Lynda Barry
Encyclopedia
Lynda Barry is an American
cartoonist
and author
. One of the most successful non-mainstream American cartoonists, Barry is perhaps best known for her weekly comic strip
Ernie Pook's Comeek. Barry's cartoons often view family life from the perspective of pre-teen girls from the wrong side of the tracks. She has also produced novels. She garnered attention with her book, The Good Times are Killing Me, about an interracial friendship between two young girls. The book was made into a play. Her novel Cruddy (2000) was well received. One! Hundred! Demons! (2002), a graphic novel she terms "Autobiofictionalography," uses collage and a Zen Ink painting exercise to address personal and social topics. What It Is (2008) is a graphic novel that is part memoir, part collage and part workbook in which Barry instructs her readers in methods to open up their own creativity. What It Is won the 2009 Eisner Award
for Best Reality-Based Work.
, Barry moved as a child to Washington. She is one quarter-Filipina
, half Irish (each parent is half Irish), and one quarter Norwegian. She attended Kimball Elementary School on Seattle's Beacon Hill and used some of her experiences there as an inspiration for her work. Barry hints that her childhood was very unhappy. Barry′s parents divorced when she was 12, the same year in which Barry changed the spelling of her name from “Linda” to “Lynda”. By age 16, Barry was working nightly as a janitor at a Seattle hospital while still attending high school. Neither of Barry′s parents attended her graduation.
She went to the same high school as artist Charles Burns
. At The Evergreen State College
in Olympia, Washington
she met fellow cartoonist Matt Groening
, who first published "Ernie Pook's Comeek" in the school paper without her knowledge.
Barry's comics do not strive to depict beauty or demonstrate artistic virtuosity, and in that sense are similar to the works of her peers Matt Groening
(like her, a graduate of The Evergreen State College
), Lloyd Dangle
, and Mark Alan Stamaty
. For all their grubbiness, though, these comics are extremely expressive and evocative.
The visual aspect of her work follows the verbal. She has an extreme facility in reproducing the voices of children and adolescents. While some comics purists complain that her young characters lack elbows, the psychological depth and humanity of those characters calls the reader to take a second look at Barry's drawings. While unconventionally rendered, they carry an undeniable psychic charge legible in the context of her writing.
Barry's early work was rendered with pen and had a distinctly New Wave
, '80s look. She later told The Comics Journal
that she was forced to give up the pen because it was hurting her wrist, turning to a brush which gave her work a much looser, child-like quality.
In her latest books, One! Hundred! Demons! and What It Is, she works with color and collage. These works possess a vitality and visual beauty few would deny. Opening with tens of pages that combine collage with the thesis of the book, What It Is expands the genre of the graphic novel, bringing its bounds closer on one side to collage and on another to the picture book.
Barry has moved her line of comics primarily onto the web.
; The Greatest of Marlys; The Freddie Stories; Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel; One! Hundred! Demons!, a collection of the series published in venues such as Salon.com
; and, most recently, What It Is and Picture This.
Her backlist includes Everything in the World, The Fun House, It's So Magic, Naked Ladies Naked Ladies Naked Ladies (1984), Shake a Tail Feather, Down the Street, Big Ideas (1983), Come Over Come Over, Girls and Boys (1981), and My Perfect Life.
The book ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS! first appeared as a serialized comic on Salon.com
, then as a hardcover book from Sasquatch Books
. According to the book's own introduction, it was produced in emulation of an old Zen painting exercise called "one hundred demons." In this exercise, the practitioner awaits the arrival of demons and then paints them as they arise in the mind. This is done, one supposes, as a form of exorcism
. The demons Barry wrestles with in this book are, among others, regret, abusive relationships, self-consciousness, the prohibition against feeling hate, and her response to the results of the 2000 U.S. presidential elections
.
The book contains an instructional section that encourages readers to take up the brush and follow her example.
Barry is also a big fan of Mary Parker Follett's Creative Experience.
Many of these techniques appear in her book What It Is.
