Walter Scott’s Wendy comics have become a critical sensation, with rave reviews in The New Yorker and The Guardian, and an appearance in the Best American Comics anthology. Learn Wendy’s origin story as Scott hilariously plumbs millennial culture, creative ennui, and the nepotism of the art world’s institutions. Wendy’s an aspiring artist in a party city, and she’s in a rut. She spends her time snorting mdma in gallery bathrooms and watching Nurse Jackie reruns on her laptop while hungover. So when she’s accepted into the prestigious Flojo Island residency, Wendy vows to buckle down and get working. But during the remote, woodsy residency, Wendy and her collaborator/bff Winona put on a performance piece that becomes the centre of an art world controversy, and so Wendy returns to Montreal, getting a job in a coffee shop to make ends meet. With Wendy, Scott launches the Wendyverse, brimming with painfully relatable characters like the back-stabbing frenemy Tina, the name-dropping Paloma, the cool drummer Wendy obsesses over, Jeff, and of course, our treasured Wendy, the hot mess we can’t live without. In blunt, laugh out loud funny vignettes with perfect punchlines, Scott illuminates the opacity of artspeak and the ceaseless anxieties plaguing a largely privileged generation.

At 250, Walter Scott points toward our possible futures. Scott, although we necessarily look on his times as past, of course experienced them as present. His times were times of crisis. Scott, then, has much to share in the experience, narration, anticipation and response to change as a condition of life - a condition our era, with its existential challenges to climate, to public health, to civilization knows only too well. In Scott at 250, major scholars foreground the author as theorist of tomorrow - as the surveyor of the complexities of the present who also gazes, as we do, toward an anxious and hopeful future.

THE EXISTENTIAL DREAD OF MAKING (OR NOT MAKING) ART TAKES CENTER STAGE IN THIS TRENCHANT SATIRE OF MFA CULTURE Wendy is an aspiring contemporary artist whose adventures have taken her to galleries, art openings, and parties in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Toronto. In Wendy, Master of Art, Walter Scott’s sly wit and social commentary zero in on MFA culture as our hero decides to hunker down and complete a master of fine arts at the University of Hell in small-town Ontario. Finally Wendy has space to refine her artistic practice, but in this calm, all of her unresolved insecurities and fears explode at full volume—usually while hungover. What is the post-Jungian object as symbol? Will she ever understand her course reading—or herself? What if she’s just not smart enough? As she develops as an artist and a person, Wendy also finds herself in a teaching position, mentoring a perpetually sobbing grade-grubbing undergrad. Scott’s incisively funny take on art school pretensions isn’t the only focus. Wendy, Master of Art explores the politics of open relationships and polyamoury, performative activism, the precarity of a life in the arts, as well as the complexities of gender identity, sex work, drug use, and more. At its heart, this is a book about the give and take of community - about someone learning how to navigate empathy and boundaries, and to respect herself. It is deeply funny and endlessly relatable as it shows Wendy growing up from Millennial art party girl to successful artist, friend, teacher—and Master of Art.