WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 43Barry grew up in Seattle with emotionally distant
parents, but she was nurtured by her mother’s
extended Filipino family, which she alludes to in the
adventures of Marlys, the desperate but hopeful
eight-year-old heroine of many of her comics. At
Evergreen, a famously liberal college with a loose
curriculum even for the 1970s, her classmates
included Simpsons creator and lifelong pal Matt
Groening, as well as Charles Burns, creator of the
acclaimed graphic novel Black Hole, and Steve Willis,
a lesser-known cartoonist who pioneered the form
known as minicomics.
Barry became associated with alt-comix cartoonists
of the era, such as Groening and Gary Panter, whose
work could be found pinned to the refrigerator door of
every hipster worthy of the label during the ’80s and
’90s. The work of this gang of cartoonists had various
names, she recalls. “First it was punk, then new wave,
and then alternative. Now it’s graphic whatever. I
think we can just call them comics.”
The advent of the internet gradually killed alternative newspapers
such as The Village Voice and The L.A. Reader, where Barry and other
cartoonists’ comic strips thrived. But at that same time, Barry was
branching out into other media with her novels The Good Times Are
Killing Me, about an interracial friendship, and Cruddy, about a youthful
murder spree. She also turned The Good Times Are Killing Me into a suc-
cessful play and became a regular guest on Late Night with David
Letterman.
One! Hundred! Demons!, collected in 2002 from comics originally
serialized on Salon, was another breakthrough; it is a visually explosive
collage of what she called “autobifictionalography”—mostly true tales
of her life mixed with some fiction. But the publisher had no interest in
her follow-up, the book that would become What It Is. “So I didn’t have
a publisher, and I couldn’t find anyone who would touch my work,” she
recalls. “Nobody wanted to print it.”
Luckily, Drawn & Quarterly approached Barry a few years later to
reprint some of her strip work; she mentioned What It Is to them, and
Barry’s literary resurgence began. “I feel like they saved me, because my
career had kind of fallen apart in 2002,” she says.
Since then, most of Barry’s published work has centered on unleashing
creativity. “It turns out that the only thing I can really write about while
I’m teaching is teaching,” she says.
All of Barry’s work is concerned with memory, and the exercises in
Making Comics often call on the subject to find some flotsam floating in
a sea of memory and put it to paper. “A memory changes every time we
think about it,” she writes. “Or it changes depending on why you’re
remembering it. But to me that actually gives you the idea that there is
a core memory—and there isn’t.”
Barry’s teaching has had at least one success story: at her first class in
2012, Ebony Flowers, another writer/educator, was a student. Hot Comb,
Flowers’s graphic memoir about black women and the sociological rami-
fications of how African-American hair is viewed, was published in May
by D&Q, to wide critical acclaim.
When asked about the benefit of learning from her method, Barry can
barely understand why someone would ask such a question. “Imagine if
you found out that you could speak Turkish,” she says. “It’s like asking
what’s the benefit of having a liver!”
Making Comics may be Barry’s last educational text for a while. She’s
just begun a sabbatical and is taking the time to work on a long-delayed
graphic novel. “I need to have at least a year of uninterrupted time to be
able to finish it,” she says. “It’s kind of a chimera. It has too many words
to be a comic and too many pictures to be a novel. I don’t even know
what to call the thing.”
Surely, if anyone can find a word for it, it’s Lynda Barry. ■Cartoonist and educator Lynda Barry
uses comics to help readers unleash
creativity in Making Comics