", "The Lesbo Story", and "I Remember Mike". It also contains a variety of home-made answering machine outgoing messages.
proposed to Lynda, who declined. He still notes, whenever he mentions her in print, that she is “Funk Queen of the Galaxy”, in response to her references to him as “Funk Lord of USA”.
For a time, Barry dated public-radio personality Ira Glass
, who moved to Chicago in 1989 to be with her.
Barry is married to Kevin Kawula, a prairie restoration expert. They met each other while she was an artist-in-residence at the Ragdale Foundation and he was land manager of the Lake Forest Open Lands project in Lake Forest, Illinois. They live on a farm near Footville, Wisconsin
.
In 1994, Barry suffered a near-fatal case of dengue fever.
She is a vegetarian and says she came to it slowly.
More recently, she has become an outspoken critic of wind power
.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
cartoonist
Cartoonist
A cartoonist is a person who specializes in drawing cartoons. This work is usually humorous, mainly created for entertainment, political commentary or advertising...
and author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
. One of the most successful non-mainstream American cartoonists, Barry is perhaps best known for her weekly comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
Ernie Pook's Comeek. Barry's cartoons often view family life from the perspective of pre-teen girls from the wrong side of the tracks. She has also produced novels. She garnered attention with her book, The Good Times are Killing Me, about an interracial friendship between two young girls. The book was made into a play. Her novel Cruddy (2000) was well received. One! Hundred! Demons! (2002), a graphic novel she terms "Autobiofictionalography," uses collage and a Zen Ink painting exercise to address personal and social topics. What It Is (2008) is a graphic novel that is part memoir, part collage and part workbook in which Barry instructs her readers in methods to open up their own creativity. What It Is won the 2009 Eisner Award
Eisner Award
The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, commonly shortened to the Eisner Awards, and sometimes referred to as the Oscar Awards of the Comics Industry, are prizes given for creative achievement in American comic books. The Eisner Awards were first conferred in 1988, created in response to the...
for Best Reality-Based Work.
Early life and education
Born in Richland Center, WisconsinRichland Center, Wisconsin
Richland Center is a city in Richland County, Wisconsin, United States, which also serves as the county seat. The population was 5,184 at the 2010 census.-History:Richland Center was founded in 1851 by Ira Sherwin Hazeltine, a native of Andover, Vermont...
, Barry moved as a child to Washington. She is one quarter-Filipina
Filipino people
The Filipino people or Filipinos are an Austronesian ethnic group native to the islands of the Philippines. There are about 92 million Filipinos in the Philippines, and about 11 million living outside the Philippines ....
, half Irish (each parent is half Irish), and one quarter Norwegian. She attended Kimball Elementary School on Seattle's Beacon Hill and used some of her experiences there as an inspiration for her work. Barry hints that her childhood was very unhappy. Barry′s parents divorced when she was 12, the same year in which Barry changed the spelling of her name from “Linda” to “Lynda”. By age 16, Barry was working nightly as a janitor at a Seattle hospital while still attending high school. Neither of Barry′s parents attended her graduation.
She went to the same high school as artist Charles Burns
Charles Burns (cartoonist)
Charles Burns is an American cartoonist, illustrator and film director.-Life:Burns is renowned for his meticulous, high-contrast and creepy artwork and stories. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, painter Susan Moore, and their two daughters Ava and Rae-Rae.His father was an oceanographer for...
. At The Evergreen State College
The Evergreen State College
The Evergreen State College is an accredited public liberal arts college and a member of the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges. It is located in Olympia, Washington, USA. Founded in 1967, Evergreen was formed to be an experimental and non-traditional college...
in Olympia, Washington
Olympia, Washington
Olympia is the capital city of the U.S. state of Washington and the county seat of Thurston County. It was incorporated on January 28, 1859. The population was 46,478 at the 2010 census...
she met fellow cartoonist Matt Groening
Matt Groening
Matthew Abram "Matt" Groening is an American cartoonist, screenwriter, and producer. He is the creator of the comic strip Life in Hell as well as two successful television series, The Simpsons and Futurama....
