News Briefs featuring Lynda Barry ( back ) WHAT IT IS and GEORGE SPROTT are comics of the decade says Omnivoracious Updated January 19, 2010 Graphic Novel Friday: Comics of the Decade by Alex Carr After a few years on the wagon during school, I came back to comics in 2000 and returned to my long-boxes just in time to witness a tipping point in the industry. In the 1990s, the top billing generally went to artists working with mainstream superheroes (and occasionally moonlighting as spokesmen for button-fly jeans), but in the past ten years, the industry made a marked shift in its spotlight on talent. This isn't to say that comics artistry has declined in importance--of course, where would comics be without pencils and inks?--but a balance has returned, and writers are once again held in as high of esteem. And this leveling of talent and emphasis allowed for the advancement of more personal storytelling both in and outside of DC and Marvel, producing some of the most literary projects yet in the medium. Add to these works the box office domination of capes and cowls, and all of sudden comics are reviewed on NPR, and no one bats an eye when the medium has a New York Times Bestseller List devoted to it. For our picks for Comics of the Decade, we tried to find a similar balance between indie and mainstream, superheroes and comics lit--and a few cases where it all blended together. We narrowed this list by naming titles that set the bar for the next decade. Black Hole by Charles Burns Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware Promethea by Alan Moore and J.H. Williams III David Boring by Daniel Clowes Fun Home by Alison Bechdel Planetary by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw Y: the Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra, Jose Marzan, et al. New X-Men by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, et al. What It Is by Lynda Barry But not all that is great about comics is necessarily new, and there's no doubt that this decade saw a vast improvement in archival and collected editions. There was so much material that we had to break these objets d'art into their own separate category. Below are our picks for Comics Archives and Anthologies of the Decade: Complete Peanuts (Fantagraphics) Love and Rockets Library (Fantagraphics) DC Comics's Absolute Editions (Sandman, Watchmen, Crisis on Infinite Earths) The Complete Calvin and Hobbes (Andrews McMeel) An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories: Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. (Yale University Press) Creepy and Eerie Archives (Dark Horse) The Best American Comics (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic in One Volume (Cartoon Books) McSweeney's Issue 13 (McSweeney's) MOME (Fantagraphics) And just so I can sleep tonight, here's what the rest of the comics list would have looked like if this were a Top 25: All Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday Blankets by Craig Thompson Clumsy by Jeffrey Brown Criminal by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips Daredevil by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev Eightball #23 by Daniel Clowes Fables by Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, Lan Medina, et al. George Sprott: (1894-1975) by Seth Hellboy by Mike Mignola, et al. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O'Malley Stitches: A Memoir by David Small The Ultimates by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch The Umbrella Academy by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá Ok, that's more like a Top 26, but we had to cut the list somewhere. Here's to another ten years of remarkable comics. Up, up, and away.   click here to read more Featured artists Seth Lynda Barry            Featured products What It Is George Sprott: (1894-1975)   WHAT IT IS inspires exploration in one's creative deep waters says the International Examiner Updated January 5, 2010 Chaos and Order in “What It Is” A book that is neither textbook, graphic, or novel, it demands a personal interpretation from readers. By Thomas R. Brierly A tepid reader who first gazes upon this book may shy away from breaching its pages. The captivating collages of magazine cutouts, mammalian illustrations mounted in magic and glittered fascination of a helpful cephalopod can seem discordant for most, but the celebrated world Lynda Barry has created for the imagination and inspiration is actually most harmonious. It would be a dereliction of doting, which she attempts to reinstate for the sake of one’s imagination we all once probably had as children and few of us have foster in our adulthood. What Is It happens to be the catalyst for minds needing a helping hand. She may hesitantly refer to it as a textbook, not wanting to classify it, being the author’s only description for the book though even describing it as an activity book, which is apt considering the pedagogy in the last third, doesn’t do it justice. Barry does what artists often do is the device of having the audience arrive to their own conclusions. Whether packaged as a textbook or a freeform, visual barrage of considerable interest, one does learn or maybe invite back memories of youth, something safe to the say is what the author intends. As an earnest textbook, these lessons complied here are something of a compendium to Barry’s Writing the Unthinkable, her creative writing class. Though to also state that this is a book only for writers needing inspiration would be wholly short on the understanding what Barry has created. We see the illustrative techniques that Barry uses, she incorporates found objects building structure and stories by overlaying cutouts with her own hand-drawn rendering as the visual aids in a maxim of her’s, pictures can help us find words to help us find images. The phrase being of a snake biting it’s tail conjures the continuous effort to keep the creative juices flowing. “What It Is” isn’t all writing activities for inspiration, there is Barry’s story-telling she injects as the opener. The personal narrative starting with her childhood and weaved within the first two-thirds tells of the author’s vivid imagination coping with barren inspirational life that existed growing up. A childhood experience of parental neglect, as a young girl, she conjured for comfort a method of waiting or more like meditating on inanimate objects to tell her stories. These objects being of toys or characters in magazines or television’s revelry on a child’s imagination speak to the author and by way of her, divulges an intimacy that locks the reader to the narrative. It would be a mistake to turn away from these pages. One might find personal particulars relatable to Barry’s childhood. These particulars present themselves in wonderful illustrative forms and fashion harkening one’s memory to their own experiences. An old song playing in the background or a smell sparking a memory can be turned into her catalyst which she’ll have intertwined elements ready for your own narrative to react to. The small drops dripping from your conscience will be flooded by the innate voice ready to replenish the drought of your riverbeds of creativity. What It Is commands a mouthful of descriptions that may be difficult for a person not familiar with her style, but all the better for it when you take the time to bond with its content. Barry’s has created a wonderful book that balances a narrative that delves in things of the past that can be the fodder for the expulsion of one’s memories for her lessons bringing full circle a fun read and even better, inspiring exploration in one’s creative deep waters. click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS on the Make: Gift Guide 2009. Updated December 14, 2009 Make: Gift Guide 2009: Creativity tools What It Is By Lynda Barry I can't think of a better example of a real-life Blakean character, someone who's cultivated a similar self-modeled creative universe and who sees things from many and unique angles, than contemporary comic artist and memoirist Lynda Barry. This is profoundly evident in her new book, What It Is. This densely collaged work is utterly uncategorizable - so many modes of expression at the same time: a textbook/workbook on inspiring creative writing and cultivating creativity of all kinds, a memoir-comic of Barry's personal struggles with creativity and self-expression as a child, a stunning and challenging piece of collage art, and a sort of extended fever dream on the nature of memory, imagination, play, and creativity. And like William Blake, Barry's message is also about waking up to yourself. It's an extended pep talk on finding the inspiration between your ears and using your senses and memories of life experiences to express yourself in ways that can truly enrich your life. It's hard not to open up this book, poke your head into its dream-like sea of memory-ticklers, imaginative ideas, creative inspiration, and surreal imagery, and not want to put it down to go make something on your own. As if to drive home the beastly, manifold nature of feral creativity, Barry introduces the Magic Cephalopod (aka squid), a sort of creature from your Id who swims through the murky depths of the text, its many appendages constantly in creative motion, gently guiding you to swim off to some grand adventure inside the Mariana Trench of your own creativity. This is Blakean art, and Blakean inspiration, for the 21st century. -- Gareth Branwyn   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   WARE and BARRY participate in discussion panel Updated November 9, 2009 click here to read more Featured artists Chris Ware Lynda Barry            Lynda Barry in the Janesville Gazette Updated August 27, 2009 Alternative cartooning icon enjoys simple life in Footville By CATHERINE IDZERDA ( Contact ) Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2009 FOOTVILLE — First came the stories of childhood. The dusky evenings playing kickball on a quiet suburban street. The stories of being 8 or 9 or 10 years old and trying to understand the mysteries of the universe—the cool girls table in the lunchroom, kind teachers and cruel ones and the unpredictable moods of parents. Then came the stories adulthood—funny, awkward, tender. Finally, other people's stories. Not the big ones—like the time we won the big game right at the buzzer. But those small, framed moments of life: The barber putting a wooden board across the arms of the barber chair for a child to sit on for a haircut. All those stories come from—and are encouraged by—the heart and mind of Lynda Barry. Lynda Barry and her husband, Kevin Kawula, live quietly on a farm near Footville. He restores prairies; she teaches writing, writes and illustrates her own books and, until recently, produced a weekly comic strip. Her artwork isn't easy to describe. It's a mixture of cartoon panel drawings, ink and water color on paper and collage. Even the script in the cartoon panels carries emotional weight. Barry was born in Richland Center in 1956, but her family moved to Washington when she was young. She attended Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where she met Matt Groening of Simpsons' fame. He was the editor of the student newspaper and published her comics. Barry started her career as a cartoonist during the hey day of alterative newspapers. They wanted something sophisticated, edgy and funny, and she obliged with "Ernie Pook's Comeek." The comic told the stories of Maybonne, Marlys and Freddie, preteens struggling with the vicissitudes of childhood. Sometimes, the strips were straight up funny, other times strange, poignant, disconcerting, but most often, they were all of the above—that's the way childhood is. Barry became an artistic celebrity, a leading alternative cartoonist. Collections of "Ernie Pook's" comics were furious sellers. Over the years, however, alternative newspapers began to close, losing ground to the Internet, and Barry had trouble finding outlets for her work. In 2001 she created a series of cartoons called "One! Hundred! Demons!" for Salon.com., and it was later published in book form. The work is kind of artistic devotion developed by Buddhist monks. Its goal was to exorcise personal demons by giving them form on paper. It sounds like a grim exercise—but it's actually about telling stories, and those stories can be really funny, especially when they involve self-involved boyfriends, insane roosters and former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. The first demon in the compilation is "Head Lice." It's a story about your first crush, the uncomfortable life of fifth graders and looking back with chagrin at the relationship you had with that self-absorbed jerk with the ponytail. In that self-absorbed jerk, Barry creates a universal metaphor for every wienie anyone has every dated. And though Mr. Pony Tail doesn't get his comeuppance, he does get head lice, which is almost just as good. The opening panel reads "Although head lice have been with us since Neanderthal days, they seem to have skipped my neighborhood in the '60s. Was it all the TV dinners we ate? Or the candy so loaded with preservatives it never went bad?" Several panels later, we meet her boyfriend, a "somewhat gifted" child from the suburbs who is reading the "Lonely Genius Gazette." "Although I'd been making my living from my writing and art for years, he saw a lot of room for improvement," Barry writes in one panel. His doubts about her fitness to be his partner only seem to increase her love. After an extended stint volunteering in a fifth grade classroom, she catches head lice from the kids. It's a horrible and hilarious moment: "He was frank with me about this feeling that I was not his peer in many ways, now I had to tell him I'd given him head lice." In the cartoon bubbles above their heads, she says, "There's no easy way for me to say this." He says, "You don't have to. This relationship isn't working for me, either." She says, "No, I have head lice." It's funny, but also reminds us of the people we've dated who didn't recognize our worth. Worse, it reminds us that we continued to date them even after we knew the truth. But Barry forgives our frailties by showing us her own: "I wish I could say my revelation made an instant difference, but head lice are much easier to get rid of than bad love. It's been true since Neanderthal times, I'm sure." In 2008, "One! Hundred! Demons!" was one of three books picked as required reading for the Stanford University Class of 2012. At the end of the book, Barry encourages readers to paint their own demons—to tell their stories. In 2008, Barry published "What It Is," an entirely different work with a similar theme: Tell your story. Each page is its own artwork created with ink, watercolor, scraps of text photos and images cut from books, magazine and newspaper and a variety of other items. It's visually complicated and tremendously engaging. The first half of the book is like a graphic novel: With images and words she tells readers about the creative life—where it comes from in childhood, how it disappears and, most importantly, how to get it back. On page 138, a multi-eyed sea monster brandishing a pencil announces, "Welcome to Writing the Unthinkable!" "Useful, distinctive and inexpensive," announces another line of text that looks like it was cut from a pamphlet. What follows are lessons Barry uses in her writing classes. "We notice that when people tell the story of their lives, it often sounds like an obituary," says the cartoon bubble next to the multi-eyed sea monster. "A lot of general information, but almost no images." Those images hold the key to our ability to tell stories. Instead to trying to remember the details of a childhood trip to the Corn Palace, start with the image of the station wagon. Vinyl seats? A big space in the back for a fort made of suitcases? The smell of Aunt Mary's cigarettes? Those kinds of images loosen up our brains, taking us back to the rich world of childhood, and those framed moments in time that, in the end, are the only ones that matter.   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry              WHAT IT IS reviewed by The National Post Updated May 19, 2009 Cartoonist Barry teaches how to tap creativity Weekend Post Published: Saturday, May 09, 2009 What It Is: The Formless Thing Which Gives Things Form by Lynda Barry (Drawn & Quarterly; 208 pp.; $24.95). The American cartoonist and writer's instruction manual for older teens and adults provides, in collage format, strategies to help artists pull ideas from the inside out. This visually stunning book -- part memoir, part guide -- offers readers a glimpse of how Barry herself has tapped into her creativity. Beverley Brenna, reviewing in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, writes: "Not a book to be read sequentially, or even much in one sitting, What It Is provides a great deal of food for thought, but readers who attempt to digest it as a more traditional writing guide will get a headache." As Barry delves into her storied past, she provides recollections that offer insight into her definition of imagination. "When I was little, I played a certain staring game that seemed to have invented itself. I would hold myself as still as I could and make my eyes like a toy's eyes that don't move -- and I would wait. I would wait for the other things in the room to forget about me and begin to move ... I believed there was another world that would show itself to me in the smallest ways." Buy it. click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS reviewed by The Star Phoenix Updated April 30, 2009 Giving form to images too often kept inside Beverley Brenna, Special to The StarPhoenix Published: Saturday, April 25, 2009 American cartoonist and novelist Lynda Barry is the kind of artist who detests self-censorship. Her writing instruction manual for older teens and adults is proof that the muse is varied and rich. What It Is (hardcover, Raincoast Books, $24.95) provides, in collage format, strategies which allow artists to pull ideas from the inside out. On visually stunning pages, Barry offers readers a glimpse of what she herself has pulled out . . . things which most people would be too reserved to share. There is, in some, a suspicion that if we share the artistic process, it will disappear. Not so with Barry, who offers her inner workings for readers to examine. She also sends explicit thanks to teacher Marilyn Frasca at The Evergreen State College, on whose techniques much of this book is based. Not a book to be read sequentially, or even much in one sitting, What It Is provides a great deal of food for thought, but readers who attempt to digest it as a more traditional writing guide will get a headache. Assumptions which Barry contradicts in her book include the notions that artistry requires particular time, space, phase of the moon, or nutrition break. She also quashes the idea that writers must be particularly talented. Instead, she offers, through words and graphics, the philosophy that everyone has an inner writer and artist, and that the requirement for production is simply to engineer its release. She also hinges much of her advice on embracing the life of an image, a recommendation that definitely shows up in her own work. As Barry delves into her storied past, she provides recollections that offer insight into her definition of imagination. "When I was little, I played a certain staring game that seemed to have invented itself. I would hold myself as still as I could and make my eyes like a toy's eyes that don't move -- and I would wait. I would wait for the other things in the room to forget about me and begin to move . . . I believed there was another world that would show itself to me in the smallest ways." She goes on to describe how it is up to us to bring back the illusions, the realities of that other, earlier world. "Where is the past?" she asks, and then answers, "Everywhere, nowhere, somewhere, anywhere, elsewhere, and here." Barry relates, in autobiographical terms, a childhood swelling with doubts and fears, and four books that made it into their house. Four books and a radio became her map and her compass, because although they had TV, "both misery and joy seemed to perish in its light." How do images get inside of us? How do they get out? These are questions that connect to the personal and social demands that make writers want to write. "Why don't you write?" she asks. The answer to this question can be explored in terms of place. Stories have transformational capabilities. "They can't transform your actual situation, but they can transform your experience of it." Yet if we are in a place where we see no reason for writing, or in a place where the reason for writing is overshadowed by a feeling that we can't write, we don't. Barry implies that school is a place that often gives many reasons for writing, and sometimes, at the same time, no reasons for writing. That reasons are contrived may be enough of a detriment to the writing process to make students disinclined. And imagine building a house, where every strike of the hammer caused the foreman to yell, "Too hard! Too soft! Too loud! All wrong!" Some of the pages separate the book from a younger audience, including Barry's very dark exploration of monsters. "Why are monsters in so many old stories?" she queries. Her response is that it's perhaps because we need them when we are children, as a way of helping us come to terms with the monsters we face in real life. "That I had a very gorgon-like mother never occurred to me, and if it had, I would have been lost. Did the (fictional) gorgon help me love my mother? I think she helped me very much." In her artistic work, Barry certainly tackles a great number of monsters. Her characters in the weekly comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek offer views of family life from the perspectives of marginalized groups. In her novel The Good Times are Killing Me, she describes an interracial friendship between two girls, and in Cruddy, she offers a gritty and at times hilarious portrayal of an adolescent girl caught in drug subculture. Straddling the divide between advice for teachers and advice for writers, What it Is provides an inspiration to consider what gives form to the images we keep inside us, the purpose for giving these images voice, and the autobiography of a woman whose artistic life is a memorable tribute to good teachers everywhere. Brenna is a Saskatoon author of six books for young people. Her junior novel The Moon Children is shortlisted for a Silver Birch Award from the Ontario Library Association.   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   LYNDA BARRY interviewed by Radar Redux Updated April 30, 2009 What It Is: Cartoonist Lynda Barry Speaks at Johns Hopkins Tuesday, 21 April 2009 16:54 Brigitte Warner The morning after her talk and slide-show presentation at Johns Hopkins University's Homewood campus, Cartoonist Lynda Barry sat across from me in a small tea shop on the fringes of Charles Village. Her talk and slide-show about her illustrated, genre-bending book What It Is, had shaken the audience with unending laughter. Some slapped knees; others had to wipe away tears from their eyes at her intensely personal, unrelentingly honest humor. Now, I had a quiet moment to talk to her about life in the midwest, Wind Turbines, and the importance of poetry. “I’ve never been a breakfast person. I wouldn’t eat until 2, but now I’m forcing down a raw-food bar in the mornings. Otherwise, my glucose levels would go like this. (She motions a wave with hand). "I'm living with my husband in Footville, Wisconsin and have started learning so much about plants. He's a prairie restoration expert. When I moved to the midwest I hadn't realized how close-minded I was. I mean, I'm liberal with multiple L's. Llllllllliberal. I never thought I'd be such close friends with - be able to love people so much - whose views are so different from mine. My friend invited me to church with her. Most people in Footville are Evangelical. Part of me was expecting the entire service to be about how terrible liberals were, but it wasn't like that at all. "I've gotten very involved with wind turbine advocacy. My friends in the midwest call them 'turbans.' They're 400 feet high when measured to the tip of the blade and newer ones will be 500 feet. They're only required to be 350 steps away from a house, and they're wreaking havoc with a lot of peoples' bodies. That repeated sonic boom is making it hard for people to concentrate or even sleep. Studies are showing how the continual vibration of soft tissue causes it to harden. It's also messing with the inner ear. I don't want to call it Wind Turbine Syndome - there's a researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine named Dr. Nina Pierpont who's published a book on it - but Wind Turbine Syndrome? (laughs) I'm not sure how people would respond to that. "The wind turbines are killing bats too. You'd think these bats -- the only flying mammal -- could outfly wind turbines, but we keep finding dead ones at their bases. It turned out they were flying into sudden drops in air pressure caused by the motion of the blades - the bats were dying of the bends. Their lungs were collapsing. "I never expected to get so involved. I've become such close friends with those in my community. Dr. Forni's work on civility has transformed our meetings with wind turbine companies. His work is so important to me. It was incredible to meet him last night. "I've given myself two more years to pour everything into this, and then I need to focus on my writing again. I don't miss being in New York City or Chicago. Seattle was never a good fit for me. I don't mind not being around people - I mean when there are people I'm like the friendly dog in the neighborhood that has to run up and get to know everyone. It's just the images are always with me no matter where I am. The mentality of artists in New York can be distracting. I need to keep striving and not get caught up in it. You keep thinking as an artist that you'll someday reach a point when you'll graduate and have it figured out. essay_questions"It's like that with faith too. I grew up a strict Roman Catholic and went through a hard-core atheist phase. You think you're going to graduate and come to conclusions about things, but the questions remain. That competition between disbelief and God will always be with you until the final punctuation (laughs). "My depression influences shifts in my work. I've dealt with it since I was a little girl. I think drawing - the creative process - is essential for our mental health. I've been memorizing poetry. Especially Emily Dickinson. There's something about