taken critics by storm.

Walter Scott's profile page

Walter Scott is an interdisciplinary artist working in comics, drawing, video, performance, and sculpture. His graphic novel series Wendy chronicles the continuing misadventures of a young artist in a satirical imagining of the contemporary art world. Scott's eponymous party girl has previously been featured in three graphic novels Wendy; Wendy's Revenge and Wendy: Master of Art as well as in Canadian Art; Art in America; New Yorker; The New York Times and MoMA Magazine. Scott was nominated for the Sobey Art Award, considered to be the preeminent fine art award in Canada.

As far as I’m concerned, there can never be too many books about Wendy. This is a character I want to follow for a long, long time.

London Free Press

Like just about all of her contemporaries, so broke and uncertain and desperate to do the right thing, poor Wendy inhabits a particularly precarious world – and thanks to this, even when she’s at her most ridiculous, we’re inclined always to give her a pass.

Rachel Cooke, The Guardian

I thought I regretted not going to art school until a friend introduced me to Walter Scott’s Wendy comic book series... Wendyskewers art school and young adulthood alike via the lens of [its] titular protagonist.

New York Times

Scott manages a rare thing: the sharpness of his satire doesn’t preclude a realistic rendering of personhood, and the seeming flatness opens up, at every turn, to a depth of feeling…. His mastery of his characters’ faces and gestures is also wonderful, his line quick and sure and expressive.

The New Yorker

I am blown away by Walter Scott's Wendy series.

Zadie Smith

Scott uses his powerful female character to puncture holes in all kinds of sacred cows, raising questions about the absurdity of our modern lives, the shallowness of what society often tends to celebrate, and even the inadequacy of education when it comes to dealing with real-world anxieties. Taken together, these books give us valuable insights into what motivates and challenges a generation.

Broken Frontier

It’s hard not to yell out loud while reading Walter Scott’s agonizingly hilarious graphic novels... Even people only fuzzily familiar with the vagaries of contemporary art will recognize the humanity of Wendy, trying and failing, trying again.

The Tyee