78 The New York Review
Back to the Drawing Board
Sarah Boxer
Making Comics
by Lynda Barry.
Drawn and Quarterly,
199 pp., $22.95 (paper)
Sitting at home this summer, quaran-
tined with my paper, my pen, and my
anxieties, I dipped into Lynda Barry’s
latest you- can- do- it- too book, Making
Comics. It seemed the perfect tonic—
part doodle, part manual, part ther-
apy. Trouble was, Barry’s exercises
soon awakened a couple of my latent
anxieties—Devwahrphobia (fear of
homework) and Atelodemiourgiopa-
pyrophobia (fear of imperfect creative
activity on paper)—which almost made
me shut the book. But then it dawned
on me that Barry’s genius—yes, she is
certified, having gotten a MacArthur
Fellowship earlier this year—is tightly
bound to her ability to confront her de-
mons and make them get up and dance
for her. Barry has even drawn a book
about them: One! Hundred! Demons!,
based on a sixteenth-century Zen
scroll.
Almost all of Barry’s comics feature
gawky, uncertain youths (mis)handling
the anguish of childhood and early
adulthood. She was one of the first fe-
male cartoonists—decades before Al-
ison Bechdel (Fun Home) or Marjane
Satrapi (Persepolis)—to plumb the ter-
rors and textures of her own childhood
and adolescence, spurring a trend, still
going strong, of autobiographically in-
flected comics. In fact, the impetus for
Barry’s first published work was her
boyfriend’s leaving her for someone
else. “I couldn’t sleep after that, and I
started making comic strips about men
and women,” Barry told The Comics
Journal in 1989. “The men were cactuses
and the women were women, and the
cactuses were trying to convince the
women to go to bed with them, and
the women were constantly thinking it
over but finally deciding it wouldn’t be
a good idea.”
That comic, Ernie Pook’s Comeek—
starring a wispy, hapless daydreamer
named Ernie Pook and a series of
prickly dogs—launched her career.
In 1977 Barry’s friend and fellow stu-
dent at Evergreen State College Matt
Groening (creator of Life in Hell and
The Simpsons) and John Keister, who
worked at the University of Washing-
ton’s newspaper, both started pub-
lishing Ernie Pook’s Comeek in their
respective school papers without tell-
ing Barry. Soon her strip was picked
up by The Chicago Reader, and then by
alternative newspapers all over the US.
It became a cult favorite.
Now Barry has more than a dozen
books to her name, all done in her
inimitable raw, crazed, leave- no-
space- unfilled style. They include
compilations of her strips and two il-
lustrated novels—The Good Times
Are Killing Me (1988), the tale of an
interracial friendship between two girls
(based on her childhood), and Cruddy
(1999), featuring Roberta Rohbeson,
who lives in “the cruddy top bedroom
of a cruddy rental house on a very
cruddy mud road” and goes on a killing
spree with her father, who runs a meat-
packing business. (In Barry’s words,
“It’s, like, you know, it’s a murder fi-
esta, and lots of knives and killing.”)
Most of Barry’s comics are, to use
her own term, “autobifictionalogra-
phy.” Her trademark characters, who
first appeared in her comic strips in the
mid- 1980s—Marlys, Maybonne, Fred-
die, Arna, and Arnold—are fictional
kids. But, as Barry has said, “I picture
it; I see it happening on the streets
where I grew up.” The family lived in
a working- class neighborhood in Seat-
tle; her father, of Irish and Norwegian
descent, was a meat- cutter and her
mother, of Irish and Filipino descent,
was a hospital housekeeper. Barry her-
self worked as a night janitor at a hospi-
tal starting at age sixteen.
Although Barry is still best known
for her comics about gritty, insecure
kids dealing with sadistic parents and
rejection, her work over the last decade
has taken a sharp turn. Barry, who
now teaches at the University of Wis-
consin at Madison, has created four
inspirational- instructional comics in
which she plays the role of uninhibited
professor: What It Is (2008), Picture
This: The Near- Sighted Monkey Book
(2010), Syllabus: Notes from an Acci-
dental Professor (2014), and Making
Comics (2019). They focus on what
she has learned about the drawing
process—“big realizations and small
ones,” as she told The Comics Journal.
“The biggest one was... that the back
of the mind can be relied on to create
natural story order. It’s not something I
have to try to do... it seems to begin to
form itself if I keep moving my hands.”