the form that is able to contain an image so concisely. It's been tremendous for my creative process." (This article has been transcribed from notes from the interview) Lynda Barry's book What It Is, published in May 2008, is a richly illustrated work book detailing her creative writing process and is based upon her Writing the Unthinkable workshop. click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is Lynda Barry in The Chicago Tribune Updated April 2, 2009 Being Lynda Barry For the legendary cartoonist, it's been a [very bumpy] road less taken By Christopher Borrelli March 8, 2009 Lynda Barry Cartoonist Lynda Barry photographed while teaching a class on creativity at the Old Town School of Folk Music Sunday, August 24, 2008. (E. Jason Wambsgans, Chicago Tribune / March 8, 2009) "There's a gas leak." That's the first thing Lynda Barry said to me. Then she looked at me sideways, like a shy child, and though it was late summer and uncommonly pleasant, conducive to an outdoors interview, she led me into the living room, where we talked for hours, enveloped by disorienting fumes, which grew in pungency by the minute. She wore a red bandanna, which she wears a lot; a white shirt because she sweats a lot; glasses with lenses so thick they reminded me of an aquarium; and intense red lipstick, because that's her uniform. "The great thing about leaving Chicago for Wisconsin," she said, "is Wisconsin's full of eccentrics." "There's no pressure to be straight. You might think there is. But they know I'm a nut. There are a lot of nuts here, which is good because the thing I can't do is tamp down the way I look. This is as straight as I get. I look crazy. I know I do. Been true since I was a kid! I looked like Alfred E. Newman. Now look at me!" click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry              LYNDA BARRY in the SF Examiner Updated March 31, 2009 Writers and Artists to Follow: Lynda Barry March 30, 1:56 AM · http://www.examiner.com/x-6065-SF-Graphic-Narrative-Examiner~y2009m3d30-Writers-and-Artists-to-Follow-Lynda-Barry I had the supreme pleasure of meeting Lynda Barry a few months ago when she came to speak at The Booksmith, one of my favorite bookshops in San Francisco. She gave a fascinating, untraditional presentation about the importance of play and creativity to the human psyche (a big chunk of which can be found on her Marlys website.) Barry’s latest book, What It Is, largely deals with these themes as well. If play is the key to mental well-being, Lynda’s got to be the sanest person on the planet. I say this because from a visual standpoint, it’s very clear from Barry’s work that her inner child is alive and flourishing. Her use of yellow notebook paper, glitter, sequins and lots of knick-knacks creates a lovely homemade aesthetic with the illusion that you could do it yourself. However, anyone who has actually attempted such an endeavor with said materials knows Barry’s true mastery of her craft. Some people will be turned off to Barry’s arts and craft aesthetic from the get-go and that is their prerogative. However, I would urge those people to take a second look for two main reasons. First of all, Barry’s visuals contain many subtle, thematically crucial details that can easily be missed upon first glance. This is especially true in the ornate collage pages that run rampant throughout One! Hundred! Demons! and What It Is. Secondly, the true genius of Barry’s kindergarten-on-crack visuals is in how aptly they fit the narratives she portrays with them. Like the visuals she evokes, Barry’s storytelling style combines equal parts whimsy, innocence, nostalgia and ghostliness. Acting as perfect thematic complements, her art and text seamlessly integrate so that the resulting narratives are breathtaking and spellbinding. Together they possess the uncanny ability to evoke all the terrible, beautiful and awkward aspects of growing up most of us have so readily forgotten. This brings me to what is perhaps Barry’s absolute best quality as a writer: to genuinely, flawlessly capture the voices of her teenage and child characters—and in doing so, to take her readers back to a time much less familiar than they think. In her comic sequences in works like What It Is, One! Hundred! Demons!and Ernie Pook's Comeek, her economy of language is impressive enough considering the scope of sentiments, ideas and detail she gets across with it. But the fact that she’s constantly accomplishing these feats in the voice of youths is what’s really astonishing. If you’ve ever read Cruddy, her illustrated novel (which, despite certain graphic novels being mislabeled as such, actually is a novel with illustrations), you know her verbal talent for getting into character extends beyond captions and dialogue. Barry defines her writing as autobifictionalography, a term which I think would also aptly apply to the myriad other loose memoirs and pretend-autobiographies on the shelves today. A number of recurring motifs, themes and stylistic elements can be found throughout her work, including teenage angst and rebellion, cruel or abusive parents, self-reflexivity, personal vices, socioeconomic status, ageism, and creativity. Lynda Barry is quite prolific, so I’m just going to focus on a few of my personal favorites in my recommendations. Her newest book, What It Is, is the perfect read for any creative type who sometime finds him or herself confronted by writer’s block or similar frustrations. It contains many helpful exercises to stimulate the creative self and thus keep the rest of the self sane. As much as I enjoy What It Is, I would say that One! Hundred! Demons! is actually the quintessential Lynda Barry work. Here she is in top from as a storyteller, using a unique Zen Ink painting exercise to exorcise the various metaphorical demons that plague her semi-autobiographical protagonist. These include her mother, regret, self-consciousness, drugs, and Ira Glass. How could that not make for a great read? If you’ve never read her work before, I’d recommend you start with one of those and then move on to the other, followed by some collections of her strips such as The Greatest! Of! Marlys! or The Freddie Stories and then maybe to her novel Cruddy. If you find yourself desperate for more Lynda Barry after devouring all of these and reading all her work on Salon.com, you can check out this huge list of all the work she's done and then maybe buy some of her original drawings on ebay. click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS reviewed by The Graphic Novel Reporter Updated March 13, 2009 What It Is written by Lynda Barry reviewed by John Hogan March 2, 2009 GRAPHIC NOVEL REPORTER This is not just an exciting time to be reading comics and graphic novels. It’s also a time when many people want to write and draw them too. With so many options available to share their creations (and several success stories that have come about from self-publishing startups), people who want to do more than read have begun to explore their creative sides. While the results of those efforts have been wildly diverse (for every great breakthrough, there have been more than a few clunkers), the excitement in the industry has created a small but valuable niches: the how-to guide. Two recent books have set the standard for guides to creating graphic-novels. One, Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, from the team of Jessica Abel and Matt Madden (click here for the Bookreporter interview of Jessica and Matt), gave a thorough, explicit, and delightfully well-rounded look at how to create a graphic story from start to finish. Do we really need another one after that? The answer: If it’s a book as wildly inventive as Lynda Barry’s What It Is, then yes indeed. Barry is a respected creator often noted for creating rich subtext and resonating meaning that transcend her dense imagery; read between (and through) her lines and you find a powerful world of haunting memory. Here, though, she’s come to show you how it’s done. From the most basic—where do those crazy ideas to come from?—to the abstract—when an unexpected memory comes calling, who answers?—she delivers a jarring experience in the art of writing. She goes for the jugular of the whole creative process and lets it all come pouring out. It’s not a quick and easy experiment. But it’s hardly long and arduous either. It’s, of all things, actually fun. Barry’s creative process is childlike, full of wonderment, hard to pin down, and gloriously all over the place. To that end, What It Is works not just as a jumpstart for creating graphic novels but for all writing. (A quick side note: Considering how well What It Is and Drawing Words and Writing Pictures complement each other, it’s fitting that the books’ three creators have recently teamed up as editors for the upcoming Houghton Mifflin release The Best American Comics 2008). A cheeky tagline at the bottom of the book’s cover promises it’s “Dramatically illustrated with more than color pictures.” And so it is. Barry throws pictures, images, and words at you at a breakneck pace, challenging you to write and think, relentlessly forcing you to get at the heart of what makes you tick, creatively. So what is it, exactly? Ah, that’s the big question. Barry knows she can’t answer the question decisively for everyone. But she can take you to the brink of your own wellspring of inspiration and show you how to drink from it in a new and unexpected way.   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   WHAT IT IS reviewed in MAKE Magazine! Updated March 4, 2009 click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS on Pop Candy's Best of list Updated February 27, 2009 POP CANDY Best of 2008   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   WHAT IT IS in The Contra Costa Times Updated February 27, 2009 Best of 2008: Graphic novels Randy Myers 12/22/2008 ContraCosta Times 2. "What It Is," by Lynda Barry (Drawn and Quarterly, $24.95, 209 pages) At a time when buyouts, lay-offs and bailouts have become catch phrases of the year, it's comforting that Lynda Barry is here to extend an encouraging hand for us to tap into our creative powers . "What It Is" is a delightful how-to hybrid — a memoir, an activity book, and a motivational speech. Hope is still alive, and one place you can find it flourishing is within the folds of this lovely book. click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS in The Boston Globe Updated February 27, 2009 Season's Readings Boston Globe 28 November 2008 The Boston Globe Lynda Barry's "What It Is" (Drawn & Quarterly) is equal parts cartoon memoir, collage album, scrapbook, and Zen roadmap. Written and drawn in a chaotic but riveting style, it offers itself as a guide to creative self-ignition. Barry is an iconoclastic cartoonist best known for her unsentimental evocations of childhood dreams and terrors. Based on her writing seminars around the country, the full- color book uses her drawings, musings, and writing exercises to guide readers toward artistic focus and expressive freedom. Betty Edwards's "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" has long been a staple of art classes; Barry's book might be subtitled, "Drawing All Over the Brain." Not for neatniks or the timid.   Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   WHAT IT IS chosen for Globe and Mail's "Best of" list Updated February 27, 2009 WHAT IT IS By Lynda Barry Nathalie Atkinson December 10, 2008 GLOBE AND MAIL Barry's autobiographical, instructional and inspirational graphic work is both an intensely personal memoir of her creative life and a writing guide. In more than 200 pages of dense, personal material, Barry examines the nature of imagination and memory, combines comics and collage, and blurs the distinction between drawing and handwriting. Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS picked as one of the year's best by School Library Journal Updated February 27, 2009 'School Library Journal' Picks Best Adult GNs For High School Students 12/02/2008 The School Library Journal has included eight graphic novels in its list of 30 adult titles that “will appeal to high school readers and provide a bridge into the vast world of adult publishing.” The books, which were all published between September of 2007 and November of 2008, were chosen by SLJ’s Adult Books for High School Students Committee made up of librarians from public and school libraries who work with teens in a variety of rural, urban, and suburban settings across the U.S. and Canada. The eight graphic novels on the list include Lewis Trondheim’s pirate saga Bourbon Island published by First Second, Lynda Barry’s What It Is from Drawn & Quarterly, Andrew Helfer’s Ronald Reagan: A Biography from Hill and Wang, Akira Hiramoto’s Me and the Devil Blues from Del Rey, Mat Johnson’s Incognegro and G. Willow Wilson’s Cairo from DC’s Vertigo, Marc-Antoine Mathieu’s The Museum Vaults: Excerpts From the Journal of an Expert published by NBM ComicsLit, and Howard Zinn and Paul Buhle’s A People’s History of the American Empire from Henry Holt. Hiromoto’s haunting biography of blues legend Robert Johnson was the only manga title on the list, which definitely leans toward the literary side of the graphic novel spectrum, which is understandable given the educational emphasis of the SLJ.   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   Kelly Link recommends OJINGOGO and WHAT IT IS on Salon.com Updated December 10, 2008 Books we love Some of our favorite authors weigh in on the best reads of 2008. Compiled by Abby Margulies Dec. 9, 2008 | Yesterday we revealed our favorite books of 2008. Today we've asked a selection of our favorite writers to chime in and tell us what books got them excited this year. Kelly Link, author of "Pretty Monsters" " ...And because I can never just recommend one book, I'll also note that this was a terrific year for graphic novels. I loved the new "Scott Pilgrim" by Bryan Lee O'Malley, Matt Forsythe's beautifully produced, weird and wordless "Ojingogo," and Lynda Barry's "What It Is." click here to read more Featured artists Lynda Barry Matt Forsythe            Featured products What It Is Ojingogo WHAT IT IS reviewed inthe OC Weekly! Updated December 9, 2008 Reviewer Bill Kohlhaase does a rare thing in comics criticism - he provides a lengthy, in-depth review of just ONE book. No one or two sentence plot summation group review of a zillion unrelated titles here. Kohlhaase says: "What It Is (The Formless Thing Which Gives Things Form) is a beautiful and unsettling book that serves as a primer on artistic creation and self-knowledge. Barry digs into her twisted psyche to pass on what she’s learned, and in the process, she has created a dreamy art book."   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   LYNDA BARRY interview by The Walrus Updated November 28, 2008 A Conversation with Lynda Barry by Sean Rogers November 17th, 2008 WALRUS Lynda Barry visited Toronto recently to speak at a book festival, and to teach her class on creative writing, “Writing the Unthinkable.” In her lively festival talks — which felt more like happenings than your typical button-down, staid author’s reading — she presented excerpts from her latest book, What It Is, asked the audience to shout their first phone numbers out loud, and sang “You Are My Sunshine” with her mouth closed. She also bemoaned her sometime status as a publishing industry “gateway chick” — she says she’s like the last girl guys go out with before they realise they’re gay, only in her case it’s publishers realising they want to “date” something completely different than Lynda Barry books. That’s changing now that she’s settled with Drawn and Quarterly, who plan to collect all of Barry’s longrunning, seminal alternative comic strip, Ernie Pook’s Comeek, and who recently published What It Is to tremendous acclaim. A memoir-cum-workbook, What It Is incorporates collage, cartooning, and longhand writing in an effort to explain and disseminate the author’s creative process—which, loosely, focuses on one word, image, or memory to begin with, then spirals out from there. Lynda Barry was gracious enough to browse through a copy of What It Is with me, all the while speaking about her craft, about the creative state of mind, and about the collage material she used from her neighbour’s mother, Doris Mitchell—as well as a little bit about Family Circus. This is the first part of that conversation. * * * What It Is goes back to all the different modes you’ve worked in, in terms of the different techniques like pen and ink and watercolour and so on, but to me it feels connected to One Hundred Demons. Oh, it absolutely is. It’s the sister book. There’s that autobiographical aspect, and in the prologue to that book you actually talk about the process of putting those demons to paper. The method that I used to write One Hundred Demons was to put a bunch of nouns and -ing words, gerunds, in a paper bag and pull them out. It was all based on that method I learned from my teacher, Marilyn Frasca. Right after One Hundred Demons came out my next plan was to do this book, but the publisher came out and admitted he was gay and he didn’t want to do another book with me [laughs]. But my plan all along was to do this, to try to do an instruction book, because it really is like following a donut recipe, and it was really fun. In What It Is I have a word list that I encourage people to just xerox and cut up. So that’s how I did One Hundred Demons. It wasn’t anything that I sat around and went, “I should think about smell, and come up with a story about smell.” No, I happened to pull that word out. Sometimes you pull a word out and you’ll just go, Nooooo! but I really stuck to my vow that I would do it no matter what. The one that sticks in my mind from One Hundred Demons is “Resilience.” It’s a heavy strip. And you know what’s interesting about that strip is, I went to speak at a high school in Washington DC, this inner city school, and these students had done their own One Hundred Demons, they had done their own books, so when I walked in I saw their books, and saw them, and started crying, and they hadn’t ever had an author before so the last thing they expected was that she’d walk in and go wauuuuugh! So they were frightened [laughs]. But it turned out that they had all this stuff prepared, and they asked if I would read a strip and I said, “Which one would you like me to read?” and that was the one they picked. Blew my mind, because it’s a weird thing for comics—not so much anymore, for comics to be sad or have so much trouble in them. When you were publishing that, it was a webcomic at that point. Webcomics, or the ones that I know of anyway, don’t really move into that territory very often. Yeah, or the ones that do we probably don’t even know about. It’s so funny to me because it’s like saying, we know music has the capacity to be incredibly sad and moving, and happy and all kinds of stuff, but it’d be like having music, something as big as that, stuck with only happy songs for a long time. I mean, happy songs are cool, but it’s the sad ones we use and play over and over and over again while we’re crying over somebody who broke our heart. I found that What It Is kind of connects back to your very early work, also. You seem to be working with strict ideas, or what you’re thinking about, rather than any kind of extended narrative. It makes me think of, say, Big Ideas. Do you think that you’re returning to that, or is that something that’s always been present in what you do? You know, it’s funny, because those early books of mine, I was a real know-it-all and I was in my twenties and I didn’t know anything. But that’s the beauty of being in your twenties and being a teenager, where you’re just like, “Well, I have this shit figured out and I know why people don’t get along.” But actually, in What It Is, I tried for the longest time to find any way other than using myself as a narrator and making the memoir part of it. I tried to think of any way I could, but that one’s my whole relationship with making things and writing. I tried really hard not to have to use myself as a narrator because One Hundred Demons really is the only close to real autobiography—and I say close to real, not quite real—but I couldn’t find any other way to tell this story. I haven’t thought on that at all, but I think you’re absolutely right on. It’s an instruction book and that’s what I was way into. Matt Groening, the Simpsons guy, he and I have been friends since we were 19, and our comics strips kind of evolved together, and we would call each other up on the phone and give each other shit all the time while we were working. But we started calling each other, because he did a lot of instructive—do you know the early Life in Hell stuff? I know a few of the chapbooks that were published. That stuff’s just amazing, like Work Is Hell and Love Is Hell. But there was some reggae guy called the Explainer, and that’s what we called ourselves, The Explainers—but I couldn’t write such things now. Well, no, take it back, I just did! “With my hand on my heart, I wouldn’t do it, except for when I do.” But you think it’s coming from a different place than it was in your twenties. Well, yeah, I do, because I think what I’m really trying to do here is get people itchy to make something. That’s my goal. And it’s not so much about relationships or, I don’t know—I mean, first of all, I never read my work. Like, people talk to me about the novel Cruddy, and I can’t break it to them that— You can’t remember what happens. No, I’ve never read it. I read it while I was writing it, but I’ve never read it. But Drawn and Quarterly’s going to reissue everything, and as I’m gathering comics I’ll see some of the stuff and I’ll know how old I was when I wrote it and [laughs] it works just fine, but it’s not my experience now. I’m definitely not the same kind of person that I was then. I wanted to ask about the collage technique that you’re using here. It kind of goes from these strips— Yeah, so these are all on legal paper. How did that come to be? I know you did the prologue to One Hundred Demons on yellow legal paper. Well, part of it is that I have this real fear—I still have art paper that I bought when I was in my twenties and I still don’t feel good enough to use yet. But I found that whenever I was around paper that was very inexpensive or already in the garbage I felt completely uninhibited to use it. I keep a journal like these back pages right here, so the way that I set up my desktop is, I’ll have a comic strip on my left side, and I’ll be working on it, and when the comic strip dries up—because it always does; everything you do, the wheels fall off a little bit—instead of sitting there and going, “Oh, what comes next,” I would just move my pen over and start scribbling stuff. And while I was drawing sometimes I would hear a sentence in my head, like, “Take a ouija board attitude toward your brush.” So there’s January 11th, and most of these were done while I was doing What It Is. There was something about the legal paper—I felt freed by it. I also thought, if other people see it on legal paper, then they’ll be like, “Legal paper is good enough! You don’t have to go to the art supply store and buy some special paper!” So I liked it and I’ve been keeping a journal this way for years and years and years. I have thousands of those pages. In fact I sent a whole slew of them in to Drawn and Quarterly and just let [D&Q publisher] Chris Oliveros pick which ones he wanted. To use them in the reprint series, or— No, for this. There were so many, there were hundreds and hundreds, and I was too close to them. I couldn’t pick, so he’s the one that picked—and did a good job, I thought, editing those back pages. And there’s my Little Women, [ which was turned down by Penguin because they thought it] wasn’t Lynda Barry enough. These are really cute little dolls, though. Well, you know what, Penguin didn’t turn down Frank Miller when he turned in his Gravity’s Rainbow cover [laughter]. I know—it’s really a bummer. But you know, I think part of it is, the guy who was the art director hadn’t seen One Hundred Demons and wasn’t familiar with the newer collage stuff, so to him it really looked like a violent departure and he didn’t want to be the petri dish for whatever I was trying to cook up [laughter]. But for these other collage pages, you move from this kind of narrative strip to these collages which are very singular and do connect to each other, but they’re very much their own page and composed as a page. Actually, the collages came first. OK, that’s what I was wondering. And they came before I found Drawn and Quarterly. But until I found Drawn and Quarterly I just knew that nobody wanted to publish my work—it was over. And I just thought, “I still want to make this book that I’ve been wanting to make since Sasquatch dropped me,” so I thought, “Just make it. Just start.” And again I had that idea about doing this book about writing, but the idea of writing about writing, doing a book that was about writing with writing in it, was something that was so different than my class. I wanted to give some kind of visual equivalent to the class that I teach, so I just started messing around and making collages—and actually there are many, many more than are in this book. And while I would work I would just hear these little things, like, “What would be different if there were no monster stories? Anything?” And that’s all I’d have to have and then I could start messing around. So once I had the collages and I knew I wanted to do a workbook, then I was thinking, “The collages and the workbook aren’t quite enough. I need to map out the story of how we have this ability to have images, then all of us lose it—very few people don’t, but almost all of us lose it—then the trick is to get it back again.” Which is also the basic story of every fairy tale: the kingdom was once in good shape, and then it went to hell, then we have to figure out a way to get it back. So I think that’s a pretty classic human experience. That’s what I was wondering about the collages, whether it was you going back and revisiting everything and making this article for meditation or something like that, or whether it was actually you thinking through your process. My whole philosophy is just, make a mess and do it every day and then eventually you’ll be able to figure out something from it. So the collages just sort of started. And also this lady in the back, Doris Mitchell, this is all her. This is from one of her students. You’ve probably seen all the little pieces—I was working on the collages and then, she passed. I was wondering how you approached using these kids’ artwork, because it seems