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Lynda Barry Faces Her Demons

Cartoonist's 14th Book is a Zen-Comic Masterpiece

Lynda Barry has been drawing books of cartoons for over twenty years, most of them quirky volumes of her right-on reminiscences and glimpses of growing up in '60s-'70s America. It's all there in her work -- love, hate, sex, race, abuse, alcoholism, mental illness -- always delivered with a dose of humor and hopefulness. Born in 1956, Barry began drawing comics in 1977 while attending Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. One of her friends and classmates at the time was Matt Groening of Life in Hell and Simpsons fame).

A longtime favorite in alternative weeklies throughout the U.S. and frequent contributor to magazines like Esquire, Mother Jones, and BARK, Barry's paintings, essays, and NPR commentaries have made her a cultural icon, her words and pictures helping define the angst and uncertainty of getting along in a perilous world. When HarperCollins cleaned house in the mid-90s and turned her into an out-of-print "cult favorite," she was surprised and saddened.

"They just dropped me out of the blue, in fact, worse than out of the blue because it was on the day before I was supposed to turn my next book in (The Freddie Stories, later published by Sasquatch). What made me so sad about it was that I'd gotten a lot of letters from teachers who said they taught The Good Times Are Killing Me in junior high and My Perfect Life was on the ALA's list of books the reluctant reader enjoyed. Because school was such a huge part of my life and because ever since the first grade I had fantasies of having a book I made in the school library it seemed so heartbreaking to have them go out of print right while they were getting picked up in the schools."

"That was a dark time. I was getting dropped from papers all over the country and was getting broker and broker and sadder and sadder. I even made homemade books to sell by mail, with hand-colored covers. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I was going to do for a living."

Enter Sasquatch Books, the Seattle-based publisher who just happened to have an editor on staff who'd gone to high school with Lynda and had followed her career from afar. Sasquatch arranged to re-print The Good Times and also publish The Freddie Stories (which won an IPPY award from this publication).

"I thought it couldn't be the same Gary Luke I went to high school with, but it was. I was really intimidated by this because he was two years older than me and very very cool in those days and I was the opposite of cool in those days. It was weird working with someone you looked up to in the teen years. It's hard to overcome that stuff. I finally had to write him and explain that I was intimidated, and Gary was, naturally, very cool about all of it."

"If it weren't for Sasquatch neither of those books would exist. There is no real money in it for anyone; no one gets rich at a small press but the work is just the way I want it to be and I couldn't ask for more wonderful people to work with. That's huge. I like small presses A LOT! At about the same time another really cool editor at Simon & Schuster became interested in a novel I'd been working on forever (Cruddy), so I was out of the trunk and back in the car again!"

It was a time of redemption for Barry, who says while in junior high she would lurk in the library for an hour after school, looking at art books and reading poetry, waiting for the other kids to go home so she wouldn't get beaten up. In 2001, Sasquatch published The Greatest of Marlys, featuring the life and times of the most beloved character in Barry's nationally syndicated comic strip, "Ernie Pook's Comeek." This oversized book presents the long strange journey through puberty and life of Marlys, her groovy teenage sister Maybonne, and her sensitive and strange little brother Freddie.

The latest release (Sept 2002) is One Hundred Demons, a collection of semi-autobiographical comic strip stories, in which Barry wrestles with some of her own demons in her signature, quirky, irrepressible voice. Funky boyfriends, innocence betrayed, and small cruelties we perpetuate on others are featured in chapters from "Dancing" and "Hate" to "Dogs" and "Magic." As she delves into the delights and sorrows of adolescence, family, identity, and love, the tales are at once hilarious and heartbreaking.

"I did have a ball putting that book together," says Barry. "I worked with TWO! great graphic designers who were like the kind of people you love to travel with, the kind that get you to do things you'd never do otherwise. They really emboldened me in the collage department. We laid the whole thing out on my computer in the attic of my house. Sometimes I was at the computer, sometimes I was kneeling on the floor over scattered pages of the collage introductions with an Elmer's glue bottle in my hand. It took three months to do all the designing and my studio looked like a tipped-over ransacked aquarium when we were finished."

After a dozen volumes of slim paperbacks, this book is a solid, 224-page hardcover tome - the first hardcover and first color book of her career. It is as colorful and sumptuous as it is emotional and soul-baring; a culmination of twenty-five years of comic art.