Barry isn’t the first cartoonist to
make comics about making comicsor drawings about making drawings.
There is Ad Reinhardt’s How to Look;
Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential
Art; Scott McCloud’s Understanding
Comics; Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning:
Philosophy and Practice; and Mark
Newgarden and Paul Karasik’s How
to Read Nancy. But hers are nothing
like those others, which are designed,
for the most part, to teach readers
about what makes comics tick. Eisner’s
book, based on a course he taught at
the School of Visual Arts in New York,
is an analysis of graphic storytelling
techniques—framing, timing, thought
balloons, gesture, the relationship be-
tween words and pictures. McCloud’s
wildly popular instructional volume is
about the peculiar grammar of graphic
storytelling. These books are unlikely
to make anyone who does not already
draw cartoons feel that they could do
so.
Barry’s books could not be more dif-
ferent. They have a democratic, do- it-
yourself feel. For the most part, they
are indifferent to technique and the
nuts and bolts of comics. They don’t
explain thought balloons or timing or
framing. Instead, they are meant to
bring one’s cartooning id to the sur-
face. Barry’s books demand that you,
the reader, come along with her—call-
ing up your own demons, stirring your
own memories, and prodding yourself
to make the kinds of marks only you
can make. They are comics meant to
get you psyched, and they are fun and
funny. They are perfect for our lonely
Covid moment.Making Comics is a book pitched
to adults who want to draw but think
they can’t. It has the look and feel of a
school composition book, the kind with
black- and- white marbleized covers,
and is jam- packed with Barry’s draw-
ings, decorations, monsters, demons,
self- caricatures, lists, ideas, exercises,
tricks, and prompts. It offers tons of
advice: Relax! Keep your pen mov-
ing! Listen to music! Work hard! Don’t
think about your drawings while mak-
ing them. Don’t judge them! And what-
ever you do, don’t throw them away!
Give them to Lynda and she will put
them in her next book.
Barry wants all her students—and
that includes you—to get back to the
time in childhood “when drawing and
writing were not separated,” when they
were conjoined parts of an emotionally
expressive language. Her many aliases
in the book—Professor Sasquatch, Pro-
fessor Peanut, Professor Skeletor, Pro-
fessor Mandrake Root, and Professor
Hot Dog—all want you to find your
own language, your “line- voice,” or,
rather, to make sure it finds you.
Come to think of it, the closest cousin
to Making Comics is not a book about
drawing comics at all but the 1979 clas-
sic by Betty Edwards, Drawing on the
Right Side of the Brain. Both books de-
mand participation. Both have a mes-
sianic spirit. Both demand you silence
certain parts of your judgmental self.
But Edwards’s book, which teaches
you how to draw from life, relies on the
intelligence of the eye; Barry’s, which
teaches you how to draw from your un-
conscious, relies on the intelligence of
the hand. Edwards’s is about “the art
of realistically portraying actual things
seen ‘out there’ in the world.” Barry is
into another kind of “realness”: finding
your expressive core. This requires let-
ting your hand take the lead. She wants
you to rediscover the pictorial fluency
you once had, the kind that “moves up
through your hand and into your head.”
The first step is getting you to not
despise your spontaneous drawings. As
she notes, “There is an energy on the
first day of class—dread and hope com-
bined.” She loves that energy and wants
you to love it too. On page 4 of Mak-
ing Comics Barry displays a drawing
by one of her adult students, Alex. It
shows a figure—I can’t tell whether it’s
a boy or girl, man or woman—standing
aslant on four lines that are meant to
represent two legs. One foot is missing;
one arm has stubby fingers, the other
arm is hidden behind his or her back;
the figure has short curly hair, a tri-
angle nose, and the eyes are irregular
shapes; the irises are scribbled black
circles. It’s probably not the way you
would want your drawings to look. In
fact, it’s a dead ringer for the kinds of
untutored student drawings Edwards
uses as her bad “before” examples.
What does Professor Barry say about
it? “There is a certain kind of drawing
that I adore.... The line is unpracticed,
even a little timid. It’s the line of some-
one who quit drawing a while ago. It’s
impossible to fake.” The goal is to get
beyond the self- loathing that attends
such drawings, to get back to the fear-
lessness one had as a child of nine or
ten. This age, by Barry’s reckoning
(and also by Edwards’s), is when manyA page from Making Comics by Lynda BarryLynda Barry/Drawn and Quarterly