like you’re really sharing them. All of them were in little pieces. There was hardly any whole sheet of paper, because all the paper that she had saved was just piled on top of each other, and had been wet and dried and had mice running through it, and so really sometimes there was only this much left. And then I would also just find like this. This kind of stuff where there’s somebody who’s doing math, doing math, and then all of a sudden it’s, I love you I love I love you, Patsy Patsy Patsy. That stuff would just blow my mind because, to me, it illustrated what thinking’s like. Here I’m trying to work on this problem and there’s, Patsy Patsy Patsy. The really shaky handwriting, is that— That’s Doris’s. That’s amazing. Just the marks on the paper. She also was somebody who kept every little thing and she liked to package certain things. For instance, I found this plastic bag that was full of twist-ties and around it, it had a twist-tie that had a tag on it that said, “twist-ties” [laughter]. I have that hanging on my wall. She was obsessive that way. And this is her shirt, she made this. I have not only her scraps, but I have all her clothes. I always say, it’s the curse of one hoarder put on another hoarder. I can’t throw away anything. She also kept all her school pictures, but they’re all ones that had water on them. So sometimes you’ll only be able to see somebody’s eye, but on the back there’ll be their names. So I’ve gotten to know all these people—it’s really cool. And the photos that you’ve covered over, are they from her collection as well? No, a lot of them would have been from really old National Geographics, and then I just used gel pencil. I used every source that I could think of. Any piece of paper is fair game. Weirdly, I stopped sweeping my floor while I was doing this because as soon as I saw a scrap on the floor, I don’t know why, that was much more likely to be used. So I realised, every time I swept the floor I was sweeping away possibilities. So I had the dirtiest floor for nine months, but I wouldn’t sweep it. It’s like the ultimate hoarder mentality. It is! They’ve done MRI stuff on hoarders—on people who have that thing where they can’t throw away anything. They do these MRIs to see what part of the brain is getting blood flow, and they had this woman who had a really big hoarding problem. She had coupons that had expired ten years earlier and what they wanted to do was measure her blood flow as they put the coupon that had expired ten years earlier through a shredder. And it was the blood flow exactly as if she herself had been attacked. My husband is also a hoarder—we love garbage—and this wish to transform garbage into something valuable, it’s sort of a feeling about yourself as well. The hoarding thing is really interesting. I do think it’s a defence. Also, my mom was very neat, so I know as long as there’s stuff on the floor she’s nowhere around [laughs]. If things are a mess, that woman is not ever around. So I made my ring of trash to keep her away. And then I used a lot of glitter—it’s hard to… It does show up. At the beginning I was noticing it a bit more than when I actually got into the book. The most ridiculous thing I did is, there’s a whole bunch of glow-in-the-dark paint—not that anyone in this world could ever see it, but there was something really fun for me about doing it. And then turning off the lights to go back up to the house, and then the thing would go, Woooooooo! I had one last thing that I wanted to ask you about the collages. It seems to me like it’s a different kind of using your hands than the kind that you talk about in the rest of the book, than the doodling and the alphabet-writing. I’m just wondering if that’s accessing the same thought process that goes into the image-making that you’re talking about. I think it’s the exact same neighbourhood. All you’re doing is practicing a physical activity with a state of mind—there was something about this way of working that allowed accidents to happen more than if I’m writing. That’s the part that was so valuable about it. Chip Kidd talked about it today—when something would just fall when you set it down, when you went to answer the phone, and the way it was sitting was just right. That helped me a lot. And while I’m moving stuff around, that’s when I hear in my head a sentence like this. None of this is written when I’m not actually working on it. For me that was a really important thing, because I feel like if something is occurring to you as you’re doing it, it sounds kind of flaky, but it might transfer a little. Also I like that you can look at this and go, “I could do this.” That’s like, “Yes, you can! Mission accomplished!” That’s got to be your goal, teaching, too. Oh, yeah. I really do think that the health of the world, the future of the world, depends on people connecting. The future of the world depends on people feeling mentally healthy and stable and having the will to live. This is one of the natural ways that human beings have always done it, is the arts. It’s such a new word, compared to what it’s describing, because people were making marks and singing and dancing and there were story arcs long before there was anybody to call it a story arc. I think it’s also the best thing that you can have, is a feeling that life is worth living. You don’t have to be happy—you just have to not want to kill yourself or others [laughter]. That’s good—that’s a bare minimum. No, seriously! From there, you’ve got your vowels and you can throw in the consonants you want. I wanted to talk a bit more about the doodling or the constant hand movement that you’re talking about. I think you’ve read Ivan Brunetti’s little book on cartooning… That is the best book ever written, as far as I’m concerned. The Philosophy and Practice—that one? That is the best book I’ve ever read on cartooning, and it is so generous. It’s like, anybody can do this. That book is so good. Yeah, I think part of that is his business on the doodle as the basic form of cartooning. He promotes it as the ideal form of cartooning because it’s simple and it’s not thought-through—it’s from your brain to the paper. And the reason you do it is because it’s giving you something. It’s making you able to stand a bad meeting. It’s making you able to stand hanging on line until the electric company comes back. That’s what we do if we have a pen. I saw you do it a little bit on the back of that page, am I right? Yeah, just circling. I always spot them. I don’t take those things for granted anymore. When I see them I’m just like, “It’s alive!” I wanted to ask if you think that the doodling, the constant hand movement, if that maybe makes cartooning closer to the unconscious than any other art form, just because that’s the one that has the most maker’s mark to it? But if you think of movement—that’s your hand on the page, but then if you think of a dancer, that’s full-on movement. Or even a musician—the main thing for a musician to get to the end of the song is to stay in motion until the end of the song. Right. So it’s not necessarily the hand on the paper. No, it’s physical activity with a state of mind for a sustained, not necessarily too long, period of time. There was some guitarist who says that when things are going really well in his band he feels like he doesn’t even know what’s driving his fingers and there are times when he could just take his hand off and the guitar would keep playing itself. That’s absolutely how it feels when you have characters. Once you have characters and you kind of know them it does feel like the strips write themselves—although you have to haul the thousand tons of brick with your pen. So do Marlys and Fred Milton act on their own? Beyond the valley of on their own. Fred Milton has gotten me fired from so many papers. He doesn’t care. I’ve been fired from so many papers because of that dog. So, because I have characters and I’m used to having them now, I even do the bag thing with Marlys or Arna—Arna’s been the narrator of the strip for the last year or so. But I try my best not to have a single idea when I sit down to do my strip, and then I’ll pull that word out and do a list of ten things. If it’s Marlys doing it, I know what her memories will be, and Arna. But it’s not even like I’m thinking—it’s like when you’re a kid and you had a car. You didn’t have to go, “I think what I’ll do now is, I’ll do this and then it will swerve and go off the cliff and I will feel anxiety and then I’ll catch it and feel release—let’s go!” There’s some other thing that goes on that’s very quick. It’s like getting a joke: getting a joke is way past the thinking part of it. So what is that? How do we do that? I find it to be fascinating. Or why we can read a novel and not have to keep every little part in mind. After a certain point it just rolls. That means we have that power. And we’re just not using it, maybe. Or we’re shamed out of using it, for sure. I said that thing in my talk about finding out that What It Is made the science fiction list [on an online bookseller]. It does seem like there is some kind of science fiction plot to get everyone to stop doing all the stuff that would make us feel better and then instead start consuming. [Pause.] But that’s fucking bullshit [laughter]. Well, it is, you know. I mean, frankly, it is. That’s one thing about getting older: when you’re younger you can come up with a concept and it kind of fits and you think, “Heeeeey.” You don’t even care if it’s true or not—it just made somebody go, “Yeeeeeah!” Now, I know, I just made that up and it’s bullshit. It does fit, but it’s like drawing a key. Yeah, it looks like a key, but it’s not going to start your car [laughter]. You were talking earlier about dancers and musicians. The whole book is about finding images and getting access to images. Do you think that they are accessing images in different ways, or is it the same kind of image with them as it is with your writing students? I think the thing that Marilyn, my teacher, called an image, is an arbitrary word. “Image,” for most people, in the beginning, makes them think of a visual image or a memory of something. But I feel like what she meant by it was that living part that’s in the container of the song. So maybe “an experience” is more accurate. So in the container of the song, in the container of the dance, in the container of the good reciprocal conversation with a stranger which we have every once in a while and it’s fucking miraculous—at a certain point in the conversation, that person’s going to get off the train, or you are. There’s something about that timeframe of, our train ride’s going to last for 27 minutes and that’s the container. I don’t know how else to describe it except as this living thing that’s activated either by reading it or watching it or making it, and it’s contained in the thing we call the arts, or what kids call play. I just keep trying to figure out the exact metaphor for this other space that human beings have made and that we all can talk about. We can all talk about Batman or how Superman, no matter how strong he is, his outfit is sooooooooo baaaaaaaaad. No matter what he does—I don’t care how he fixes his hair, I just can’t get past his outfit. But I can talk to you about that. So where is Superman? He’s in a kind of space that we all share, yeah. In computers they call it a virtual world. But this is an entirely other workspace or living space and even the word “imagination” doesn’t capture it. It really is the place where most stuff happens, but I know that I haven’t gotten my mind around it yet. I’m just missing about three feet of my mind to be able to get around the whole thing. I keep going back to one of the early Star Treks—when Whoopi Goldberg was on and they would play that three-dimensional chess. Do you remember that? Yeah. See, that’s another thing! That’s in the image world. What I’m talking about doesn’t really exist. There was no actual game, but for me—terrestrially, we’re here in the world, and then there’s this other place where we’re able to go. But I can tell I don’t quite have the way to describe it yet. But I’m interested in it. All literature, all art takes place in that spot. Even Ronald McDonald is there! It’s an equal opportunity spot. Well, I guess anything that we see on TV is. Advertisers really know how to take advantage of it. They really understand mixing images with words and music. I’m 52 and I love having stuff that I still chase after like I did when I was 22 trying to find the most obscure Ramones tune. That’s what I like about being a writer or being whatever it is I am. When I was a kid, the main thing I wanted to be was Dr. Seuss. I didn’t know what he was, but that’s what I wanted to be. I like that this stuff is stuff you can do right to the end—to your last little gnarly wrinkled gasp. And Doris’s little shaky handwriting. Talking about these places that everybody goes to that aren’t necessarily real, I wanted to ask you about Bil Keane. My beloved. Because that’s what Family Circus is, to me, is being able to follow around that dotted line. Now why is that so fascinating? I mean, it’s so engaging. You want to do it when you see it—you don’t just go, “Oh, pssh.” And it makes that space so much more real, just to have that little line going through it. One of the things about Family Circus that I did in the intro to Best American Comics—Bil was so kind, Bil and Jeff, to give me permission to print them without the captions. To see them without that, it’s powerful. And once you take the captions away, you realise: this is a world I’ve seen just through a porthole over and over. But I feel like I’ve moved through it. And then when Jeff’s mom died—mommy died this year, Thelma—and when I found out I was like, ah! wauuuugh! And I don’t know this woman—it’s just lines on paper. So we have a capacity to make another world, and it had to have come along with all the other things like our thumbs and our brains, and then at what point did that become an elective? That’s really interesting to me. I guess we just take it for granted. One of the writers I heard the other day said he didn’t think there was any such thing as artistic genius, which is exactly how I feel. And I do feel that art is as integral to human experience as our autonomic nervous system. I think I said, it’s like saying somebody has a talent for saliva production. You’re a genius at producing saliva! Or man, can you grow hair! “He’s brilliant!” But I do think the converse is true. I do think people can be talked out of it, or shocked out of it. It’s amazing to me how frightened people are of making their own art. Terrified. click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is LYNDA BARRY event mentioned by NBC Updated November 28, 2008 D'oh! Matt Groening Chats with Lynda Barry By ALYSIA GRAY PAINTER Tue, Nov 18, 2008 NBC We want to be perpetually 10 years old, like Bart Simpson. Or have a tower of blue hair. Can Matt help us? We'll find out, at the Hammer Museum. "Can't wait to see that new show with the sexy gal who works at that one place," we said to our friend. "It's already canned," said the friend. "Gone." Oy. Shows are leaving the tube faster than we can TiVo them, except "The Simpsons," which has now been on for 87 years, debuting, in an odd twist, several decades before the invention of television. Matt Groening, the genial, beard-y father of TV's most famous cartoon family, must know something about creating art that can make a profit and not be marched out to the woodshed after exactly two airings. Lynda Barry, the creator of "Ernie Pook's Comeek" has kept a comic thriving in the alternative newspaper world for several years running. That lady is tough stuff for sure. And funny. And deep. What will be the theme of their conversation at the Hammer? What are their secrets to making hilarious, dark stuff that they get paid for? Do they have an insights for the rest of us? Or will they chat about other matters altogether, like balloons, extra-pulp orange juice and naps? We don't care. These two gifted artist/writers could sit on the stage and have a "don't blink" contest and we'd sign up to watch. Tuesday, November 18, 7PM The Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles 310-443-7000   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   LYNDA BARRY interviewed by LA City Beat Updated November 28, 2008 Lynda Barry ‘Comeek’ creator talks about the ocean in the back of your mind, and filthy, filthy wind energy By Gabrielle Paluch November 15, 2008 LOS ANGELES CITY BEAT Lynda Barry, author of the beloved “Ernie Pook’s Comeek” and a new book, What It Is (Drawn & Quarterly), has been a voice for pained, weird little girls for 30 years. This Tuesday, she takes time away from her farm in Wisconsin, where she’s been battling industrial wind-power developers, to lecture at the Hammer alongside Simpsons and “Life Is Hell” creator Matt Groening, who first published her work in the college paper. L.A. CityBeat: Why write a book about writing books, or a book meant to inspire people to write? What gives you the energy and desire to draw stories out of other people? Lynda Barry: It all goes back to my teacher Marilyn Frasca, who I studied with at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, in the late 1970s. She asked a question, “What is an image?” I think it’s the thing that is contained by anything adults call the arts and kids call playing. And I would even call it a living thing. An image isn’t alive in the way you and I are alive, but it’s certainly not dead either. It’s something in-between that exists in this odd place I call the image world. It’s where Scrooge and Batman are, and Emily Dickinson’s poems, and also the thing that a toy contains for the kid who is attached to it. I don’t think human beings can exist without this image world, I think it has an absolute biological function, and I think that function is related to, among other things, mental health. So though What It Is uses writing to get us to that image world, I think it applies to all of imaginative activity. I didn’t want to write a book full of writing about writing. I wanted to make a book that would make people feel an itch to make something. To write, or glue paper onto paper, or to just cut things out of magazines – any of these things will get you into the image world in the way a smell will instantly transport you back to your auntie’s kitchen. I think of this kind of physical activity as being a small boat we can row into the ocean of the back of our minds. It’s different than thinking. It requires moving around an object with a particular state of mind – and a pen and paper qualify. The stories people come up with in my workshops just floor me. They are so vibrant and alive that they make me feel vibrant and alive. I always feel fantastic after teaching a workshop. I always feel renewed and excited about going on in the world. That’s what I mean by a biological function. I feel better about being alive in a world full of horrible troubles. Can you tell us more about the work you do to save the environment, one sustainable energy source at a time? The work I’m doing the most of to save the environment is getting the word out about the serious downsides of industrial scale wind turbines. If the goal of using renewable energy resources is to reduce CO2 emissions, industrial-scale wind turbines don’t do this. Because they need fossil-fuel burning power plants to function, and because those power plants are never powered up or down in response to the wind being there or not, the same amount of CO2 is going into the air. This conclusion was reached by the National Academy of Sciences and also a Norwegian study on Danish wind power. You will get more electricity to sell from wind turbines, but no real reduction in current CO2 levels. It’s the only renewable resource that keeps us completely dependent on power companies, fossil fuels (usually coal), and the grid. It’s the only one that doesn’t cause a loss of customers for the power companies. All the other renewable energy choices cause customer loss. Also, industrial wind is used as the justification for more and bigger transmission lines and use of eminent domain. Bigger and more transmission lines allow greater use of fossil-fueled power plants. So industrial- scale wind energy is just another way to say “MORE! MORE! MORE!” Most people don’t realize that unless the wind is blowing at a certain speed – at least 10 miles an hour – the turbines can use more energy than they produce. Most people don’t understand how much electricity it takes to run a machine that is 40 to 50 stories tall. Most people never even ask how the power is getting to and from the turbine. They don’t know about the thousands of miles of cables. Apart from all this, consider the impact on flying creatures. Turbines are placed in migration corridors because that’s where the wind is. It’s maddening to me that wind developers are getting away with this, siting them in wildlife refuges, national parks, and other protected areas. By the way, on-site wind turbines of the smaller scale are great. Small, on-site power generation is the best alternative, and it’s the one the power companies are going to fight the hardest against. My favorite renewable resource option is manure digesters – for both animal and human manure. It’s the only renewable energy option that actually cleans up other environmental problems as it creates electricity. It’s also the least sexy of the choices and one no one wants to talk about. How do you feel about the trend in comics to do personal narratives, basically resulting in illustrated therapy, and what this says about the position of the “hero” in contemporary culture? Well, therapy has always been about telling stories, hasn’t it? I think the use of stories to undo and untangle knots inside of people has always been around. I’m not sure we could exist without it. People may think that comics that contain personal narratives are something like therapy, but I think it’s the other way around. Therapy is something like comics that contain personal narratives. Usually the “hero” is the one who somehow restores life to a dead zone, even if he has to die doing it. For me that dead zone is a feeling that life is not worth living. When a story can turn that feeling around, it becomes a lot more than entertainment or amusement. It’s a life-saver. If you weren’t allowed to make comics anymore, what would you do? I’d still make comics. click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS mentioned by Drawn! Updated November 28, 2008 Lynda Barry: What It Is November 20th, 2008 DRAWN.COM The other week I had the immense pleasure of seeing Lynda Barry speak in Toronto. She was in town promoting her book What It Is, part autobiographical comic, part how-to guide for blocked creatives. The It in the title of the book is the idea of an image–a memory, a place, a feeling–and it is what forms the basis of Barry’s methods for storytelling. Rather than racking one’s brain for the perfect story idea, she shows her readers how to let the stories, the images, reveal themselves through word association exercises, and quick, easy writing assignments. It’s a book that teaches adults how to play and daydream again, and it’s full of Barry’s humour and matter-of-factness. More than I recommend the book, though, I recommend seeing Lynda in person. I’ve never met anyone bursting with so much creative energy and joyful inspiration. Her workshop tour, Writing the Unthinkable (Myspace link), finds itself in Chicago next — Jan 3rd and 4th — and it could be just what you need if you think you don’t have any stories in you to tell.   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   WHAT IT IS reviewed by The Toronto Star Updated November 26, 2008 A book you can judge by its cover Artist Lynda Barry urges us to be creative for fun and sanity DAPHNE GORDON Oct 26, 2008 TORONTO STAR So what is What It Is? As author and illustrator of this genre-bending book, Lynda Barry ought to know. But the best she can do is describe her latest book as "my crazy little dropped plate of spaghetti." A sloppily delicious and nutritious blend of autobiography, illustration, creativity guide and cultural commentary, the book recently hit shelves, and Barry is in town to talk about it at the International Festival of Authors. Yesterday, she read from the book, and today at 1 p.m. in the Harbourfront Centre's Brigantine Room, she and famed book designer Chip Kidd will discuss how you can, in fact, judge a book by its cover. The cover of What It Is hints at the complexity of the content inside. Collages, drawings, comic strips, creativity exercises and blank space for doodling create a dense visual experience. "People expect it to be a book that you can read front to back," says Barry, 52, the legendary comic artist most known for her syndicated strip Ernie Pook's Comeek and author of several illustrated books. "But it's not really like that." This plate of spaghetti is meant to be savoured in small bites. Because slowing down is part of the creative process, and that's really what Barry is talking about here. Each page of What It Is meditates on the origins of creativity, and many feature exercises to help wannabe artists get into the groove. "People long to do it," Barry says. "They want to write or paint or draw or dance. Human beings are born with the ability to tell stories. But something happens at the age of 10 or 11 and they stop doing it. That's when you start to go a little crazy." Arguing that creativity is the best tonic for mental health, Barry says we've become a culture of consumers rather than creators. "We're watching these singing and dancing shows instead of doing it. There's something compelling about it, but it's like trying to get your nutrition from gummi bears." After nearly 20 years of supporting herself as an artist and writer, Barry knows a little about making stuff. And she has been teaching others how to do it, too, at creativity workshops across North America over the past 10 years. Sharing a creative method she adopted at 19 as a student at Evergreen State College in Washington, she encourages participants to make stuff not for the sake of earning a living or getting famous, but rather for the sake of fun and sanity. "We know that play and mental health are connected," she says, but at some point, we stop playing. It starts about the time recess is taken away and art becomes an elective. If unfettered creativity leads to happiness, Barry seems an ideal, if eccentric, role model. Though her comics are known for having a dark side, What It Is suggests contentment and engagement are possible in spite of life's disappointments. "This is the happiest I've ever been, when I was working on this book," says Barry, "because it's such a strange book, and I could let it be whatever it wanted to be." click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS reviewed by Bookreporter.com Updated November 26, 2008 WHAT IT IS Lynda Barry Reviewed by John Hogan October 6, 2008 BOOKREPORTER.COM This is not just an exciting time to be reading comics and graphic novels. It’s also a time when many people want to write and draw them, too. With so many options available to share their creations (and several success stories that have come about from self-publishing startups), people who want to do more than read have begun to explore their creative sides. While the results of those efforts have been wildly diverse (for every great breakthrough, there have been more than a few clunkers), the excitement in the industry has created a small but valuable niche: the how-to guide. Two recent books have set the standard for guides to creating graphic novels. One, DRAWING WORDS AND WRITING PICTURES, from the team of Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, gave a thorough, explicit and delightfully well-rounded look at how to create a graphic story from start to finish. Do we really need another one after that? The answer: If it’s a book as wildly inventive as Lynda Barry’s WHAT IT IS, then yes indeed. Barry is a respected creator often noted for creating rich subtext and resonating meaning that transcend her dense imagery; read between (and through) her lines and you find a powerful world of haunting memory. Here, though, she’s come to show you how it’s done. From the most basic (where do those crazy ideas come from?) to the abstract (when an unexpected memory comes calling, who answers?), she delivers a jarring experience in the art of writing. She goes for the jugular of the whole creative process and lets it all come pouring out. It’s not a quick and easy experiment. But it’s hardly long and arduous either. It’s, of all things, actually fun. Barry’s creative process is childlike, full of wonderment, hard to pin down and gloriously all over the place. To that end, it works not just as a jumpstart for creating graphic novels but for all writing. (A quick side note: Considering how well WHAT IT IS and DRAWING WORDS AND WRITING PICTURES complement each other, it’s fitting that the books’ three creators have recently teamed up as editors for the upcoming Houghton Mifflin release THE BEST AMERICAN COMICS 2008.) A cheeky tagline at the bottom of the book’s cover promises that it’s “Dramatically illustrated with more than color pictures.” And so it is. Barry throws pictures, images and words at you at a breakneck pace, challenging you to write and think, relentlessly forcing you to get at the heart of what makes you tick, creatively. So what is it, exactly? Ah, that’s the big question. Barry knows she can’t answer the question decisively for everyone. But she can take you to the brink of your own wellspring of inspiration and show you how to drink from it in a new and unexpected way.   