, who first published "Ernie Pook's Comeek" in the school paper without her knowledge.
Career in comics
After graduating from Evergreen she moved to Seattle. When she was 23, the Chicago Reader picked up her comic strip, enabling her to make a living from her comics alone. She later moved to Chicago, Illinois. While Barry's work is humorous, the undertones are usually serious. It depicts life as harsh but occasionally joyful. Her work addresses themes of intolerance and psychic pain, and at times includes some starkly left-wing political commentary.Barry's comics do not strive to depict beauty or demonstrate artistic virtuosity, and in that sense are similar to the works of her peers Matt Groening
Matt Groening
Matthew Abram "Matt" Groening is an American cartoonist, screenwriter, and producer. He is the creator of the comic strip Life in Hell as well as two successful television series, The Simpsons and Futurama....
(like her, a graduate of The Evergreen State College
The Evergreen State College
The Evergreen State College is an accredited public liberal arts college and a member of the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges. It is located in Olympia, Washington, USA. Founded in 1967, Evergreen was formed to be an experimental and non-traditional college...
), Lloyd Dangle
Lloyd Dangle
Lloyd Dangle is an American writer and visual artist, particularly known as a cartoonist, illustrator, and political satirist...
, and Mark Alan Stamaty
Mark Alan Stamaty
Mark Alan Stamaty is an American cartoonist and children's book writer and illustrator. During the 1980s and 1990s, Stamaty's work appeared regularly in the Village Voice...
. For all their grubbiness, though, these comics are extremely expressive and evocative.
The visual aspect of her work follows the verbal. She has an extreme facility in reproducing the voices of children and adolescents. While some comics purists complain that her young characters lack elbows, the psychological depth and humanity of those characters calls the reader to take a second look at Barry's drawings. While unconventionally rendered, they carry an undeniable psychic charge legible in the context of her writing.
Barry's early work was rendered with pen and had a distinctly New Wave
New Wave music
New Wave is a subgenre of :rock music that emerged in the mid to late 1970s alongside punk rock. The term at first generally was synonymous with punk rock before being considered a genre in its own right that incorporated aspects of electronic and experimental music, mod subculture, disco and 1960s...
, '80s look. She later told The Comics Journal
The Comics Journal
The Comics Journal, often abbreviated TCJ, is an American magazine of news and criticism pertaining to comic books, comic strips and graphic novels...
that she was forced to give up the pen because it was hurting her wrist, turning to a brush which gave her work a much looser, child-like quality.
In her latest books, One! Hundred! Demons! and What It Is, she works with color and collage. These works possess a vitality and visual beauty few would deny. Opening with tens of pages that combine collage with the thesis of the book, What It Is expands the genre of the graphic novel, bringing its bounds closer on one side to collage and on another to the picture book.
Barry has moved her line of comics primarily onto the web.
Books
Barry's books include The Good Times are Killing Me, which was adapted into a musical play that ran off-BroadwayOff-Broadway
Off-Broadway theater is a term for a professional venue in New York City with a seating capacity between 100 and 499, and for a specific production of a play, musical or revue that appears in such a venue, and which adheres to related trade union and other contracts...
; The Greatest of Marlys; The Freddie Stories; Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel; One! Hundred! Demons!, a collection of the series published in venues such as Salon.com
Salon.com
Salon.com, part of Salon Media Group , often just called Salon, is an online liberal magazine, with content updated each weekday. Salon was founded by David Talbot and launched on November 20, 1995. It was the internet's first online-only commercial publication. The magazine focuses on U.S...
; and, most recently, What It Is and Picture This.
Her backlist includes Everything in the World, The Fun House, It's So Magic, Naked Ladies Naked Ladies Naked Ladies (1984), Shake a Tail Feather, Down the Street, Big Ideas (1983), Come Over Come Over, Girls and Boys (1981), and My Perfect Life.
The book ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS! first appeared as a serialized comic on Salon.com
Salon.com
Salon.com, part of Salon Media Group , often just called Salon, is an online liberal magazine, with content updated each weekday. Salon was founded by David Talbot and launched on November 20, 1995. It was the internet's first online-only commercial publication. The magazine focuses on U.S...
