Lynda Barry

Lynda Barry (born January 2, 1956, Richland Center, Wisconsin, U.S.) is an American cartoonist and author known for her syndicated weekly comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek (1979–2008) and the graphic novels The Good Times Are Killing Me (1988) and What It Is (2008).

Early life

Barry was born to a father of Irish and Norwegian descent who worked as a butcher and a mother of Irish and Filipino descent who worked as a hospital housekeeper. Barry and her two younger brothers were raised in a racially diverse, working-class neighbourhood in Seattle. Her experiences growing up in Seattle and her parents’ troubled relationship would infuse her later work as a cartoonist. Her parents divorced when she was 12 years old, and she remembers her youth as generally unhappy and difficult. After her parents divorced, she changed the spelling of her first name from Linda to Lynda. By age 16, she was working seven nights a week as a hospital janitor while attending school during the day.

In 1974 she enrolled in Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where she met two individuals who had a profound impact on her life and career. One influential figure was classmate Matt Groening, a cartoonist who would go on to create the iconic animated television series The Simpsons. In a 1993 Washington Post article, Groening recalled that Barry “opened my eyes to the fact that you didn’t have to do the same old thing. Her humour and her insights in college were so original that I thought, ‘She’s going to be an artist; there’s no way to contain this kind of thinking in conventional prose.’ ” The other influential person was Marilyn Frasca, an art and writing professor who would shape Barry’s work with the pivotal question “What is an image?” In a 2010 interview with The Portland Mercury newspaper, Barry remembered: “The big lesson I learned from her was this idea…that the one thing that unites everything we call the arts is this thing that she called the Image. This kind of living thing that’s in the center of a song, a dance, or a piece that you’re writing that you’re interacting with.…It’s kind of like when kids are in deep play, the toy is playing with them and they’re playing with the toy.”

Career

While Barry studied painting with Frasca, she began drawing comics as a way of coping with a relationship breakup. In 1977 Groening, who was the editor of Evergreen State College’s newspaper, and John Keister, editor of the University of Washington Daily newspaper, published her comics, initially without her knowledge, as Ernie Pook’s Comics. Barry’s comic strip, which she renamed Ernie Pook’s Comeek, focused on satirical views of personal relationships and countercultural society. The strip was picked up by the Chicago Reader weekly newspaper in 1979 and was eventually published in 75 alternative newspapers across the United States.

Over time, the stories in Ernie Pook’s Comeek evolved into tales about childhood, focusing on a young girl, Marlys, her elder sister, Maybonne, and the friends and neighbours who were part of their small world. Up until then, most syndicated newspaper comic strips were comedic or adventure-based. Barry used comics to tell stories that had emotional weight, often employing lighthearted moments and situations to serve as foils for weighty real-life issues, such as alcoholism and bullying.

The success of Ernie Pook’s Comeek led Barry to create other works and publish her comics in collections, including Girls and Boys (1981), Big Ideas (1983), and Everything in the World (1986). In 1988 she published the coming-of-age graphic novella The Good Times Are Killing Me, which is set in late-1960s Seattle and focuses on a forbidden friendship between Edna Arkins, who is Caucasian, and Bonna Willis, who is African American. Barry adapted The Good Times Are Killing Me as a theatrical production in 1991. She went on to publish Cruddy (1999), a graphic novel that follows the dark adventures of a teenager on a road trip with her mentally unstable father.

Barry coined the term autobiofictionalography to describe her mélange of factual and fictional storytelling in the collection One! Hundred! Demons! (2002). One! Hundred! Demons! stood out as an example of Barry’s ability to use comics to convey the darker side of her life story. In 2008 the book was selected as required reading for incoming freshmen at Stanford University. Barry began achieving a level of fame unusual for cartoonists, even becoming a frequent guest on the talk show Late Night with David Letterman.

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In the early 2000s, with the rise of the Internet and the subsequent demise of many newspapers, Barry’s outlets for her weekly comic strip began to dry up. She discontinued Ernie Pook’s Comeek in 2008, one year before its 30th anniversary.

Canadian-based graphic arts publisher Drawn & Quarterly approached Barry about reprinting some of her older comic strips, and in 2008 it published her groundbreaking book What It Is, a large-format hardcover collection of stories from her life. What It Is also collected Barry’s musings on the nature of the image, memory, and storytelling. The book won an Eisner Award, one of the most prestigious honours in the comics industry, in 2009. What It Is and its follow-up, Picture This: The Nearsighted Monkey Book (2010), combined graphic memoir with Barry’s encouraging and inclusive instruction on writing and drawing, and they signaled a new direction for her, as a teacher.

Barry continued advocating what she had learned from Frasca in college, exploring the nature of the image and its relationship to memory and storytelling. She began teaching a workshop called “Writing the Unthinkable,” based on her memory-stimulating writing exercises from What It Is. She became an assistant professor of interdisciplinary creativity in the art department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2013, teaching students in various academic majors, not exclusively artists, how to draw comics and use them to tell stories. She wrote and illustrated two books about her university classes, Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (2014) and Making Comics (2019). Making Comics won two Eisner Awards, for best comics-related book and best publication design.

Barry was inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame in 2016. She won a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2019 for inspiring creative engagement through original graphic works and a teaching practice centered on the role of image making in communication. Her work is also featured in the Library of Congress. She is married to Kevin Kawula, the owner of a tree and plant nursery, who contributed artwork to her book Picture This: The Nearsighted Monkey Book.