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   WHAT IT IS, BURMA CHRONICLES, GENTLEMAN JIM and BERLIN 2 reviewed by Globe and Mail Updated November 26, 2008 What It Is by Barry, Lynda (May 2008 | Out of Stock) 978-1-897299-35-7 | Drawn & Quarterly | RAI Cloth | Price: $24.95 The Burma Chronicles by Delisle, Guy 978-1-897299-50-0 | Drawn & Quarterly | RAI Cloth | Price: $19.95 Berlin City Of Smoke, Book Two by Lutes, Jason 978-1-897299-53-1 | Drawn & Quarterly | RAI Paperback | Price: $19.95 Gentleman Jim by Briggs, Raymond (Jun 2008) 978-1-897299-36-4 | Drawn & Quarterly | RAI Cloth | Price: $14.95 Drawing from life The Globe And Mail Saturday, October 4, 2008 Page: D10 Section: Book Review Byline: Nathalie Atkinson Source: Martin Levin The best books are often hard to classify. Lynda Barry's autobiographical, instructional and inspirational graphic novel What It Is (Drawn & Quarterly, 210 pages, $24.95) is one of these, because it's both an intensely personal memoir of Barry's creative life and a writing guide. Oh, and it's a DIY creative activity kit too. So where to shelve it? The newly minted graphica section? Art? Psychology? Activity books? Memoir? Although the most autobiographical of Barry's books, What It Is is also a creative text presented in a very original way, so it most naturally belongs next to Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. Regardless of where it's shelved, What It Is is unique. It starts with Barry herself, whose creative life has stalled. Working through and diagnosing her malaise and writer's block, she becomes introspective. "The thing I call 'my mind' seems to be kind of like a landlord that doesn't really know its tenants, " she begins. Her path as an artist began in childhood and Barry establishes a connection between the importance of imaginative childhood play and art and creativity in adulthood; both, she argues, are essential to well-being. Art and embellishment fill page after page of yellow legal paper, divided into three distinct sections identified by the colour of page borders. Over these 200 pages of dense, personal material, Barry examines the nature of imagination and memory, combines comics and collage and blurs the distinction between drawing and handwriting. It's much the same way someone might doodle while talking on the phone. Barry thinks most adults continue to do this long after they've given up on art, "because it helps us maintain a certain patient state of mind and there is a part of us which has never forgotten this ... a place where one line can still follow another without a plan." Stamps and postmarks appear both as decoration and reminders of the passage of time when Barry considers memory and its use in creativity. Here, she poses many questions: "Is a dream autobiography or fiction?" "What makes us able to imagine something?" and the two supreme questions that haunt every artist, whatever the medium: Is this good? Does it suck? The middle section, called Activity Book, is filled with the exercises Barry uses in her popular creativity workshops: helping others mine their creativity functions as an inspiration to her own. In the final section, Barry provides the essentials of a DIY writing kit, such as words to cut out and tips on materials (a three-ring binder and loose-leaf paper - all in Barry's unique baroque collage style. Text and image interplay in many ways: Text lies inside an image (unlike a word balloon) and strips of found typography add texture. Ad slogans, sentence fragments, lists of names and random words become a sort of poetry, interspersed with product advertisements clipped from old newspapers and magazines and even glitter. Occasionally, Barry uses vintage primer page for practising children's letters as her sketch paper, superimposing her recurring menagerie of fish, squid, dogs and monkey sketches or cutout pictures of birds. All these images decorate Barry's text rather than merely illustrate it, like an illuminated manuscript. It's an extraordinary peek into the mind of the artist. … After visits to Pyongyang and Shenzhen, Guy Delisle shifts his autobiographical travelogue shtick with Burma Chronicles (Drawn & Quarterly, 264 pages, $19.95). By now a habitué of culture shock, Delisle is chocked by nothing. His talent is noticing the peculiar mundane details of whatever latest totalitarian milieu (this time Rangoon, thanks to his partner Nadège's year- long posting with Médecins sans Frontières). This time, their toddler son Louis is in tow and Delisle is a househusband, which enables him to add a few new notes to his repertoire of Seinfeldian nothingness, as when he pushes Louis's stroller up to armed guards at a barricade ("a white-skinned baby is a big draw here") to get close to the world's most famous political prisoner, Aung San Suu Kyi, a dissident under house arrest since 1988 and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Delisle's observations are at once banal and absurd: Currency is in denominations of 15, 45 and 90 kyats, a "nice way to drive people nuts or make them math wizards." At the supermarket, Nescafé's ubiquitous grinning cow is "the real face of globalization," and he points out the irony of a grocery store playing the songs of anorexic fatale Karen Carpenter in constant loop for ambience. Nathalie Atkinson is a Toronto freelance journalist who very much wishes she could draw. *** A cluster of comix BERLIN City of Smoke: Book Two By Jason Lutes, Drawn & Quarterly, 210 pages, $19.95 This long-anticipated sequel to Berlin: City of Stone (2001) recreates the Volatile Weimar Berlin of 1929, a world of Nazis and communists, Jews and gentiles. Lutes handles the sense of menace with delicacy and force. GENTLEMAN JIM By Raymond Briggs, Drawn & Quarterly, 32 pages, $14.95 A welcome reissue of a 1980 work by the wonderful author of Ethel & Ernest marks the first appearance of the Bloggs family, stand-ins for Briggs's own parents. Cartoonist Seth adds an illuminating introduction. Martin Levin © 2008 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved. Featured artists Guy Delisle Lynda Barry Raymond Briggs            Featured products What It Is Gentleman Jim Burma Chronicles WHAT IT IS reviewed by OC Weekly Updated September 11, 2008 CARTOONIST LYNDA BARRY'S HOW-TO BOOK 'WHAT IT IS' MAKES BEING AN ARTIST EASY BY BILL KOHLHAASE OC WEEKLY September 04, 2008 You, Too, Can Be Creative! Cartoonist Lynda Barry’s how-to makes being an artist easy Why is it that most classes in creativity stifle the very thing they seek to nurture? Somehow, becoming conscious of the creative process—in the way it’s usually taught—extinguishes creativity. You remember those grade-school lessons in which what you drew or what you wrote was really an attempt at gaining approval from your teachers and peers, which had little to do with actually making art? When was it that we learned, if we did, to color outside the lines? Fred Milton Lynda Barry Cartoonist Lynda Barry, she of Ernie Pook’s Comeek fame, has pursued these question and come up with a method of making art that renders it a simple process. In distilled form, here it is: Keep moving. Don’t stop drawing or writing. If you’re suddenly stuck on the sentence displayed on your computer screen, switch to the note pad kept handy on your desk. Don’t let the flow stop. You’ll end up with puddles. Write what you know. And what you don’t. What It Is (The Formless Thing Which Gives Things Form) is a beautiful and unsettling book that serves as a primer on artistic creation and self-knowledge. Barry digs into her twisted psyche to pass on what she’s learned, and in the process, she has created a dreamy art book. A collage of symbols and ideas, the book less resembles her Ernie Pook strip, in which she explores the thumb-sucking angst of pre-adult life, than her weirdly reflective One! Hundred! Demons! in its assemblage and technique. Part memoir, part sketch book, part strategy for unlocking the mystery of image, it’s Barry’s least narrative work and, in a sense, her most ambitious. A riddle about visual puzzles, it stirs both the conscious and subconscious mind. It’s a sort of Zen koan that poses questions—lots of questions—for which there are no simple answers. Confused? That’s just the state Barry wants you to start from. The inside cover of the book is filled with jottings—some on Post-It notes, some on file cards—that aren’t exactly revelatory. “Living Bacon” and “Freak out after” share space with “No narrative memories until language” and “Images require some sort of representation in the world outside of us.” Once inside, this sort of random thinking begins to firm up, leaving (mostly) clear lines of thought. Certain images reoccur. Birds, cats, monkeys and ghost-like creatures with hollow eyes drift through the pages. Deep-sea images, complete with toothy fish, stand in for the subconscious, and a cephalopod (yes, an octopus) serves as a sort of Beatrice into the world of creation. In her quest to capture the creative process (you just know she hates the word “process”), Barry pushes innocence. Childhood serves as a vehicle to revelation. “At the center of everything we call ‘the arts’ and children call ‘play’ is something which seems somehow alive,” she writes early on. “Adults are scared to do this,” she pens next to an owl, barely escaping triviality. Questions pile upon questions, and the search for answers seems confused and hopeless. What keeps us moving through this hodgepodge are the personal narratives—her early discovery of Medusa figures—and the strangeness of her pages that blend a variety of scripts and images into thoughtful mosaics. In other words, this is as pretty and entrancing a picture book as you’ll find, something to be explored under the spell of psychedelics as well as studied when perfectly straight. Many of the narrative pages appear to be done on lined yellow legal paper, giving space to her words and a structured frame for her drawing. Detailed pencil sketches from her “copying” days are contrasted with colorful constructions of flowers, candles, phrases and peanut shells. It all starts making sense past the halfway point of the book, after the story of how she became a cartoonist and was able to generate “that strange floating feeling of being there and not being there,” in which “one line led to another and a story slowly formed under my hands.” Barry sets us up with somewhat absurd activities as to “writing the unthinkable” and giving images “living form.” Suddenly, all the questions posed find value, if not answers, as she provides ways to bring out the details in the images we create. One facet left unexplored—revisions—seems foreign to her philosophy. (One of the cover-page notes sums up her thinking: “Why we don’t read it over? The person reading it over is not the same person writing it.”) Surprisingly, this weird and wonderful book ends up being as practical as it is dream-like. But you might like it just for its visual appeal. What It Is (The Formless Thing Which Gives Things Form) is a beautiful and unsettling book that serves as a primer on artistic creation and self-knowledge. Barry digs into her twisted psyche to pass on what she’s learned, and in the process, she has created a dreamy art book. A collage of symbols and ideas, the book less resembles her Ernie Pook strip, in which she explores the thumb-sucking angst of pre-adult life, than her weirdly reflective One! Hundred! Demons! in its assemblage and technique. Part memoir, part sketch book, part strategy for unlocking the mystery of image, it’s Barry’s least narrative work and, in a sense, her most ambitious. A riddle about visual puzzles, it stirs both the conscious and subconscious mind. It’s a sort of Zen koan that poses questions—lots of questions—for which there are no simple answers. Fred Milton Lynda Barry Confused? That’s just the state Barry wants you to start from. The inside cover of the book is filled with jottings—some on Post-It notes, some on file cards—that aren’t exactly revelatory. “Living Bacon” and “Freak out after” share space with “No narrative memories until language” and “Images require some sort of representation in the world outside of us.” Once inside, this sort of random thinking begins to firm up, leaving (mostly) clear lines of thought. Certain images reoccur. Birds, cats, monkeys and ghost-like creatures with hollow eyes drift through the pages. Deep-sea images, complete with toothy fish, stand in for the subconscious, and a cephalopod (yes, an octopus) serves as a sort of Beatrice into the world of creation. In her quest to capture the creative process (you just know she hates the word “process”), Barry pushes innocence. Childhood serves as a vehicle to revelation. “At the center of everything we call ‘the arts’ and children call ‘play’ is something which seems somehow alive,” she writes early on. “Adults are scared to do this,” she pens next to an owl, barely escaping triviality. Questions pile upon questions, and the search for answers seems confused and hopeless. What keeps us moving through this hodgepodge are the personal narratives—her early discovery of Medusa figures—and the strangeness of her pages that blend a variety of scripts and images into thoughtful mosaics. In other words, this is as pretty and entrancing a picture book as you’ll find, something to be explored under the spell of psychedelics as well as studied when perfectly straight. Many of the narrative pages appear to be done on lined yellow legal paper, giving space to her words and a structured frame for her drawing. Detailed pencil sketches from her “copying” days are contrasted with colorful constructions of flowers, candles, phrases and peanut shells. It all starts making sense past the halfway point of the book, after the story of how she became a cartoonist and was able to generate “that strange floating feeling of being there and not being there,” in which “one line led to another and a story slowly formed under my hands.” Barry sets us up with somewhat absurd activities as to “writing the unthinkable” and giving images “living form.” Suddenly, all the questions posed find value, if not answers, as she provides ways to bring out the details in the images we create. One facet left unexplored—revisions—seems foreign to her philosophy. (One of the cover-page notes sums up her thinking: “Why we don’t read it over? The person reading it over is not the same person writing it.”) Surprisingly, this weird and wonderful book ends up being as practical as it is dream-like. But you might like it just for its visual appeal.   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   WHAT IT IS reviewed in The School Library Journal Updated September 2, 2008 BARRY, Lynda. What It Is. SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL Gr 9 Up–Every so often a book comes along that surpasses expectations, taking readers on an inspirational voyage that they don’t want to leave. This is one such book. Each page is a feast for the eyes with beautiful full-page collages of photographs, watercolors, ink drawings, and text, resulting in a gorgeous volume that explores and encourages writing in a combination of ways. The author challenges readers with philosophical questions to ponder, such as “What is an image? Where are they found? Can we remember something we can’t imagine?” The volume also acts as a workbook that successfully encourages teens to explore their own creativity through writing. In addition, autobiographical glimpses of Barry’s journey from childhood to adulthood appear throughout the book. The struggles and obstacles she faces while following her path of becoming an artist and writer allow readers to believe in the possibility of writing themselves. This stunning book will appeal to those teens who are interested in delving into their creativity through words and art. The questions posed and valuable exercises that exist within its pages, along with the illustrations, could also make this book a valuable tool for English and art teachers in the classroom.–Lara McAllister, Halifax Public Libraries, Nova Scotia Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS reviewed by Riverfront Times Updated September 2, 2008 It Is What It Is A Barry good time By Nicole Beckert Published on August 20, 2008 In her new book, What It Is, the beloved indie-comic genius Lynda Barry embraces her audience with a lesson in creative revival. In this collection of memoirist comics, Barry sets aside her syndicated strip Ernie Pook's Comeek and instead delves deep into the root of the creative process and demonstrates how the "ordinary is extraordinary." Throughout her book, the reader is inspired, amused and bewildered -- as any Barry fan should be. The Central branch of the St. Louis Public Library, located at 1301 Olive Street, is graced with Barry's presence from 7 to 8:30 p.m., and she'll discuss her new work and sign copies. Can you dig the freaky, groovy magic, man? Right on!   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   WHAT IT IS reviewed by The St Louis Post-Dispatch Updated September 2, 2008 Comic artist shares creative spark of her art By Holly Silva Special to the Post-Dispatch 17 August 2008 St. Louis Post-Dispatch Lynda Barry is best known for "Ernie Pook's Comeek," a weekly black-and-white comic strip she has authored since 1978. In early years, the strip was drawn in angular pen strokes and concerned random characters such as Fred Milton the poodle. "Ernie Pook" has since evolved to a softer, ink-brush format and a regular cast of child characters, mostly preteen girls in financially and parentally impoverished circumstances, much of which echoes Barry's childhood. The tone of these strips is simultaneously whimsical and truth-telling. Barry conquers a thin emotional line in storytelling: sorrow that does not spill over into pity, and bursts of joy that are never mawkish. In 30 years and a dozen published collections of strips, she has occasionally branched out with a coloring book, a spoken word audiotape and two novels, one of them ("The Good Times Are Killing Me," 1988) later produced as an off-Broadway play. And before releasing "What It Is," Barry published "One! Hundred! Demons!" in 2002, an especially heady mix of longer autobiographical strips in color; photos of bright mixed-media collages; and seven photo-illustrated pages with instructions for the reader to paint his or her own demon using ink stone, ink stick and Asian brushes. "What It Is" melds those three elements of the "Demons" book into a single purpose. Each 8-by-11-inch page (nearly twice the size of her usual book page) combines collage, autobiography and encouragement to the reader to try this at home. There are outright assignments, exercises and pages that function as an activity book: "Start by copying all 4 pages of our word list onto cardstock or tagboard. Cut out all the words. ... Set aside until needed when you're ready to write." Throughout "What It Is," Barry credits this creativity formula (which she also teaches in small "Writing the Unthinkable" classes all over North America) to her college art instructor, Marilyn Frasca. A classmate was "The Simpsons'" Matt Groening, if you need more evidence of Frasca's professorial powers. The idea that readers of "What It Is" can access the singular talent that Barry does is a little like falling for late-night TV ads selling miracle kitchen appliances at $9.99. But the images of "What It Is" are so seductive, and Barry's encouragement so generous and gentle, that even the most cynical readers will undoubtedly find themselves fully absorbed in "Other People's Mothers. Write the first ten that come to you." --- 'What It Is' By Lynda Barry Published by Drawn and Quarterly, 210 pages, $24.95 Lynda Barry When: 7 p.m. Aug. 25 Where: St. Louis Public Library, 1301 Olive Street How much: Free For more info: 314-206-6779 click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS reviewed The Observer UK Updated September 2, 2008 Review: Books: [ GRAPHIC NOVELS ]: Magic realism and blue-sky thinking: The latest graphic novels have everything - psychological complexity, masterly satire, out-of-this world artwork and no little dry humour Roger Sabin 17 August 2008 THE OBSERVER ...Finally, Lynda Barry's What It Is ( Drawn and Quarterly pounds 16.99 ) is a 'how to make pictorial literature' guide with a twist. Rather than set out a boring template about composing images, judging perspective etc, she simply suggests exercises to maximise creative potential (the zone again). But she does so in a style that is itself inspiring, with punkily naive strips, collage and personal reflections ('The lines made a picture and the picture made a story. Every kid I knew could do it.'). You end up convinced that fretting over the status of the graphic novel pales into insignificance against actually trying to create one.   Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   LYNDA BARRY on Ich Leibe Comics Updated August 4, 2008 Lynda Barry San Diego 2008 Friday, August 1, 2008 ICH LIEBE COMICS ! By Ralph Mathieu My absolute favorite 2008 San Diego convention moment was getting my copy of What It Is signed by Lynda Barry. Lynda's panel (which was in a big room and had a big crowd, I'm happy to report) was on Friday and it was one of the best panels I've ever been to. For anyone who was at that panel who was unfamiliar with her comic work (or her novels), I know they were still highly entertained by Lynda Barry's stage presence and one would easily think she's moonlighted as a stand up comic. She started by introducing herself by singing some lines from Coal Miner's Daughter, albeit with some altered lines to reflect her life growing up and she closed by singing a song without opening her mouth (I hope that these two bits somehow end up on youtube)! On Sunday I made sure that I'd get my book signed by Lynda Barry and tell her how much I loved her work so I went over to the Drawn & Quarterly booth (the publisher of What It Is) and stood in line. She was very gracious to all of the people in line getting their books signed, but she seemed especially nice to me as I think she sensed what a huge fan of her work I am. I've been to a lot of conventions and have met a lot of comic book creators (most of them are really nice and appreciative of their fans), but I'd have to say that my face to face time with Lynda Barry will be amongst my very top memories of the people I've talked to within the comic book community. After talking to her I was on a high for the rest of the day! click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS reviewed by BIBLIOLATRY Updated August 4, 2008 Tapping the inner meditating monkey August 01, 2008 By Kel Munger SACRAMENTO NEWS & REVIEW'S BIBLIOLATRY BLOG Lynda Barry, author of the long-running alt-strip "Ernie Pook‘s Comeek," has a new book out. What It Is is both a both a manual for discovering and unleashing your own creativity and a paen to Barry’s ability to tap into hers. Using small drawings and collage, this large format book is best examined in small doses—followed by enough time and quiet to really digest what Barry’s suggesting: the everyday accessibility of the great power of creation. For example, this passage is intriguing in its own right: What do drawing singing dancing music making handwriting playing storywriting acting remembering and even dreaming all have in common? ??? They come about when a certain person in a certain place in a certain time arranges certain uncertainties into a certain form. But when the passage is combined with the incredibly busy pieces of Barry’s inner workings, it comes out so much more slowly—it actually winds out, as if being pulled slowly from a place where we’ve always known at our core the relationship between fruit, trees and birds (her illustration) and the difference between cursive and block printing (her choices for the words, which change during the passage). Barry has opened the door for us to see the connection between words, ideas and images in a completely new way. I might have to dig out my crayons.   