, then as a hardcover book from Sasquatch Books
Sasquatch Books
Sasquatch Books is a Seattle-based book publishing company that was founded in 1986. Its books are about the western United States and Canada and cover topics such as nature, travel, gardening, entertainment, and food & wine....
. According to the book's own introduction, it was produced in emulation of an old Zen painting exercise called "one hundred demons." In this exercise, the practitioner awaits the arrival of demons and then paints them as they arise in the mind. This is done, one supposes, as a form of exorcism
Exorcism
Exorcism is the religious practice of evicting demons or other spiritual entities from a person or place which they are believed to have possessed...
. The demons Barry wrestles with in this book are, among others, regret, abusive relationships, self-consciousness, the prohibition against feeling hate, and her response to the results of the 2000 U.S. presidential elections
United States presidential election, 2000
The United States presidential election of 2000 was a contest between Republican candidate George W. Bush, then-governor of Texas and son of former president George H. W. Bush , and Democratic candidate Al Gore, then-Vice President....
.
The book contains an instructional section that encourages readers to take up the brush and follow her example.
Workshop
Barry offers a workshop titled "Writing the Unthinkable" through the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, and The Crossings in Austin, Texas, in which she teaches the process she uses to create all of her work. Barry conducts approximately 15 writing workshops around the country each year. She credits her teacher, Marilyn Frasca at The Evergreen State College, with teaching her these creativity and writing techniques.Barry is also a big fan of Mary Parker Follett's Creative Experience.
Many of these techniques appear in her book What It Is.
Other published work
Lynda Barry's spoken-word CD The Lynda Barry Experience contains a variety of her semi-autobiographical stories, such as "I Got an Accordion", "Good Grief, It's the AswangAswang
An Aswang is a mythical creature in Philippine folklore. The aswang is an inherently evil vampire-like creature and is the subject of a wide variety of myths and stories, the details of which vary greatly...
", "The Lesbo Story", and "I Remember Mike". It also contains a variety of home-made answering machine outgoing messages.
Personal
While they were still in college together, Matt GroeningMatt Groening
Matthew Abram "Matt" Groening is an American cartoonist, screenwriter, and producer. He is the creator of the comic strip Life in Hell as well as two successful television series, The Simpsons and Futurama....
proposed to Lynda, who declined. He still notes, whenever he mentions her in print, that she is “Funk Queen of the Galaxy”, in response to her references to him as “Funk Lord of USA”.
For a time, Barry dated public-radio personality Ira Glass
Ira Glass
Ira Glass is an American public radio personality, and host and producer of the radio and television show This American Life.- Early life :...
, who moved to Chicago in 1989 to be with her.
Barry is married to Kevin Kawula, a prairie restoration expert. They met each other while she was an artist-in-residence at the Ragdale Foundation and he was land manager of the Lake Forest Open Lands project in Lake Forest, Illinois. They live on a farm near Footville, Wisconsin
Footville, Wisconsin
Footville is a village in Rock County, Wisconsin, United States. The population was 788 at the 2000 census.-Geography:Footville is located at ....
.
In 1994, Barry suffered a near-fatal case of dengue fever.
She is a vegetarian and says she came to it slowly.
More recently, she has become an outspoken critic of wind power
Wind power
Wind power is the conversion of wind energy into a useful form of energy, such as using wind turbines to make electricity, windmills for mechanical power, windpumps for water pumping or drainage, or sails to propel ships....
.
Selected publications
- The Lynda Barry Experience (1993) ISBN 1-882543-17-3
- Cruddy (2000) ISBN 068483846X
- The Good Times are Killing Me (2002) ISBN 1-57061-105-X
- What It Is (2008) ISBN 1897299354
- Picture This (2010) ISBN 1897299648
External links
- Salon.com: Lynda Barry archive
- Marlys Magazine An unofficial web page offered on Lynda Barry's behalf
- Presenting at Cusp Conference 2009 (video)