"I'm not sure I'll ever get a chance to do a full-color hardcover book again, so I wanted to take advantage of this chance and not waste an inch of paper anywhere. That's one thing. The other thing is that the comic strips were already done! They ran first on Salon.com and I had the world's best editor there, Jennifer Sweeney, she just let me make up the entire format, she didn't plant herself in the corner of my mind the way some editors do, they're like this little black squatting shape in the back of your head going 'no, no, no' and 'that will never work' and 'our readers won't understand that' a bad editor scares me into self-editing before I even know what it is I'm writing--- I already have enough of those muddy no-imps in my brain that I have to throw cheese to so it's great to have an editor who helps to vanquish them instead of creating more. She mostly just said, 'Go! Go! Go!' and corrected my spelling and made little suggestions I felt free to either take or leave (which made me want to take them!) I owe her plenty! The book is dedicated to her."

"I do have to say it took a lot of crying, screaming, Mick Jagger-style posturing, James Brown-style begging, arm twisting, smoke-blowing and flaming e-mails to get the publisher to agree to the book looking the way it does. They did not go gently into that good night! And I had to pay for a lot of it myself. But it's done! So to hell with the housework, baby, let's go to Vegas!" Custom cover artwork by L.B.
Independent Publisher July-August 1999.

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Barry has been on a cross-country book signing tour, visiting regional bookseller tradeshows and top independent bookstores. Always known for an uncanny ability to connect emotionally with readers, this tour has been a major Lynda love-fest. At Powell's in Portland, OR, she drew a standing-room-only crowd of about 400, and according to Events Coordinator Kevin Sampsell, Barry was "very gracious with her fans -- really, really personable." Ingrid Nystrom at Stacy's Bookstore in San Francisco says Lynda relates more closely with her fans than any other visiting author. "She makes each person feel like they're something special -- not necessarily perfect, but special in who they are -- and that it's okay to be different."

"Oh man, my friends and fans around the country are SO important," says Barry. "You know when you see singers saying 'I'd like to really thank the fans...' and you go, 'Yeah, right. You're just saying that.' Well I am NOT just saying that! I've gotten to meet so many wonderful people because of doing cartoons, and it's a mind blower to eat French fries and think, 'Cartoons paid for these French fries.' The only other job I've been ever able to hold down was being a janitor at a hospital and I was only able to keep that job because my mom was my boss. It's made everything bad that ever happened in my life turn to WORTH IT!"

Another clue to the worshipful connection between Barry and her fans is the plethora of websites and fanzines devoted to her work. "The guy who does marlysmagazine.com has saved my life! I just met him for the first time, by the way. He was here visiting but he lives in Australia, grew up in Tasmania, he's a tall, cute, very smart looking guy who Marlys would fall in love with in like twelve seconds, and be following him around everywhere with hearts popping out of her head. The Australia thing is cool, but the TASMANIA part is psychedelic. He graduated from the University of Tasmania! I was so nervous to meet him!"

"I've been making pictures ever since I was little and the comic strip is a small part of my visual work. Some people think my drawings are deliberately childish, which is a comment that always confuses me. I'm drawing the best I know how, and I'm certainly not trying to make the work look like a kid did it."

"I work on each book by itself and just marathon until it's finished. It takes a lot of drawing and writing before the thing has its own identity. I guess the work I do before it starts to roll on its own is like practicing. I have to practice every day for things to roll. If I stop for over three days in a row it will take me at least that long to get back into it. I guess it's like playing the piano or dancing or dentistry. A lot of it is just getting your body used to doing the right thing."

"For me, I get the velocity like riding a bicycle that keeps you from falling over, and I try very hard not to think or plan the book unless I am in the process of actually working on it. I try to be as purposeless as possible and to hear the story or let the picture happen. I rarely do any pencil work before hand. What you are seeing or reading is pretty much just as I wrote it or drew it."

What's next for Lynda? "What I want to do the most is write another novel. The plan is to start in late fall. I don't have a publisher lined up or anything, but that's the plan."

What has been her reaction to 9/11? "Hmm. Well. I've been thinking about this a lot, every single day in fact, but I don't have anything too smart to say about any of it besides it's a trainwreck that I can't do anything about besides cry and rant at the television. My dogs are finally used to it. They used to jump up and bark when I really got going. Now they don't even move an earflap."

One last question I had to ask, in light of where some of Lynda's books are displayed in my own home: Is this lush hardcover volume too elegant to place atop the toilet tank?

"I cannot tell a lie," answers Barry. "These stories are a good length for toilet seat meditations."

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