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   MSNBC loves LYNDA BARRY Updated July 31, 2008 Comic-Con 2008: The empire strikes back Nerds rule the show, but Hollywood publicity teams want to take control By Dave White MSNBC July. 28, 2008 "Lynda Barry, the cartoonist who will sing to you This cartoonist, a contemporary and college friend of “The Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, has worked in relative obscurity for over 20 years with her strip, “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” having been a staple in alternative weekly newspapers in the 1980s and 90s. Her one-woman panel presentation, based on her latest book, “What It Is,” was Comic-Con’s single most inspirational moment, even if most of the 125,000 daily attendees weren’t in the room or, more likely, had never even heard of her (I had to explain her and her work three different times in response to the question, “What panel are you headed to now?”). An exuberant, no-nonsense cheerleader for life’s outcasts, she led her smallish room’s capacity crowd in a sermon-like call to creativity without fear of failure, to engage in what she called “deep play” or suffer going slowly insane. Of all the convention’s “professional” badge wearers, she was the coolest. She finished her panel by singing, “You Are My Sunshine” without moving her lips and got a standing ovation." click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS and GOODBYE reviewed by the Contra Costa Times Updated July 30, 2008 'What It Is' is a work of true creative genius By Randy Myers Contra Costa Times 07/27/2008 Let's get those creative juices flowing. Sounds good, huh? Just how we go about successfully drilling into our imagination oil fields can be tricky, though. To help us kick-start the process, here is comics writer and artist Lynda Barry. Her book "What It Is" -- a "how-to" guide for those who despise that genre -- has spawned sold-out workshops/readings and inspired hundreds to clear creative blockages. ... "What It Is," written and illustrated by Lynda Barry (Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95, 210 pages). Blinded by writer's block? Snatch up Barry's book, and I guarantee it will four-wheel you out of any creative sinkhole. As inspired as it is inspiring, Barry's scrapbook memoir is a motivational tome that revolutionizes the format of the autobiography and the maligned "how-to" book. It's a genre-shatterer that looks and reads like a crazy patchwork quilt, and gives you the confidence to go out and create. One of the best, most rewarding books I've read -- ever. A "Good-Bye," written and illustrated by Yoshihiro Tatsumi (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95, 212 pages). I love it when authors take me to very dark and disturbing places. Tatsumi, an influential Japanese cartoonist who is finally getting his day in the spotlight, does just that by exposing the gnarled, disintegrating psyches of men beaten down by their environment and insecurities. In this intense nine-story collection, Tatsumi exhibits a Raymond Carver-like grace as he peers into the emotional toll wrought by seething masculine resentments over war, marriage and retirement. Must reading for those want to be shaken and unsettled. A   click here to read more Featured artists Yoshihiro Tatsumi Lynda Barry            Featured products What It Is Good-Bye   WHAT IT IS reviewed by the North Adams Transcript Updated July 23, 2008 An idiot's guide to creativity By John E. Mitchell NORTH ADAMS TRANSCRIPT Friday, July 18 What It Is by Lynda Barry (Drawn and Quarterly) In this primer for cartooning -- a sort of how to be creative instructional text book -- Lynda Barry takes a very different and very abstract approach. Instead of merely telling you how to fashion ideas and work with them, Barry takes the reader through an autobiographical journey tracing the movement of her brain and consciousness as it learned to fashion ideas and work with them. "What It Is" unfolds through a bold and abstract presentation, where the subtleties and depth of Barry's creative process -- or, better yet, process to creativity -- is echoed through a mix of sharp cartooning layered within intricate collage work. It may be an instructional work underneath all the clutter, but it's that clutter that does the dirty work, making plain why the instruction makes any sense whatsoever. Barry employs an arsenal of tactics to walk would-be cartoonists through the process. Sometimes it's straight cartoon narrative -- often Barry messes with this, creating a memoir of childhood with handwritten entries alongside the drawings. The journal winds through the personal circumstances of those years -- including some sad details about her parental relationships -- but the biographical detail provides a road map to the moment where all the circumstances, the doodling and reading and alienation, come together as artistic motivation. When she's not functioning as the Ghost of Cartoonists Past, Barry is posing a series of abstract philosophical questions about storytelling, the kind of Zen unanswerables designed to get you thinking without entirely worrying about any conclusion. Questions like "What is the past made of?" and "What are thoughts made of?" serve as springboards for Barry's energetic and often gorgeous collage work, providing equally abstract images illustrating the journey begun by the questions. Reading "What That Is" is like diving into Barry's mind and swimming for a while. You plunge into bits of narrative now and again, but most of it is free form exploration, with your actions working alongside and in contrast to Barry's own. In other words, Barry actually takes you through the act of creation, rather than just telling you how it's done -- by the end, she's a guide in the mysterious world of your own creative brain, not just her own. This should be required reading for any teenager drifting into a creative life. click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS included on Entertainment Weekly's MUST List Updated July 3, 2008 ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY MUST LIST From the June 6th, 2008 Issue Ten Things We Love This Week BOOK 3. WHAT IT IS, by Lynda Barry The comic legend's graphic-art guide only looks scattered. Really, it's an inspirational tribute to the do-it-yourself creative spirit.   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   LYNDA BARRY writes for Tricycle Updated June 25, 2008 Monkey Business Artist and author Lynda Barry on the power of the paintbrush By Lynda Barry TRICYCLE: THE BUDDHIST REVIEW Summer 2008 I PAINT THESE MONKEYS with a brush and hand-ground Chinese ink. What began as a response to the death of a friend has become something I lean on, just as I depend on the alphabet to be there when I want to write. I found the paintbrush when I was working on my novel Cruddy, getting nowhere because I was trying to write it on a computer. The problem with writing on a computer was that I could delete anything I felt unsure about. This meant that a sentence was gone before I even had a chance to see what it was trying to become. When I was a kid, I never wrote without first having a book to write in. The simple act of folding sheets of paper and stapling them inside a construction paper cover was the first step in writing a book. The second was the movement of a pencil on paper. For most kids, once the experience of writing or drawing is over, the story itself isn’t so important. Some studies show that for children, handwriting and stories are intertwined. The very motion of writing by hand encourages creativity. The same is true for drawing. It’s only later in life that action and intent part ways. I decided to try to write my book with a brush, mostly because I wanted to get as far from the computer as I could. I was surprised by the instant change in my experience of writing. Without a delete button, I could allow the unexpected to grow. I finished my novel. As it turns out, people have been aware of the power of the paintbrush for over two thousand years. Brush, ink, and Buddhism are all bound together. The history of brush and ink in Asia cannot be studied without encountering the Buddha, who long ago traveled, via brush and ink, across China to Japan. He crossed entire centuries to my studio that day. I’ve used the brush ever since. These monkey paintings are fossils of experience, the remnants of a hand in motion, of breath and being. The vehicle of ink and brush is available to anyone. The picture you make is not so important. Move your brush not to make a picture, but make a picture in order to move your brush. Lynda Barry is the creator of the weekly comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek and the author of several books. Her new book is What It Is (May 2008, Drawn & Quarterly). click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS a Salon "Critic's Pick" Updated June 25, 2008 Critics's Picks SALON June 14, 2008 The problem with most guides on how to revive your creativity is that the people who write them create little more than guides on how to revive your creativity. Lynda Barry, the great comics artist, is an exception, and this book is part autobiography, part workbook, filled with moving stories and evocative collages. The emphasis is on memoir, with exercises asking readers to list every dog they've ever known or contemplate the feelings that come up when they think about their first phone number. Honest, awkward, funny and shot through with yearning, this is quintessential Barry. -- Laura Miller   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   WHAT IT IS reviewed by Salon Updated June 25, 2008 How to be a comic book hero: Like graphic novels, manga or superhero tales? New books by Lynda Barry, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden may inspire you to turn your stories and doodles into real cartoons. By Douglas Wolk SALON.COM June, 2008 "It's hard to imagine two worthwhile books on the same subject more different than Jessica Abel and Matt Madden's "Drawing Words and Writing Pictures" and Lynda Barry's "What It Is," both of which are nominally about how to make marks that turn into stories. (One of them is in comics form, and the other one is focused on how to make comics.) The process of making art is mysterious, though, and it's a mystery that deserves multiple explanations -- even contradictory explanations. Every page of Lynda Barry's book demands to be stared at lingeringly and lovingly. "What It Is" is nominally a book about writing rather than cartooning; it's jumbled and digressive, occasionally vague on the details. Even so, it's likely to be useful and even inspiring to anyone who wants to make comics, or any kind of narrative art, for that matter, because what it's meant to serve isn't the mechanics of creative work but the creative impulse itself. Barry is a cartoonist (her strip, "Ernie Pook's Comeek," appeared on Salon for a few years) and novelist who also teaches a writing workshop, "Writing the Unthinkable"; this is more or less the book version of that course. The whole thing is in comics form, or rather comics-and-then-some. Nearly every page is reproduced from a yellow legal pad on which Barry has drawn, handwritten, doodled, painted and pasted on evocative snippets of pictures and text until virtually every space has been filled. (One of the sources of collage materials she uses most is a cache of vintage, crushingly earnest schoolchildren's papers.) It's an art object itself as a book, and a gorgeous one, decorated like an envelope sent to a loved one; the birds and fish and monkeys that seem to turn up everywhere suggest that Barry's created the kind of terrain living things are drawn to, sky and sea and air all at once. The first and longest section of "What It Is" is essentially Barry's artistic autobiography and manifesto. It's framed by a series of not-easily-answerable questions: What is the past? Where is it located? Are there images inside of us? What are toys? What are monsters made of? Barry describes her experience of making art as a child, how that ability went away, and how it eventually came back and she "accidentally became a cartoonist." She changed her life, she writes, by copying other people's work before she could make her own: "In a fairy-tale it wouldn't work but in real life it did." It's a very funny piece of cartooning -- her portrait of herself as a sullen, early-'70s teenager is dead-on -- and insightful about her own experience: "That I had a very Gorgon-like mother never occurred to me, and if it had, I would have been lost. Did the Gorgon help me love my mother? I think she helped me very much." That extended reflection is followed by the heart of "What It Is": "Activity Book," originally published in part as a Free Comic Book Day giveaway last year. It's a sort of instruction book, but not for writing stories, as such. The core of Barry's concept here is the primacy of "images," by which she doesn't just mean pictures but moments of real or imagined sensory experience that can be brought to life with strokes of a pen. The point of "Activity Book" is for students to inhabit those moments fully, and describe them in every aspect. Barry presents it as a kind of goofy game, guided by a "magic cephalopod" and a many-eyed aquatic creature called "Sea-Ma"; she emphasizes, though, that it's incredibly important to keep your pen moving, rather than stopping to consider what you're doing. And she backs it up with her own example: The final section of "What It Is" is 20 pages' worth of the doodle pad Barry kept by her side while she was working on the rest of the book. That alone looks like she was having so much fun it'd be foolish not to follower her instructions. If all this sounds process-obsessed, it is. The old joke is that artists like making art and writers like having written; Barry's technique is to treat writing as a kind of visual art (she strongly encourages handwriting instead of using computers), in order to make the process a pleasure. She discusses the torment that set into her (as it does every post-childhood artist) in the form of a pair of demonic questions: "Is this good? Does this suck?" As she points out, "In all the books I read, no one had ever solved the riddle by thinking their way out of it. If anything, just the opposite was true." The pleasure of making marks, she argues, only happens when you're willing to not know what's happening -- to let images pull you along wherever they're going. If you're looking to learn from any art instruction book, it's worth figuring out the author's particular biases; Barry, pretty clearly, leans toward the principle of making art from one's own personal experiences and memories. For the most part, though, the artwork sparked by "What It Is" is meant to be made, period, rather than imagined and interrogated by the is-this-good, does-this-suck demons and thrown into a bottomless pit before it's finished, or even begun. Barry's directives are meant to let art flow out of yourself, for yourself. She recalls a favorite college art teacher: "When she looked at your work, she looked for a long time, usually while smoking a cigarette, and then the only word she'd say was, 'Good.'" ... The only real area of overlap between "What It Is" and "Drawing Words" is their very similar sets of aleatory story-generating tools. "Drawing Words" includes an appendix of "story cards": personality traits, physical characteristics, germs of stories ("a phone call," "a diamond ring," "an escaped prisoner"). The "writing kit" that makes up the shortest section of "What It Is" includes a set of shorter cues -- words to be written on individual slips of paper and pulled out of a bag: "telephone," "the beach," "snooping." Barry also suggests a similar bag of pictures, and offers questions to be selected at random while considering them: "What does the air smell like?" "What's beyond what's above your head?" "Is there anyone who just left or who may be coming?" So which of these books should you give to an aspiring cartoonist? Both of them -- maybe with a note that working through their respective exercises in tandem would be a good idea. "Drawing Words and Writing Pictures" is a pragmatic and encouraging manual, a well-wrought selection of tools. It teaches readers how to put stories on paper, but "What It Is" makes its readers need to: Barry's book is about the joy of summoning what its cover describes as "the formless thing which gives things form," and that formless thing has to be present before T-squares and bristol board are of any use." click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS and THOREAU AT WALDEN nominated for YALSA's Best Books for Young Adults 2009 Updated June 25, 2008 The Young Adult Library Services Association names Lynda Barry's What It Is and John Porcellino's Thoreau at Walden in their compilation of the current year’s books with "proven or potential appeal to teens."   click here to read more Featured artists John Porcellino Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   WHAT IT IS featured by Publishers Weekly Updated June 12, 2008 Panel Mania: What It Is Publishers Weekly 5/13/2008 In this 6-page preview of acclaimed cartoonist Lynda Barry's new work, What It Is, she looks back on her teenage years and cites the intellectual and emotional importance of art and comics on her life and development. What It Is will be published this month by Drawn & Quarterly. click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is LYNDA BARRY and GARY PANTER discussion panels reviewed in Artforum Updated June 12, 2008 "Comic Relief" Andrew Hultkrans ARTFORUM 06.10.08 Despite lingering cultural prejudices from bluenoses and blue-hairs, comics have periodically "arrived" on the mainstream stage since the late 1960s. Each "moment" generated reams of earnestly legitimizing articles in respectable journals trumpeting the medium's "newfound" sophistication, artistic achievement, and adult relevance, but all failed to reach critical mass. Today, however, with Hollywood working its way through the Marvel pantheon, Adrian Tomine's work frequently gracing the cover of the New Yorker, and museum exhibitions honoring everyone from R. Crumb to Chris Ware, it may be for real. "Post Bang: Comics Ten Minutes After the Big Bang!" nobly sought to map the dimensions of this ostensibly new cosmos. Organized by Art Spiegelman and Kent Worcester and sponsored by the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU in collaboration with the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, the all-day symposium-comprising four panels and two creator interviews-kicked off the weekend-long MoCCA Art Festival. Pacing myself, I attended two of the panel discussions and both interviews. The first panel paired two comic evangelists with wildly divergent ideas about how to historicize their beloved medium. Moderated by Robert Storr, curator and dean of Yale's School of Art, "Comics and Canon Formation" pitted curator and author John Carlin, who helped mount the 2006 exhibition "Masters of American Comics" at the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and coedited its massive catalogue, against Dan Nadel, proprietor of PictureBox, a Brooklyn-based publisher of comics and visual books and the author of Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries, 1900-1969. Storr began by saying that, for the high-art world, comics had long been viewed as merely supporting materials to painting, and that the long-overdue elevation of comics to capital-a art has finally arrived. Carlin, who also organized a comics-based exhibition at the Whitney in 1983, when he was a grad student, said that the cartoon-inspired art of Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Jean-Michel Basquiat resonated with his own aesthetics, but it wasn't until he found his way to Spiegelman's studio that he really learned about comics history. Storr, in introducing Nadel, called his book an "alternative canon." Nadel, who onstage had the mild air of awkwardness so common in comics nerds, deadpanned, "No, it's not. It's a broadening of scope . . . adding more lanes to the highway." He testily objected to the high-versus-low frame, the notion that comics need to have aspirations to literature or fine art, and characterized the problem as a generational split: At thirty-one, he feels that older generations are still fighting a fight that has already been won; comics do not need or want any help from the upper crustaceans of "high" art. Carlin defended his canonization efforts by citing auteur theory in film, linking Krazy Kat's George Herriman and Little Nemo's Winsor McCay to Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford-creative titans who invented the language of their medium-and said that canons were intended to cause controversy and stimulate debate. Nadel countered that any attempt at devising an auteur theory of comics was premature because so much of comics history is obscured or lost, beyond its most famous practitioners. Carlin compared their impasse to that between those who prefer The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's to Love's Forever Changes or vice versa, with himself tending to side with the more successful cultural products. Nadel refused to be framed this way, saying he was not taking a Nuggets approach to comics history, but that he merely wanted to avoid the mistakes of past canonizations of other art forms. As the panel came to a close, nothing was resolved. No punches, but no hugs either. The next panel boasted more participants but generated far less wattage. Moderated by Canadian comics scholar Jeet Heer, "Comics and the Literary Establishment" brought together three comics critics and historians to discuss the perils of plying their trade. Wondering aloud whether comics had become "too respectable" in a way that might harm the medium, Heer received a unanimous "No." Hillary Chute, a Harvard research fellow who wrote her doctoral dissertation on, among other things, Spiegelman's Maus; Douglas Wolk, author of Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean; and David Hajdu, author of The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, all replied that while bandwagon jumpers from book publishing and Hollywood were a mild menace, academic or serious writing on comics would not leach the form of its grittiness and essential disrepute. But the most ear-pricking moment was when Hajdu, whom Heer had called "Hoodoo" twice, corrected the moderator by explaining that there was a David Hodo, but he was the construction worker in the Village People, not the bespectacled author in the room that afternoon. Unsurprisingly, the creator interviews were more entertaining. First, old friends and colleagues Spiegelman and Gary Panter-painter, punk poster artist, and pervy purveyor of Jimbo and other comics-sat for a tandem Q&A with comics critic Bill Kartalopoulos. Describing their drug-addled '60s initiation into "underground" comics, both under the sway of patron saint R. Crumb, the two artists walked us through the history of independent cartooning in magazines like Zap, Arcade, and Funny Animals. The letters l, s, and d rolled off their tongues frequently, to nervous audience laughter every time -one of Panter's drawings, done on acid, was even projected onscreen. They both admitted, however, that they didn't do any good work while on the drug; it was merely a source of inspiration for later projects, including Panter's production design for Pee-wee's Playhouse. Spiegelman did get the seed idea for Maus while on some speed that the Funny Animals editor sent him to hasten his contribution to an issue: Having heard a theory that Mickey Mouse was based on Al Jolson in blackface, Spiegelman envisioned a strip with Ku Klux Kats. Soon realizing he knew next to nothing about African-American culture but plenty about Jewish culture, he transposed the concept, and a classic was born. Both creators acknowledged their debt to fine art, though Spiegelman confessed he was a latecomer, or "slob snob," until Ken Jacobs helped him see that painters were cartoonists "who just worked with really large panels." Eventually, Spiegelman wanted to apply modernist styles-Cubism and Art Deco-to comics. Panter liked George Grosz and other early-twentieth-century painters, saying, "We could learn from art up to 1920 forever." Both were fond of Philip Guston, particularly when he returned to his cartoonist roots, and wondered "Who got there first, Guston or Crumb?" Panter said that each of these artists underwent a parallel evolution in 1967-Crumb from a bad acid trip; Guston perhaps from seeing Crumb's work in the East Village Other. Both creators agreed that the "underground" comics style could be traced back to Basil Wolverton's '50s grotesqueries for Mad magazine. During the audience Q&A, the artists were asked, "If LSD had never been invented, how different would your comics be?" After a beat, Panter dryly replied, "Well, there still would have been mushrooms." "Post Bang" culminated in a star turn by Lynda Barry. Novelist, artist, and creator of the long-running, syndicated Ernie Pook's Comeek, Barry was a genuinely funny, inspirational presence as she discussed her writing workshop, "Writing the Unthinkable," and her recent collage-art-book-as-writing-guide, What It Is. While attending Evergreen College as an art student in the '70s, Barry started making pictures with words to impress friends and get "cute boys and girls" to make out with her. Also inspired by Crumb and Zap, she sent her early comics to the college paper, edited by fellow student Matt Groening. Because she'd always wanted an imaginary friend as a kid, she started making comics about kids to have "real imaginary friends." Likening artmaking to "a cross between a 'cereal trance' and listening to a joke," Barry became fixated on trying to recover a childlike mode of creation, leading to, among other methods, pulling words out of a hat for story ideas and writing her novels with a paintbrush. Maintaining that "art has a biological function and should not be an elective" in school, Barry said that "images may not be logical, but they are satisfying," and they stick with you "like the memory of your first phone number." She said that comics "remind her of music," noting that the blending of pictures with words was one of the most ancient