42 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ SEPTEMBER 9, 2019
sometimes abstract scribbles that Barry finds delight
in. “There’s something so fresh and vital about a lot of
them,” she says, “and that uncorrected hand is just
amazing: it’s vibrant with life.”
Barry is fascinated by the fact that people often stop
drawing at age four. “That’s when writing and drawing
usually split,” she says. “But there are two working
languages in human life. One is sort of top of the mind,
what we’re conscious of. The other is this unconscious
stuff that we might not know about or have access to.
The way we access it is usually through this thing we
call ‘the arts.’ Unfortunately, that has gotten removed
from the regular daily experience of human life. What
I’m trying to do is to show that there is a way that they
can come together, and that you can make things in a
way that makes you actually feel alive and present.
That’s what I’m after: feeling alive in the world.”
Indeed it’s hard to imagine someone who comes
across, in conversation at least, as more fully alive than
Barry. Her enthusiasm and energy are like an electrical
storm swirling around her, palpable even as she talks
via Skype from her Wisconsin home. Clearly, she’s her
own best student and has absorbed the lessons of how
to tap into her unconscious. Her imagination is
formidable.By Heidi Macdonald
M
aking art is like a Ouija board for the subconscious,
only without the supernatural. So says cartoonist
and educator Lynda Barry, whose new book Making
Comics, due in November from Drawn & Quarterly,
offers readers methods for learning to tell stories in
pictures while plunging deep into their memory banks to unlock creative
connections.
Barry has had an amazingly varied career. Her weekly comic strip Ernie
Pook’s Comeek was a staple of the alternative newspapers that flourished
in the 1980s and early ’90s. Since then she’s written two acclaimed novels,
made one into a play, and, in her latest incarnation, become an in-demand
educator who helps people discover the creative language of art.
Making Comics is Barry’s latest collage of comics and instruction, drawn
from the course that she teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
art department, where she’s an associate professor. In the book, exercises
are interspersed with views on creativity and storytelling, with illustra-
tions based on the simple but inspiring scrawls of her students. It’s both
exhilarating and challenging as it asks students to draw themselves as
Batman or make a comic about their life in a few hours.
Barry’s previous three books—Syllabus (2014), Picture This (2010), and
What It Is (2008)—all explored various aspects of creativity, mixed with
narratives and some of her best-known characters. Making Comics is more
of an actual course, with instructions and a list of materials; but as in
everything Barry creates, her language and art are studded with haunting
allusions.
For Barry, making art is about more than just appearance. “I guess
that’s sort of my obsession right now: showing people that drawing is
this other thing than just how it looks,” she says. “It’s actually a language,
a way of thinking. It’s almost like having this extra brain. I’m trying get
my students to see past how their drawing looks and see it rather as
communication.”
Barry’s teaching style is inspired by Marilyn Frasca, a teacher she
encountered while attending Oregon’s Evergreen State College in the
1970s. Frasca’s method, Barry says, is based on understanding “the living
thing at the center of anything we call the arts or a good conversation or
deep play.” She adds, “It’s something that’s very, very old and very, very
human. And it seems to make people very happy when they are able to
do it. I mean, even when I show people of any age how you can make
somebody look very angry by pointing the eyebrows down, it’s unbeliev-
able! It’s like giving them a car!”
The art in Making Comics is repurposed from the work of her students—A self-portrait by Barry