artistic forms. The audience, including some very devoted fans, ate all of this up with radiant glee.   click here to read more Featured artists Gary Panter Lynda Barry              WHAT IT IS reviewed by the Philadelphia Inquirer Updated June 12, 2008 What is it? Artist/writer Lynda Barry can't - or won't - categorize "What It Is," her highly creative memoir. "Crazy book" might work, she says. By Carrie Rickey June 4, 2008 PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER Lynda Barry, prairie dog of the arts, has tunneled her way from underground comix (Ernie Pook's Comeek) to novels (The Good Times Are Killing Me) to the illuminated memoir What It Is, a transporting volume that pretty much defies description. Would she call it a memory map of creativity's source and flow? "No idea how to classify it," the literary artist responds during a free-spirited volley of e-mails last week. Nor does Barry have any idea of where to shelve it. "If there is a 'crazy book' section, it might go there," suggests the cartoonist, novelist and playwright whose Good Times enjoyed a successful Off-Broadway run. Pushing herself for a working definition of What It Is, Barry, who will speak at the Central Library of the Free Library of Philadelphia tomorrow night, calls it "a textbook." Accurate as far as it goes, but an understatement on the order of describing a Frida Kahlo painting as oil on canvas. An outgrowth of "Writing the Unthinkable," a creativity workshop Barry teaches at venues across the country, What It Is is, among other things, an apparently free-form, but artfully sequenced, illustrated journal that proffers the key to unlocking recollections. Not just any recollections, but those stored in sense memory, smells, sounds, sights that make the creative juices flow. One exercise Barry suggests is saying your first telephone number out loud. Do it. Barry says that when she recites, "Park Way Two Four Four Three Five, it feels like someone is saying my name." Her book, a magic grab bag in which Barry has collected the disparate phenomena - images, doodles, snapshots, anecdotes - helps her get into the zone, and is intended to take readers there. It does. An immersion in What It Is makes sleeping neurons wake up after a long Rip Van Winkle slumber, and primed to play. "I really wanted to make a book that would make people itch to make a book of their own," she writes, "... itchy to get started on what most of us have wanted to do since we stopped using images on a daily basis in our lives. What kids call playing and what adults call creativity seem to be pretty much the same thing." Some say that e-mail lacks tone. Not Barry's, whose electronic voice is as playful and plaintive as Ernie Pook, the comic that, when the New Wave in music and art broke on American shores in the '80s, shared the pages of underground weeklies with Matt Groening's Life in Hell. Groening and Barry met as undergraduates at Evergreen State in Washington in 1974 and can be thought of as the Picasso and Matisse of alt-art, only friendly. Groening, who first published Ernie Pook at the Evergreen State newspaper, tells the story about when he and Barry met. She was the girl in Dorm D legendary for having written to novelist Joseph Heller (Catch-22) and received a letter in return. In the return address, the resourceful Barry had scribbled "Ingrid Bergman." Over the years, Barry, 52, has valiantly defended her belief that word and image are inseparable. (As she puts it in What It Is: "Pictures can help us find words to help us find pictures.") "When I wrote Cruddy [her 1999 novel about an abused, resilient and resourceful 16-year-old] and wanted to include illustrations, I met with tremendous resistance from the publisher. . . . I was told that people would take the book less seriously if there were pictures in it." "I think the resistance to comics as literature has to do with the possible unremembered sense of advancement from books with pictures to books with no pictures," Barry says. "To unite [word and image] again makes some people very uncomfortable." What It Is is definitive proof that a work of art can also be a work of literature - and vice-versa. "We didn't have any books in the house I grew up in," Barry recalls of her hands-off rearing in Seattle. Thanks to a supermarket giveaway, four books made it into the house. Tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. Heidi. The Arabian Nights. "It was hard to find a place to read. That's why I loved the library," she recalls. To this day, the once "scraggly kid who didn't have a cared-for look" keeps a bookcase "with glass doors full of the oldest books I can find just so I can have that library smell when I need it. That's a smell that makes me feel that anything is possible." Barry went to high school with Kenny G ("no comment"), college with Groening ("Funk Lord of USA"), and dated This American Life host Ira Glass ("I'll pass"). Once the ringmistress of the boho media circus, with regular appearances on the Letterman show, Barry has put down roots in Footville, Wis. Since 2002, she's lived in a converted dairy farm with her husband, Kevin Kawula, an artist/naturalist she calls a "plant guy," who runs a native-plant nursery. As she describes it, the aromas of wood smoke, freshly baked bread, sun-dried laundry, and vegetables fresh from the garden permeate their home. Life in Footville "was everything we ever wanted" until developers proposed an industrial windmill farm that would surround the Barry/Kuwala spread. These days, in addition to her other roles, Barry is endeavoring to restrict the development of wind turbines. "They make an enormous amount of noise at times, especially at night, and have made homes unlivable," she notes. "There may be a place for them," says the queen of green, "but beside people's homes and in bird migration flyways is not the place." It's little wonder that the author/artist dedicated to sustainable living was moved to write/draw a book about how she sustains and renews her art. For art is, in the end, what keeps her going. "I believe this kind of play/creative activity evolved along with all the other parts of us, like our thumbs and fingers," she writes, "and without it we go crazy." click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS reviewed by the Montreal Hour Updated June 12, 2008 "This is it: American comic great Lynda Barry gets arty and educational with What It Is" Isa Tousignant THE MONTREAL HOUR June 12th, 2008 I came to Lynda Barry late, only a couple of years ago, despite the fact that she's been among the States' most successful non-mainstream comic artists since the 1980s. My first contact with her work was while on holiday, when I was staying with some of my best friends; they had a copy of The Greatest of Marlys. It's an incredible book, like all of Barry's stuff - touching and moving and freaking hilarious, full of characters like Arna, Maybonne and the infamous Marlys that are so well rounded they become like family members. To this day, the warm feeling I have in reading her books is indistinguishable from the love I have for the friends whose bookshelf I plucked The Greatest of Marlys off of and the relaxing headspace of responsibility-free travelling. No matter - it's art with heart, either way. Barry's new book is an intensely pleasurable turn of events. She's ventured into a variety of art forms extending beyond the regular comic format in the past - apart from her regular syndicated strip, Ernie Pook's Comeek, she's dabbled in theatre, for example, when The Good Times Are Killing Me was adapted to the stage. She's worked on short one-page strips, written longer narratives and drawn books of varying kinds. In 2004 she published an amazing autobiographical art book titled One Hundred Demons, which mixed collage and painting with deeply affecting personal remembrances. This new book, What It Is, is in that vein but dives deeper still. What It Is is a heartfelt, humorous, skewed kind of linguistics lesson. Constructed of beautiful watercoloured visions of monsters and animals alongside self-portraiture, poetry and collage, this book sets out to answer one overarching question: What is an idea made of? Barry comes up with a few hypotheses, and many, many other questions, thanks to stories from her past and present, as well as meandering philosophical reflections inspired by some of the found material she includes. There are some extracts of what seem to be the artist's childhood school projects here, as well as found postcards and photographs. The entire work is constructed like a student's activity book - or like a manual, like a Thought-Provoking Art Book for Dummies. With every new work, Barry digs deeper into her well of experiences, stretches further into the vast extent of her artistic talent and shares more intimacy with her readers. This is her richest, most generous work yet. I'm going to give it pride of place on my shelves in the hope that a loved one will pick it up and share in the revelation.   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   LYNDA BARRY event in The Chicago Reader Updated June 12, 2008 Critic's Choice: Lynda Barry Kathie Bergquist CHICAGO READER June 12, 2008 "There are happy childhoods and unhappy childhoods, but most fall somewhere in between, swinging sometimes up or dragging sometimes low," says Lynda Barry in her new writing how-to, What It Is (Drawn & Quarterly). Cartoonist and novelist (and Reader contributor) Barry has chronicled childhood through its minutiae -- its flagrant injustices and small triumphs -- in her comics, novels, and graphic novels. In her new book she encourages would-be writers to "follow the wandering mind," paying close attention to images from their childhoods and emphasizing the connections between image, memory, and imagination. What It Is begins with a series of meditative questions ("What is the past made of?" "What makes something meaningful?") and concludes with a series of practical writing exercises that could function equally well as conversation starters for a dull party ("Make a list of the first ten cars that come to you from early in your life"). Along the way Barry interjects her own narrative about becoming a writer and artist, her swirling, dizzying collage art summoning readers into the depths of the subconscious and treating them to a cast of characters from Barry's personal iconography -- a winking cat, a black-sheathed ghost, various undersea creatures, meditating monkeys, and Abraham Lincoln, to name a few. click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS reviewed by Time Out Chicago Updated June 11, 2008 TIME OUT CHICAGO Issue 172: Jun 12-18, 2008 Creative burst Lynda Barry uses comics, collage and the kitchen sink to get things going. By Laura Pearson Lynda Barry has thought long and hard about the forces that hinder creativity. The painter, writer and nationally syndicated cartoonist, who created the pitch-perfect strip Ernie Pook's Comeek, believes there are two questions we ask ourselves that take the joy and ease out of art making: Is this good? and Does this suck? "Anytime I begin to make anything, from a painting to a salad, the question of whether it's good or bad seems to immediately swoop in like a vampire," Barry says. "I don't think that these questions can be eliminated, but I do think they can be named and identified as part of [what] happens when adults make something." Her new book, What It Is (Drawn and Quarterly), thoughtfully guides and invigorates adults who make stuff. It is, among other things (illustrated autobiography, philosophical quest), an instruction manual for dealing with vampiric self-critique. The key, Barry explains, is being okay with not knowing whether something you made is good or bad, but instead working to recapture a childlike, unselfconscious sense of play—focusing on images, letting the stories come to you. At the book's outset, Barry recalls her childhood games and creative escapes. Using collage, comics and beautifully illuminating scraps of text from old children's books and worksheets (salvaged from the garbage of a Wisconsin school teacher), she describes her early forays into drawing, storytelling and imagining. She recalls nights of getting lost in the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, afternoons of waiting for her toys to blink and come alive, if only she waited long enough. "I believed that there was another world that would show itself to me in the smallest ways," she writes. Barry goes on to explain that around age 10, this period of creativity and make-believe was shaken by the idea that people could be "good" or "bad" at artistic expression: "By then I knew who the best artists were in our class, who were the best writers," she says. "The rest of us started wishing. 'I wish I could draw. I wish I could write. I wish I could dance.' By the fifth grade, most of us knew it was already too late." Suddenly, the all-consuming two questions entered the psyche, and creative activity became a kind of wrestling match. But as a student at Evergreen State College, Barry took a painting class called "Images," in which she began working with unexpected memories. Rather than trying to drum up an idea or concept, she attempted to get inside an image, examining a familiar person or place with fresh eyes. This act required patience and practice, much like staring at toys and waiting for them to move. "It's an experience, not a thought," Barry says. "Parts of the brain relating to sound, balance, spatial relationship, vision, smell and emotion are all active during certain kinds of memory." Realizing that unexpected memories might enliven her writing as well, she eventually applied these techniques to other media. Barry even began teaching a workshop about images called "Writing the Unthinkable." The latter half of What It Is explores the curriculum of this class in colorful detail. "Do you wish you could write?" she asks and then follows up with a series of steps to "Make Writing!!" As a creative handbook, What It Is takes a refreshingly unambiguous approach. Open-ended questions and swirling collage give way to simple advice and concrete steps: Don't stop and think; keep moving your pen. As such, this book isn't just for Lynda Barry fans or writers or people who felt the crush of fifth-grade peer pressure; it's for anyone who has ever wondered how to make something truthfully and honestly and, in so doing, silence the vampires. Barry will tell you What It Is Thursday 12 at the Hideout.   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   WHAT IT IS reviewed by Gutter Geek Updated June 11, 2008 Lynda Barry, What It Is (Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2008); $24.95, hardcover. By Michael Moon GUTTER GEEK June 2008 When you grow up, would you like to be an actor, a singer, or a dancer? Nowadays, we tend to assume that a kid needs to figure out pretty early which track (and what part of that track) her particular talents (should she be so favored) have equipped her to pursue. Eventual success is supposed to depend on the kid's sticking to that track for a decade or two of continual training and trials - usually to the neglect of other artistic pursuits. But histories tell us that in the early modern period (say, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), performers with anything much in the way of formal training studied all these arts extensively. Actors, for example, learned not just the rudiments of singing and dancing but developed sufficient skill to perform credibly alongside other performers for whom singing or dancing were primary pursuits. No one expects a "serious actor" in the theater today also to be able to enthrall an audience with a high C or a quick set of leaps and turns - but performers were once expected to have cultivated this whole range of skills to a pretty high degree. It probably seems strange to most of us now. Yet something like what theater historians tell us happened in the performance world in the West beginning in the eighteenth century happens to most of us as we start growing up. Many little kids, Lynda Barry observes in her new book What It Is, have a way of making lines on paper that pretty quickly turn into images that pretty quickly turn into stories. As she also points out, many children can also sing and dance to their own full satisfaction. Don't you wish you could draw, write, sing and dance? You were quite likely able to do all these things at least passing well - did them and really enjoyed doing them - when you were a little kid. What happened? What It Is is an amazing achievement. Full of ideas about how it is that lots of children seem so creative, so well equipped to intuit how to tap and develop the richness of their own sensorium and their own experience in relation to what seems initially to be an inexhaustible reservoir of artistic gifts, the book also provides a toolbox (a "workbook") of exercises and techniques that can enable damaged, depressed, dissociated, and just plain "too busy" adolescents and adults to rediscover and redevelop the enlivening and inspiring connections to our energy, our "good demons," our childhood muses, "the sun in my belly." (Barry has been on to some of this for a long time: in an earlier work, she describes how, as a child at home, she would sometimes lie on the living room floor and take a perfectly sharpened pencil and poke tiny holes in the fabric that covered the stereo consoles' speakers - why? Because, she says, it gave her "a perfect feeling in my pants.") Barry does this through a pretty compelling set of ideas about the image / images, and about human psychic functioning and its relation to the image. Rather than defining "image," Barry intimates what seems important to her to understand about it: it's "somehow alive" ("not in the way you and I are alive, but it's certainly not dead"). It can move, and move us - in one of her most suggestive evocations of the dynamics of the image, Barry calls it "the pulltoy that pulls you." "At the center of everything we call 'the arts' and children call 'play,' is something which seems somehow alive" (p. 14). "A kid who is playing is not alone. There is something brought alive during play, and this something, when played with, seems to play back" (p. 51). "An image," she writes, "is a place. Not a picture of a place, but a place in and of itself" (p. 88). The heart of the book, and of Barry"s method, is to be found in the section entitled "Two Questions." "Is this good? Does this suck? I'm not sure when these two questions became the only two questions I had about my work, or when making pictures and stories turned into something called 'my work' - I just know I'd stopped enjoying it and instead began to dread it." But the relentless internalized censor with his two obsessive questions can be evaded. "When I was little," Barry recalls, "I noticed that making lines on paper gave me a certain floating feeling. It made me feel like I was both there and not there" (pp. 123-24). Here and elsewhere Barry's ideas about the creative process and its relation to self, identity, consciousness, and self-judgment may remind us of Gertrude Stein's similar pronouncements in her 1936 lecture, "What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them": It is not extremely difficult not to have identity but it is extremely difficult the knowing not having identity. One might say it is impossible but that it is not impossible is proved by the existence of masterpieces which are just that. They are knowing that there is no identity and producing while identity is not. "To be able to stand not knowing long enough to let something alive take shape," Barry writes, "Without the two questions ["Is this good?" "Does this suck?"] so much is possible. To all the kids who quit drawing . . . come back!" (p. 135). According to Barry, and in contradiction with almost everybody's working (and perhaps also playing) habits today, the practices one needs to do in order to regain one's lost connections to image-play cannot be performed on a computer. Call her oldfashioned, but three-hole notebook paper, a binder, and, above all, a pen is necessary. Many of the enabling exercises Barry presents have as their central imperative, "Keep the pen moving." Choreographer Agnes De Mille tells in her 1952 memoir Dance to the Piper how once, during a discouraging phase in her own artistic life, her friend and fellow movement genius Martha Graham sent her the following message: There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all Time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Barry's "Class Monitor," the friendly, many-eyed creature named Sea-Ma, couldn't have put it better. Barry shows more of the raw than of the finished edges in her processes and projects in this book. Readers of What It Is, for example, get a preview of Barry's fabric constructions of the four sisters in Little Women, of which she writes: Here are my rejected little Women. I like them so much but have been told they are not LYNDABARRY enough - The art director says it doesn't look like my work enough which make me laugh a little and also cry a little. (p. 200) Although she is not identified by name in the book, the tired-but-resolute-looking woman depicted seated and reading at a desk on p. 169 is Louisa May Alcott, who knew a thing or two herself about what goes into unblocking life force. The Wikipedia entry for Lynda Barry claims that she is a fan of Mary Parker Follett's 1930 magnum opus Creative Experience. Follett lived at the foot of Beacon Hill in a "Boston marriage" with the woman who'd been the principal of the first school where she'd taught. Follett gave us the invaluable concept of a "win-win situation" and many other nuggets of relational and organizational wisdom, and her work is now recognized as having been the Motherlode (so to call it - Follett was no one's mother) for the ideas of many of the "management gurus" of the later twentieth century. Follett had graduated from Radcliffe in 1898 alongside classmate Gertrude Stein (Follett summa, Stein magna). Lynda Barry has been doing brilliantly innovative and moving work for decades now. With What It Is she has produced an account of her own discoveries about the creative process that are as helpful and inspiring as Follett's, Stein's, De Mille's, and Graham's. If you want to get up close and personal with that weird but accessible being or state of being that Barry calls "the formless thing which gives things form," I suggest you get out your gluestick and scissors and start making your way through What It Is. But just looking at the book, even if you don't fully get with its "Writing the Unthinkable" program, has its own transformative potential. Every one of its 210 pages is a collage of enigmatic phrases, weird creatures (many of them pretty cute, it must be admitted), and helpful directives. Barry's way with color in this book represents a breakthrough for her: the palette is both strong and muted; its combination of softly bright figures against sometimes shadowy or even muddied backgrounds makes many of the pages look more like certain old quilts and other handsewn objects than like what we expect to see in a conventionally printed picture-book (those "rejected" Little Women dolls may epitomize this new aesthetic of Barry's). Hats off to Barry's new publishers, Drawn & Quarterly, for giving this artist's work the very special treatment it deserves. click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS on Channel Frederator Updated June 11, 2008 Lynda Barry's Tour de Forces Beyond Our Control CHANNEL FREDERATOR BLOG Anne D. Bernstein June 8, 2008 Going to see Lynda Barry is like going to see the Dalai Lama. (Actually, I've never gone to see the Dalai Lama, but I plan on doing so the next time he's in town to see if he could possible be more inspiring than the personality-packed "Funk Queen of the Universe".) Lynda was in NYC this weekend to promote What It Is, which is likely the world's first collage how-to-write book. She was interviewed by Hillary Chute Friday Night at the NYU Post Bang all-day comics symposium, and had the audience in stitches the entire time-but in a deep way! The book is not specific to animation, but applicable to any artistic endeavor. It is all about how to recapture the playful attitude to creativity that we all have in childhood, but lose along the way, especially when we start looking at our work and judging it. (Or, as she put it in her own inimitable way: "Is my baby defective? Should I put the baby back up inside?") For a taste of what you're in for, here's a podcast interview from NPR, a recent article in The New York Times, and a page about her "Writing The Unthinkable" Workshop, coming soon to a city possibly near you. A few new things I learned about Lynda Barry: -When she was a kid, she was obsessed with Family Circus, and really want to "get into the circle" and take part in their wholesome and charming oval-headed world. -She can recite Beefaroni lyrics. -She had an imaginary imaginary friend. -She did a college art project called "Erotic Spaces" that involved drawing electrical outlets. -When she met Matt Groening in college she was impressed because he was the only guy at hippie school with "buttons on his shirt". -She has a huge crush on Elmer The Cow of Elmer's Glue. -You can buy her original art on ebay and she would really appreciate it. -Anne D. Bernstein   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   WHAT IT IS and 365 DAYS reviewed by The Republican-American Updated June 11, 2008 New titles push the cartooning envelope By ALAN BISBORT REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN May 20, 2008 When Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker, was first shown James Thurber's cartoons by his friend E.B. White, he was reported to be equally amused and confused. White, who had fished the now famous doodle-like work out of Thurber's office trashcan, wanted Ross to print the cartoons in the magazine. "Yes, these are pretty funny, but where are the finished drawings?" Ross asked. "No, you don't understand," White explained. "These ARE the cartoons. These ARE the finished drawings." Ross eventually relented, and published Thurber's child-like scratchings, and the cartoons are now considered classic American humor. We still derive as much delight from them as we do from Thurber's short stories and memoirs. Modern readers might have a similar reaction as Ross's to "What It Is," a new book by Lynda Barry. Barry, a cartoonist, painter, illustrator and teacher, is best known for her nationally-syndicated strip "Ernie Pook's Comeek," a staple of alternative papers since the 1980s. Her work shares certain "simple" qualities with Thurber's but her aim has always been to do more than just amuse. Indeed, "What It Is" (published by Drawn & Quarterly) may be one of the most important books published this year. Never mind that it looks as if it were drawn by a child and pieced together by manic monkeys. It is nothing less than a primer on (and to) the human imagination. Ostensibly a step-by-step guide to her own quirky creative method, "What It Is" quickly lurches into the unknown. By page 6, she is already asking readers such profound questions as "Where do sudden troublesome thoughts come from? Why is there anxiety about a past we cannot change?" Her answers are also provocative: "The top of my mind has no answer for this - I find myself arguing in my head with people I haven't seen in 15 years. Or apologizing or trying to explain…it's like there is a place in me where it is all still alive." "What It Is" recalls the work of Kenneth Patchen, whose painted poems in the 1950s have a startling power. Barry asks, "Does your imagination know what year it is?," whereas Patchen asked, "Do the dead know what time it is?" Each of the 210 pages in "What It Is" lays out questions that prod the mind in unexpected directions, augmenting them with watercolor, ink, scribbles, doodles and collage elements from old letters, books and catalogs. The pages can be studied for minutes at a time, and revisited continuously, without losing their hold. The effect is captivating. Her work resonates as strongly with adults - at least those who will allow it - as with children, who need no prodding when it comes to things in the imaginative realm. Barry seems to have a special gift for capturing the losses, fears, panics and joys of childhood, noting, "I believe a kid who is playing is not alone. There is something brought alive during play and this something, when played with, seems to play back." It is clear from her earlier work and implied throughout "What It Is" that Barry had a painful childhood. Her mother was a monster, depicted herein as a Gorgon with whom little Lynda dared not make eye contact for fear of being frozen in place. Hers was the drunken, chain-smoking mom who never spoke when she could shout and said absurd things like "You don't know how lucky you are." Children treated in this manner can go in two different directions, to anger and defiance - or toward the imagination. Lucky for us Barry took the latter route. "What It Is" is the pinnacle of her artistry. As great as Barry is, she must be hearing the footsteps of another talented and engaging cartoonist: Julie Doucet. Doucet is, in fact, catching up with Barry for the "Most Lovably Eccentric and Bizarrely Confessional (or Confessionally Bizarre) Woman Cartoonist of the New Millennium" Award. With "365 Days: A Diary" (also published by Drawn & Quarterly), the younger Doucet has made giant strides toward Barry's throne. Like Barry, Doucet fills every teensy corner of every page with oddities - squiggles, cut out letters (like a kidnapper's ransom note), marginal doodles, provocative collages, fortune cookie sayings - and yet recreates her own highly personalized world. And, like Barry, her profusely personal perspective has strong elements of the universal in it. She may be soul-bearing but she's not self-absorbed. She's humane and never needlessly cruel to or about other people. click here to read more Featured artists Julie Doucet Lynda Barry            Featured products 365 Days: A Diary by Julie Doucet What It Is WHAT IT IS reviewed by Impressions Updated June 11, 2008 Did you ever have a toy you were afraid of? Nancy Tousley IMPRESSIONS THE CALGARY HERALD Wednesday, June 04, 2008 A couple of years ago, for no good reason except to see if I could, I started revisiting a little town called Oakdale in my mind. I tried visualizing the brick main street and what was on it - the big high school at the head of the tree-lined boulevard, my grandmother's house, my friend Ann Irwin's house next door, the Cookson's. Further down, after the boulevard stopped to widen the street, there was the white-painted Methodist church, the parsonage, a movie theatre, the dime store, the post office, some shops and my grandfather's men's clothing store. The street ended at the railroad tracks that ran across it at a right angle. At the centre of central Louisiana, Oakdale is the site of my early childhood memories, the perfect place to set an idyl. I thought I might write about it and never did. But relaxing and floating down through layers of time onto the brick street - and looking up, down and all around to see what I could see, like what season it was and who, if anybody, was with me - are things Lynda Barry tells prospective writers to do in her terrific and long-awaited new book, What It Is. The grown-up artist, who is the brilliant creator of Ernie Pook's Comeek, steps out from behind the panels of her cartoon and shows herself. She talks about her work. What It Is is part creative memoir and part how-to book about getting down to writing what she calls "the unthinkable." But "unthinkable" doesn't mean what you think. Barry favours an intuitive approach that draws on the complex relationships among dream, memory, experience and the imagination, and she shares her method. Stop thinking too much! Build gates that open up those places deep inside us that harbour the things we have not so much forgotten as fenced off. One thing remembered leads to another and, before long, you find a story. This is rich territory for writing: you are swimming down into the unconscious, signaled here by the sea life that courses throughout the book. What It Is, her first book with Drawn & Quarterly, is a revelation of the wellspring of Barry's creativity in childhood reverie and how she accesses the stuff she draws and writes about, activities each of which she regards as making marks that give shape. She gives us a glimpse of her vivid imaginative life. She tells us how it was fed and formed when she was a child living in a trailer park under the thumb of a Gorgon-like mother, who was clueless and careless about her child's imaginative inner life. She reminds us of how imagination can give life to even inanimate things like shadows and toys. At the start of What It Is, in a kind of two-page prologue, Barry appears as a troubled middle-aged artist who can't put her finger on what's bothering her. "Why is there anxiety about a past we cannot change?" she wonders. "The top of my mind has no answer for this." Then we are off on subterranean journey, led by the octopus (Barry?) and the many-eyed Sea Demon, to discover "the formless thing which gives things form." Giving form, with words and images, and keeping moving to keep the images flowing is what this poetic, multilayered book is about. "What is an image?" Barry asks, along with a lot of other questions - "Did you ever have a toy you were afraid of?" - and she helps us figure them out and why they matter without handing out pat answers. The question pages, like the cover, are collages of images (drawn and found), texts (printed and handwritten), postmarks cut off of old letters, children's art and writing, stamps, old people's spidery penmanship, bits of greeting cards, printed papers and fabrics, snatches of old letters, and the like. The layered collages refer all at once to dream, memory, experience and imagination. They make the link between creativity and play. They layer time. A lot is going on in them because the images and the texts that each are signifying on different levels. They ask for a slow, thoughtful read. Interspersed with the questions is Barry's story about her childhood and adolescence and her origins as an artist. Her story is told on yellow, ruled pages illuminated with watercolours of her freckle-faced, red-headed child self. The mature Barry appears here too, making asides on things like writer's block, doodling and how the innate creativity of children gets stiffled as they grow older. She tells how she became paralyzed in her adult career, was ready to give it up, until one day "That strange floating feeling of being there and not being there came back. One line led to another and a story slowly formed under my hands." What It Is then proceeds to stop explaining and "to just show you how to do it." Barry gives us the gist of what she teaches in her Writing the Unthinkable workshops, so unlike classes she took in high school. Her life changed in college. Barry has dedicated the book to her teacher, Marilyn Frasca, who taught a class called Images at Evergreen State College, where she and The Simpsons creator Matt Groening both studied. Much of the book is based on what she learned in Frasca's class, Barry says. Of course, What It Is carries Barry's inimitable stamp. Her memoir, which is as poignant as anything in Ernie Pook's Comeek, and the demonstration of the underpinnings of her method allows us deeper into her mind. This might just be the most complex cartoon book yet. It is also witty and satisfying in a way that still leaves you wanting more. Even if you don't wish you could write, you'll want to read and look at it many times over. It's a very wise and beautiful thing. "We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality," Barry writes in these pages, "we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to understand what otherwise would be intolerable." What Is Is by Lynda Barry was published by Drawn & Quarterly in Montreal. It is on sale at bookstores and www.drawnandquarterly.com   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   LYNDA BARRY event included in the New York Times' Urbaneye Updated June 11, 2008 The New York Times: Urbaneye The Best of New York Today By MELENA RYZIK June 4, 2008 Hula With Patter and Cartoons The reclusive cartoonist Lynda Barry makes a rare trip to the Strand tonight. The creator of the long-running strip "Ernie Pook's Comeek," anchored by the snooty pig-tailed Marlys, will share her first book, "What It Is," a series of collages about her take on art-making. If her appearance is anything like her workshops - in which Carol Kino says she "sings, tells jokes, acts out characters and even dances a creditably sensual hula, all while keeping up an apparently extemporaneous patter on subjects like brain science, her early boy-craziness, her admiration for Jimmy Carter and the joys of menopause" - you will come away with a new appreciation for pig-tailed creativity. click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS reviewed by Booklist Updated June 11, 2008 BOOKLIST By Gordon Flagg June 1, 2008 What It Is. Barry, Lynda (Author) May 2008. 208 p. Drawn & Quarterly, hardcover, $24.95. (9781897299357). 741.5. Though she has drawn the weekly Ernie Pook's Comeek and other alternative comics for nigh-on two decades, Barry still manages to surprise and delight. Take this hard-to-categorize book, an ambitious work that combines ink and watercolor drawings, collage, and handwritten and typeset text to explore the creative process by posing open-ended questions ("What is an image?" "What is a memory?"), and autobiographical passages about Barry's harsh, lonely youth and creative struggles. A freewheeling "Activity Book" follows, proceeding in the same lively fashion by drawing on exercises from the creativity workshops Barry holds around the country and inviting readers to join in the fun of unleashing their imaginations. Although such content is a departure from the usual for Barry, her distinctive style,with its vividly messy expressiveness, remains a constant. Barry's legions of fans will appreciate the insight she provides into her work, but her entertaining, accessible approach to weighty philosophical matters deserves a still larger audience. Drawn and Quarterly, this book's publisher, plans to bring the Ernie Pook strips back into print -good news for us all. --Gordon Flagg   Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   WHAT IT IS reviewed by the San Antonio Current Updated June 11, 2008 Serious playtime By John DeFore SAN ANTONIO CURRENT May 28, 2008 Lynda Barry, the cartoonist behind the classic alt-weekly strip "Ernie Pook's Comeek," has kept busy in recent years with a number of side ventures. She sells original art - drawings of "Pook" characters like Marlys, and stranger ink paintings featuring subjects like a meditating monkey - on eBay; she has produced the occasional hand-decorated messenger bag; and she pops up around the country from time to time to conduct "Writing the Unthinkable" workshops, which appear to be sort of intensive, avant-funky, creative-writing seminars. Now she has adapted some of her "Unthinkable" wisdom for a book called What It Is (Drawn & Quarterly). An odd little creature, What It Is certainly doesn't look like any creative-writing text before it. It isn't a textbook, of course: It aims at some kind of hybrid of workbook, memoir, and compendium of Zen koans, and will surely hit different readers (users?) in very different ways. Longtime Barry followers will appreciate it even if they have no ambition to become writers, as it documents the wild paths the artist follows when not constricted by "Pook's" four-panel narrative format. Though it does offer some chunks of comic-style illustration (often depicting the author herself in her quest to become a writer), the book also offers glimpses of her non-Marlys drawings (that monkey again, now rifling through old magazines for pictures to clip, or a many-eyed marine beast named Sea-ma) and swaths of quirky collage. The dense construction of those collage pages is aimed at triggering unconventional reader responses to questions like "Where do we keep bad memories?" and "What is the difference between awake and asleep?" - little meditations that set the stage for practical creativity exercises found later in the book. What It Is just came out, so I can't claim to have had time to put Barry's techniques into practice, but I can say that just reading through them elicits a kind of weird-inclusive, giddy embrace of the possible that could hardly hurt a bottled-up adult looking to reconnect with a creative side not seen since pre-school. click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS reviewed by Read About Comics Updated June 11, 2008 READ ABOUT COMICS Greg McElhatton May 26, 2008 What It Is By Lynda Barry 208 pages, color Published by Drawn & Quarterly One of my favorite books published in 2002 was Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons, as Barry told stories of her past in an attempt to exorcise those demons. In doing so, her observations on a lot of parts of life had really resonated with me, bringing up those emotions and ideas that I'd been carrying around for years as well. In her first original graphic novel, What It Is, Barry plumbs her early life again as she tries to understand imagination and creativity and how it works. The end result is perhaps one of the most necessary books of 2008. What It Is is several different books in one. The most prominent feature of the book is Barry telling her own story, about the games she played as a child, her experience with art classes, the effect her home life had on how she viewed the world, and more. That part alone is worth the cover price of the book, easily, and it's the easiest part of What It Is to fixate on. Interwoven throughout this narrative, though, are full page questions, massive collages that ask a question and are then a combination of Barry giving some of her own ideas to the answer, as well as asking more questions at the same time. "Where/why do we keep bad memories?" "What happens when we read a story?" "What is the difference between awake and asleep?" My initial inclination upon seeing these was to skip them, and no doubt go through the book later and examine them. I was maybe about 20% of the way through the book when I stopped and looked at one of them really closely. Then I went back, and started the book over. In some ways these are part of the narrative, these "essay questions" that that Barry asks. So much of What It Is involves getting inside Barry's head, and these creations of paint and clippings and stamps come together in a way that a simple written answer never could have conveyed. The story itself is, honestly, a little disturbing in places. Maybe it's because it's easy to see our own defeat in parts of Barry's story, the way that creativity is so often beaten down by others or even by ourselves. Barry talks about how she stopped doing things like bursting into song around other people, that sudden moment of being self-conscious about the way that others look at us. "It's not that we stop singing," she notes. "I still sang. I just made sure I was alone when I did it, and I made sure I never did it accidentally." And really, how many other people are in that same boat? Barry believes it happens to most of us, still singing but secretly and all alone. And it's easy for most readers, I suspect, to see that in themselves. At the same time, though, Barry uses What It Is to show how she got herself out of that cycle of doubt and self-defeat in her art. There's a section where she's continually questioning herself, the art having shifted from lush painted pages on yellow legal pads, to a simple thin pen line on a white page, full of muted greens and Barry's own demons mocking her for being able to answer the two questions she continually asks herself about her art ("Is this good?" "Does this suck?"). And then, as she finally answers the question, everything shifts back to its original style. It's a visual trick that others have used as well, of course, but that doesn't make it any less dramatic or appealing here. It's almost as if we're hearing Barry exhale as that final tick forward occurs, answering a puzzle that she notes she'll forget she's solved before and have to go through again and again. But in that moment, as Barry not only gives her sudden moment of clarity to the reader but explains it in context with her earlier statements on creativity and quitting, it's hard to not be completely enchanted by What It Is. The last third of What It Is, once it has finished urging people to rediscover their own creativity once more, turns into two manuals on doing just that. It's not a narrative here, but Barry's discussions on how to get your project rolling and ways to recognize your own imagination very much feed into everything she'd said in the book up until then. It's the sort of thing that you should read even if you aren't planning on working on your own creative project, just so that you can have some of those long-dormant sparks in your own head again. What It Is's strange blend of workbook, narrative, and existential essay doesn't feel like anything else out there, but in the best possible way. Barry's art is at its most expressive and open here, and it's hard to not just keep reading and re-reading it. (In the space of a week I've already read it five times.) If What It Is doesn’t top a number of best-of lists at the end of the year, I will be shocked. Buy this book, buy this book, buy this book.   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   GOODBYE and WHAT IT IS reviewed by Newsarama Updated June 11, 2008 Good-Bye Written & Illustrated by Yoshihiro Tatsumi Edited by Adrian Tomine Translated by Yuji Oniki Published by Drawn & Quarterly Reviewed by Michael C Lorah The third and most recent volume of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's gekiga continues to show a subtlety and emotional nihilism not found in the vast majority of the Japanese comics imported to our shores. Nine short stories, ranging from the shattered remains of Hiroshima in the weeks following the World War II atom bombing to then-modern depictions of the working class's daily turmoil in the early 1970s, bring readers into a less romanticized, bleaker era of Japanese history than is typically seen. From the opening narrative, "Hell," Tatsumi dives right into the darkness of Japan's post-War psyche. A shadowy embrace, blasted into a wall, of two people stands as a testament to the love and desire to protect that the Japanese felt for one another when the atomic bomb was dropped -- except, what if it wasn't an embrace? What does it mean to the city's identity if somebody can prove that the shadow depicted a far less charitable moment? Emotionally harrowing, "Hell" is one of Tatsumi's best stories. Other stories deal with the fractured minds of Japanese people, burrowing into protagonists beset by rashes, undone by sexual urges, emotionally dazed by the discovery of a deceased neighbor, conflicted about sexual identity, or wrapped up in serving the various needs of American G.I.s. Few of the stories crescendo in any obvious way: the narrative simply tracks the protagonist from one moment to the next, then moves the reader on to the next tale, leaving the emotional instability of each character to weigh on the reader's mind. Quiet and subdued, Tatsumi's artwork operates as a voyeuristic level: clean, open cartooning that focuses intently on the characters and emotional beats. The backgrounds are rendered and complete, capturing the moment in time, yet Tatsumi knows when to drop the backgrounds out of a panel to focus on the characters' emotional landscape. With myriad body types and distinct postures --often poor ones-- the characters come across as unique individuals, survivors on whose backs the future of modern Japan is built. If you don't like manga, or even if you do, but haven't read Yoshihiro Tatsumi's desolate, personal comics, you really owe it to yourself to read one of the most talented practitioners of the most under-represented genre of manga work. Good-Bye is nine soul-searching tales of a country at a crossroads, looking for an identity and struggling to live with its social taboos. It's dark comics, but it's very good comics too. What It Is Written & Illustrated by Lynda Barry Published by Drawn & Quarterly Reviewed by Michael C Lorah Lynda Barry's What It Is is her creative autobiography and personal theories on art and its creation. The first 130 pages are spent talking about her life and creative thinking, with particular attention paid to the second-guessing creative people are prone to, as well as positing her own theories on how we channel our creative impulses most effectively. With so much theoretical content, it's certainly not a book for everybody, but anybody who's ever tried to write or illustrate anything will certain connect with what Barry's trying to say in these pages. Her observations are incredible sharp, cutting directly through the preconceptions of any reader, while the autobiographical content serves to underscore how Barry herself reached the conclusions she's drawn, literally, on the pages of What It Is. After explaining where she's coming from and the importance of images, capturing the physicality of a memory, sensation, moment, Barry opens up her "Activity Book," a 60-odd page supplement to What It Is's theoretical component - complete with many exercises for would-be authors to use when faced with writer's block or when they're struggling to capture the core of a scene. I can promise that this particular writer will use her suggestions repeatedly. The book itself is extremely well made. The large hardcover has a hand-made quality, which is continued on every aspect. The pages combine art, collage and hand-written notebook-lined paper passages, all "pasted" up on colored paper. Hand-writing, I should add, is a big part of what Barry's driving at in the book, so the aesthetic supports her thesis as well as working to give the book a distinct graphic tone. Chock full of details, each page is a sensory overload, where Barry doodled into every nook and cranny, letting her brain run free until it captured the essence of each page. It's sometimes challenging: you have to read everything to truly absorb the full context of what's being said, but Barry's intelligent enough to make the effort absolutely worthwhile. Plenty of comics have tackled the theoretic elements of creativity in the medium, but only Lynda Barry is exploring creativity as a whole - regardless of your chosen medium. How does a mind connect two ideas, play them off one another, set the scene, examine the palpable reality of the situation? Barry understands, and she wants to help readers find out for themselves. What It Is is the textbook of creative thinking. click here to read more Featured artists Yoshihiro Tatsumi Lynda Barry            Featured products What It Is Good-Bye WHAT IT IS reviewed by Publishers Weekly Updated June 11, 2008 What It Is LYNDA BARRY. Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95 (210p) ISBN 978-1-897299-35-7 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY May This brilliant, beautiful, nearly uncategorizable book is a print version of Barry's famous seminar "Writing the Unthinkable" a class about writing from "images," recollected or imagined moments. It's part cartooning, part handwritten text, part ornate multimedia collage (with heartbreaking pieces of decades-old school papers and words snipped out of old textbooks)-all three appear on almost every page, most of which Barry constructed by decorating every available space on ruled yellow notebook paper. The first and longest section is a bizarre and hilarious memoir of Barry's creative impulses: how they developed when she was a child, how they flickered and faded when she started asking herself "Is this good?" and "Does this suck?" and how they returned when she learned to escape that trap. The core of the book, though, explains the "writing the unthinkable" technique; it's narrated by a sea monster and stars a "magic cephalopod." Finally, Barry shows us a sheaf of her note pad, the pages she fills with doodles and spare phrases while she's working on a "real" project; they are, naturally, as vivid and radiantly eccentric as everything else here. The whole thing is overflowing with quirks, strangeness and charm, and makes palpable Barry's affection for her students and the act of art making itself. (May)   Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   LYNDA BARRY event in New York Magazine's The Word Updated June 11, 2008 NEW YORK MAGAZINE The Word Critic's pick: Lynda Barry May 2008 Legendary alternative-comics writer Barry reads from her latest book (and first for Drawn & Quarterly), What It Is. click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS reviewed by the Chicago Tribune Updated June 11, 2008 What you ought to be reading Julia Keller CHICAGO TRIBUNE June 1, 2008 There is no Nobel Prize for cartoonists, which irks me. (There also is no Nobel Prize for mathematicians, but I can live with that.) When and if the Nobel folks wake up and do the right thing, I am ready with my nomination: Lynda Barry. In her new book, "What It Is" (Drawn & Quarterly), Barry spins around and around and bumps into so many touchstones that you get dizzy right along with her. It's a heavenly hodgepodge of philosophical speculations, biographical musings, funny observations, pointed interrogations and poignant recollections, all wrapped up in the funky, colorful, eclectic artwork that has made the former Chicago resident famous. "Do memories have mass?" she asks. "Do they have motion? Do they have inertia? Why do we say, 'It came to me?' " And just when you're thinking dreamily about the abstractions, she head-butts you right in the belly with something such as this: "My parents were not reading people. They worked, shouted, drank, slapped and belted and were broke. They had affairs and secret lives my two brothers and I had no part in, and if they could have turned back time to the days before we were born, I believe they would have. But there we were." "What It Is" is part diary, part showcase, part manifesto for the power of the imagination. It's bold and beautiful; angry and sad; joyful and loving and nervous. Memo to the members of the Nobel Committee: You could do worse.   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   LYNDA BARRY interviewed by Neal Conan on NPR's Talk of the Nation Updated June 11, 2008 'What It Is' Plumbs the Depths of Creativity TALK OF THE NATION, NPR June 2, 2008 Illustrator Lynda Barry has questions: What is an image? Where is your imagination? What is an imaginary friend, and are there imaginary enemies? Can you have thoughts without language? Barry grapples with these ideas and more in her new book, What It Is. The cartoonist, artist, author and teacher says that in her book of full-page color collages, she is trying to tap into the creative, artistic exploration that comes so easily to children. "Something happens to us as we get a little older," she says. "Adults would never consider [drawing] on a piece of paper and then just throwing it away afterwards. In fact, unless it's valuable afterwards, most adults don't think the experience was worth it. So that's kind of what the book is about. It's about what happens. What happens to that creative urge." click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS reviewed by the Montreal Mirror Updated June 11, 2008 Writing the unthinkable: Lynda Barry explores creativity and risk in What It Is: The Formless Thing Which Gives Things Form by JULIET WATERS The Montreal Mirror May 15 - May 21.2008 Vol. 23 No. 47 When I finally got my copy of Lynda Barry's book on writing What It Is: The Formless Thing Which Gives Things Form, I was like a kid who'd been waiting a year for her Sea Monkey kit to arrive. Last summer, Drawn & Quarterly sent out a teaser section of this book: a crazy, colourful "Activity Book." It was like something your mother might have bought you for a road trip, if your mother was an underground comix genius intent on stretching your brain. It promised fail safe exercises to help you "write the unthinkable." Various characters, like Sea-Ma the tutorial sea monster, and her friend the multi-armed "magic cephalopod," led you through a series of simple, fun exercises for generating images and stories. Barry has a lighthearted creative process that feels something like doodling on a pad while you're on the phone with your muse. I fooled around with it for a while, but for some reason, the exercises alone never quite satisfied me. Just like when I was a kid, pictures of funny characters weren't enough. I needed to have a family of them in their very own sea monkey aquarium. So, I waited for the book. Finally, here it was in all its beauty. And it is beautiful. If you've ever seen the illustrated version of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, you'll recognize the colour scheme. Still, on my first reading of the somewhat murky, meandering opening section, I felt a vague unease. I flipped through watery images seemingly clipped from old school books and bad dreams, images of kittens, spiders and pre-historic fish, collaged around abstract essay questions like "What is an Idea made of?" "Can we remember something that we can’t imagine," and "What year is it in your imagination?" I felt something of the buzzing, bitter irritation that accompanies this question, "Excuse me, but when do these formless things turn into monkeys?" What kept me reading were the autobiographical sections interspersed with cartoons of mean, smoking mothers, rigidly stupid teachers and perfect, taunting classmates. Barry is best known for her comics, but I'm a big fan of her writing, particularly her coming-of-age novel Cruddy. These are invariably grim, bleak, absurdist tales of homily, poor children deprived of emotional warmth. Stories barren of all hope, except for the vague sense that someone out there must care about these kids, or no one would know this was a story. Barry's own tale about her creative death and re-awakening is compelling enough to get anyone through the first reading of the cryptic first section. It is a story that will probably resonate with any reader who grew up in the '70s or '80s, as they gave up crayons for television, and creating for consuming. This story leads to an epiphany of sorts, that creativity only thrives if you develop a tolerance for uncertainty. Most writing books lure you in with easy promises. Follow the simple formula and you will write that novel, screenplay, memoir. Do this and there'll be sea monkeys, and they'll live forever. Essentially, it's the same thing that most of our media promises us. Subscribe to this cable company/internet provider/DVD mail plan, and you will never run out of interesting, stimulating things to entertain you. And it's true, you won't. That is certain, as long as you continue to believe one thing: that there is nothing interesting for you to do with your own mind and a piece of paper. Barry's book promises something else. Risk that queasy feeling of boredom and uncertainly, and you'll never run out of things that can be created. Try this. Try that. And one day, inevitably, the monkeys you made on your own will be even bigger and weirder and better than the ones you thought you needed to order.   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   WHAT IT IS reviewed by the Onion Updated June 11, 2008 Comics Of Note Comics Panel: May 19, 2008 Reviewed by Donna Bowman, Noel Murray, Tasha Robinson Most contemporary art-comics look like they were more fun to make than they are to read, but the trend toward overpriced collections of page-long mixed-media scrawling has produced a few exciting hybrids of comics and fine art. Lynda Barry's offbeat collection What It Is (Drawn & Quarterly) makes a fine case in point. In short illustrated essays, Barry reminisces about how her interest in art and writing developed from childhood to young adulthood, and she muses about how and why creativity becomes a more self-conscious, unnatural act as we get older. In between the essays, Barry presents page after page of striking collages on which she's written questions designed to get readers to pick up pens and make their own art. What It Is borders on the shapeless and even pretentious, but Barry's down-to-earth prose style and earnest interest in a deeper understanding makes the book cumulatively moving. It isn't just a comic; it's a conversation piece. A- click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS reviewed by The Clevland Plain Dealer Updated June 11, 2008 Vibrant picture books entertain the adult child Sunday, May 11, 2008 Karen Sandstorm Plain Dealer Reporter Those idea was it to take the pictures away from all the grownup books? Certainly no one who foresaw how visual our world would become by way of television and then computers. Nor anyone who understood the rich conversations between text and illustrations on the page. But the exponential growth of the so-called graphic novel (a troublesome term, as plenty aren't novels at all) speaks to the increasing desire among some grownups to be bewitched by the artist's pen even as they're whisked away by suspense, revelation and other qualities of storytelling. Always on the hunt for the beautifully illustrated book that also has something to say, I found a quartet recently that offer satisfaction at different levels. The most mesmerizing is the brand new What It is (Drawn & Quarterly, 208 pp., $24.95), in which artist and essayist Lynda Barry takes a unique approach to a time-worn form: the creativity guide. These books usually grant permission for the reader to reconnect with his or her freer, more creative inner child, and lash back at the critics who trample artistic hearts. Thus did Julie Cameron give writers "The Artist's Way." More recently, artist Danny Gregory did it with pen-and-ink drawings in his guide, "Creative License." Barry enables her readers, too, in a beautifully produced hardback highly illustrated with collage and combinations of cartoons and text on what appears to be yellow legal paper. She posits ideas and questions such as, "To follow a wandering mind means having to get lost. Can you stand being lost?" In drawings, cut-and-pasted text from old books and letters, and clipped images from unspecified sources, Barry tells her own story of creativity, then leads readers to the inevitable exercises to help them jump-start their own ideas. It's one thing to crack the creativity pinata and another to organize the goodies into a readable book or a piece of art that someone else wants to consume -- thus the high ratio of people who, say, have an idea for a novel versus the number that actually write one. "What It Is" is all about whomping the pinata and not about how to turn those newly minted thoughts into poems or essays. I didn't care. Barry's intricate pages, with their jumble of birds and monsters, sea creatures and flowers, kept me entranced.   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   WHAT IT IS reviewed by Pop Candy Updated June 10, 2008 Exclusive peek: Lynda Barry's 'What It Is' By Whitney Matheson May 19, 2008 POP CANDY, USA TODAY Lynda Barry is one of the artists who got me into comics. While living in Chicago, I read Barry's weekly strip in the Chicago Reader and instantly fell in love with her characters, which evoke layers of childhood wonder, curiosity, humor and sadness. Over the years, I have devoured Barry's books, including The Greatest of Marlys (my favorite), One Hundred Demons (read it in one sitting), The Freddie Stories (also awesome) and Cruddy (a heartbreaking, disturbing coming-of-age novel). I don't have any tattoos, but, if I ever get one, I've considered inking myself with a Lynda Barry-drawn octopus. They are the best. Anyway, Barry's new book just arrived in stores, and it's a part-memoir, part-creativity guide called What It Is (Drawn and Quarterly, $24.95). In it, the artist shares her life story and art-making advice via colorful collages and narrative pages. If you're stuck on an artistic project, this might help you get out of that rut. The book could also make a fun gift for that artsy person in your life. Below is an exclusive, seven-page excerpt from the new work. Click the images to enlarge them. If you want a signed copy, Barry will be appearing at this year's MoCCA Art Festival in New York. Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS reviewed by Philadelphia City Paper Updated June 10, 2008 On the DL Lynda Barry by Sam Adams PHILADELPHIA CITY PAPER June 3, 2008 Lynda Barry once wrote that the good times were killing her, but the bad times seem to have brought her back. With her comics falling out of print (CP dropped her syndicated Ernie Pook's Comeek in 2006 after a 20-year run) and her publisher rejecting new work, Barry channeled her creative energies into teaching a workshop called "Writing the Unthinkable," which in turn formed the basis for What It Is (Drawn and Quarterly, $24.95). Part memoir, part manifesto and part workbook, the pages of What It Is overflow with text, collage and brightly colored images, which, she writes, are "alive in the way thinking is not, but experiencing is." Using pictures to key memory (as ever, the basis of her work), Barry explores the artistic impulse at its root: What makes us create, and how can we free that impulse from the fetters of self-doubt? At once inspired and inspirational, What It Is is a shot in the arm for artists and admirers alike.   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   WHAT IT IS reviewed by Philadelphia Weekly Updated June 10, 2008 Lit Gloss Lynda Barry’s What It Is. by Liz Spikol PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY June 10, 2008 At first glance, cartoonist Lynda Barry’s latest book What It Is is a beautiful, meandering scrapbook that’s part Joseph Cornell and part Annie Dillard. Collages made from legal pads, glitter, book fragments, scraps of student assignments and Barry’s incredible drawings, doodlings, lettering and watercolors shimmer on each page. The juxtapositions are startling and eloquent. Mixed in with rabbits, birds and Abraham Lincoln stamps are meditations on big ideas: reality vs. imagination; the nature of memory; what images mean; what’s lost when childhood cedes to adulthood. Barry asks questions like, “When an unexpected memory comes calling, who answers?” The book’s rich landscape encourages the discovery of personal responses. On other pages, Barry comic-strips her childhood development as an artist. At one point she becomes mildly obsessed with the image of the gorgon. She now realizes children need monsters to counter other disappointments. “Did the gorgon help me love my mother?” Barry writes. “I think she helped me very much.” The theme of what children feel is an enduring one in What It Is. Barry says as children we were free from the Two Questions—“Is this good?” or “Does it suck?”—that came to dominate Barry’s adult life as an artist. Barry argues persuasively that the sudden thoughts, patience, inclination to play and spontaneity children naturally have are essential to enjoying the process. To that end, the latter part of the book is a remarkably unconventional writing manual with a monster named “Sea-Ma” as “class monitor.” Almost halfway through Barry writes, “Kids like making marks that make shapes that make stories. Adults are scared to do this.” Most adults, maybe. But not Lynda Barry. What It Is, above all, is fearless. » Thurs., June 5, 7pm. Free. Free Library, 1901 Vine St. 215.686.5322. www.freelibrary.org click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS reviewed by Entertainment Weekly Updated May 30, 2008 WHAT IT IS ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY May 20, 2008 Lynda Barry's What It Is is a unique, transporting, inspirational book. The well-known underground comics artist (''Ernie Pook's Comeek''), memoirist (One! Hundred! Demons!), and novelist (Cruddy) offers with this volume a way to create art. Inspired by one of her college teachers' methods but marinated in Barry's own decades as an artist and writer, What It Is is filled with drawings, collages, diary entries, and paintings — all examples of work she has created via the deceptively simple techniques she propounds. This beautifully designed volume is intended to look like the stuffed workbook of a vivid imagination, and as Barry insists, anyone with persistence, time, and will can create art of some degree of quality. I usually cringe at sentiments like this, not believing for a second that most of us possess one percent of the free-flowing creativity of Barry. But there's a lot to be said for Barry's open-hearted generosity, sincerity, and earnestness — her contagiously exciting belief that creating even the most amateurish art not only nourishes the soul but can lead to renewed clarity and purpose in life. I realize this sounds like a lot to heap upon a book of cartoony sketches and you-can-do-it-too advice, but What It Is is itself a fine work of art — not merely a valuable addition to Lynda Barry's achievements, but something of an explanation of how she achieved them. A — Ken Tucker   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   WHAT IT IS reviewed by Book By Its Cover Updated May 30, 2008 WHAT IT IS BOOK BY ITS COVER 5.12.08 You may have noticed a new ad popped up on the blog of the cover of the new Lynda Barry book I am about to review. The book is available now from Drawn and Quarterly and you should get your hands on one as soon as possible. It’s gorgeous. Between auto-biographical comics are these incredible collages that ask questions that will confuse your creative brain like- “What is an image?” or “Can we imagine something that we can’t remember?” Lynda’s comic-drawn self says “The thing I call ‘my mind’ seems to be kind of a landlord that doesn’t really know its tenants.” Through these pages, filled to the brim with funny drawings, comic anecdotes from her past and collaged bits of books, stamps and childhood writing, Lynda explores herself as an artist and challenges you to do the same. The back of the book even has some activities you can try to get your imaginative ideas flowing like making a word bag - you collect a bunch of words and pick blindly from the bag to spark a thought. When I look up Lynda Barry on Wikipedia, it calls her “one of the most successful non-mainstream American cartoonists” because of her weekly comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek and her numerous publications. Her book The Good Times are Killing Me was even made into a play click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS reviewed by the Montreal Mirror Updated May 29, 2008 Writing the unthinkable >>Lynda Barry explores creativity and risk in What It Is: The Formless Thing Which Gives Things Form by JULIET WATERS MONTREAL MIRROR May 15, 2008 When I finally got my copy of Lynda Barry’s book on writing What It Is: The Formless Thing Which Gives Things Form, I was like a kid who’d been waiting a year for her Sea Monkey kit to arrive. Last summer, Drawn & Quarterly sent out a teaser section of this book: a crazy, colourful “Activity Book.” It was like something your mother might have bought you for a road trip, if your mother was an underground comix genius intent on stretching your brain. It promised fail safe exercises to help you “write the unthinkable.” Various characters, like Sea-Ma the tutorial sea monster, and her friend the multi-armed “magic cephalopod,” led you through a series of simple, fun exercises for generating images and stories. Barry has a lighthearted creative process that feels something like doodling on a pad while you’re on the phone with your muse. I fooled around with it for a while, but for some reason, the exercises alone never quite satisfied me. Just like when I was a kid, pictures of funny characters weren’t enough. I needed to have a family of them in their very own sea monkey aquarium. So, I waited for the book. Finally, here it was in all its beauty. And it is beautiful. If you’ve ever seen the illustrated version of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, you’ll recognize the colour scheme. Still, on my first reading of the somewhat murky, meandering opening section, I felt a vague unease. I flipped through watery images seemingly clipped from old school books and bad dreams, images of kittens, spiders and pre-historic fish, collaged around abstract essay questions like “What is an Idea made of?” “Can we remember something that we can’t imagine,” and “What year is it in your imagination?” I felt something of the buzzing, bitter irritation that accompanies this question, “Excuse me, but when do these formless things turn into monkeys?” What kept me reading were the autobiographical sections interspersed with cartoons of mean, smoking mothers, rigidly stupid teachers and perfect, taunting classmates. Barry is best known for her comics, but I’m a big fan of her writing, particularly her coming-of-age novel Cruddy. These are invariably grim, bleak, absurdist tales of homily, poor children deprived of emotional warmth. Stories barren of all hope, except for the vague sense that someone out there must care about these kids, or no one would know this was a story. Barry’s own tale about her creative death and re-awakening is compelling enough to get anyone through the first reading of the cryptic first section. It is a story that will probably resonate with any reader who grew up in the ’70s or ’80s, as they gave up crayons for television, and creating for consuming. This story leads to an epiphany of sorts, that creativity only thrives if you develop a tolerance for uncertainty. Most writing books lure you in with easy promises. Follow the simple formula and you will write that novel, screenplay, memoir. Do this and there’ll be sea monkeys, and they’ll live forever. Essentially, it’s the same thing that most of our media promises us. Subscribe to this cable company/internet provider/DVD mail plan, and you will never run out of interesting, stimulating things to entertain you. And it’s true, you won’t. That is certain, as long as you continue to believe one thing: that there is nothing interesting for you to do with your own mind and a piece of paper. Barry’s book promises something else. Risk that queasy feeling of boredom and uncertainly, and you’ll never run out of things that can be created. Try this. Try that. And one day, inevitably, the monkeys you made on your own will be even bigger and weirder and better than the ones you thought you needed to order.   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   WHAT IT IS reviewed by The Village Voice Updated May 29, 2008 [BOOK] PEEK-A-POOK Lynda Barry emerges for a round of applause VILLAGE VOICE May 27th, 2008 Cartoonist and former Voice contributor Lynda Barry asks many questions in her new book, What It Is, like "What is the past?" and "Where is a story before it becomes words?" In the scrapbook/journal/workbook, Barry answers these questions by recalling her troubled childhood, making it something like a prequel to her most popular work, Ernie Pook's Comeek, the 30-year comic strip responsible for her cult following and several books, including The Good Times Are Killing Me (adapted into an Off-Broadway musical), Cruddy, and One! Hundred! Demons! Now living a semi-reclusive life on a farm in Wisconsin, Barry is being dragged back into the spotlight with the publication of the new book. So go see the creator of Marlys before she disappears again! At 7, Strand Bookstore, 828 Broadway, 212-473-1452, free ARACELI CRUZ click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS reviewed by Time Out New York Updated May 29, 2008 What It Is Time Out New York May 29–Jun 4, Lynda Barry's latest book is both an instruction manual on creativity and an outpouring of questions about the nature of memory, imagination and art. What It Is begins with a comic about Barry, best known for her weekly strip Ernie Pook's Comeek, struggling with the uncontrollable, compulsive tendencies of her thoughts-but we soon learn it is the mind's very independence that allows images and stories to come to us effortlessly if we'd just stop "trying." Much of Barry's advice involves losing the self-consciousness of adulthood and recapturing the way you thought as a child. Kids play and create with purity of intent-not unlike Barry, whose work has an undeniable sincerity. The book interweaves pages of comics and collage. The comics chronicle Barry's relationship with art throughout her life, including a heartbreaking story in which 10-year-old Barry earnestly applies to a "Do You Have Hidden Artistic Talent?" scam ad in the back of a magazine. Meanwhile, the collage pages jump-start the imagination with questions ("Did you ever have a toy that scared you?") and sentence fragments varying from the surreal ("Locomotive is my name") to the insistent ("Pretend you are a writer"). The book suffers a little from the frequent shifts between mediums: The comics themselves are a mesmerizing Disneyland ride, but looking at the collages is often more like just walking around the park. The various sections also contain quite a bit of repetition. Still, Barry composes with such urgency-you need to break free and start creating now or it will be too late-that it builds into an inspirational chant. And to answer the most important question: Does this book make you want to sit down and start creating? Absolutely.   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   WHAT IT IS on Jog The Blog Updated May 28, 2008 "Come On Come On! Remember to Forget to Forget to Remember" What It Is JOG THE BLOG 5/25/2008 This is the much-anticipated new book from Lynda Barry, her first with publisher Drawn and Quarterly. I don't think it's out in Direct Market stores just yet, but some large bookstores should have it right now. It's a 208-page hardcover, sized at 11" x 8.5", priced at $24.95. You won't easily gloss it over on the shelves. That's reassuring; Barry may be an experienced, influential figure in alternative comics -- her signature weekly strip, Ernie Pook's Comeek (which D&Q will reprint in five collected volumes starting later this year), has been running for over one quarter of a century -- but she doesn't have a terribly pronounced presence in book form. Most collections of her work are out of print, and even highly-acclaimed recent books like 2002's One! Hundred! Demons! (from Sasquatch Books, collecting material from Salon.com) can be tricky to find offline. But D&Q, fully in spite of its size, excels at getting its projects into a broad range of venues, often with a supple backing of varied media attention. It'll be interesting to see what those sources make of What It Is, a colorful, sometimes cacophonous mix of 'How To' writing instruction, philosophic text and creative autobiography, adopting the visual attributes of anything that might meld words and pictures, be it comics, collage or activity workpages. Steeped in personal reflection and lessons learned from valued teachers -- not to mention the author's own Writing the Unthinkable seminars -- it's as crisply straightforward in presentation as any student could like, yet as elusive and challenging in certain passages as the questions it confronts, those Barry deems fundamental to the individual human experience. Memory, imagination, myth, thought, meaning, image - all are addressed, perhaps in so individual a manner that those looking for basic writing instruction from a glance at the cover might find it all unduly digressive, a bit arty for adequate tutoring as to the arts. But I'm not sure how else this book could have read, given Barry's take on the inseparability of creation and being, the impossible beauty of transubstantiating the several species of recollection, the immaterial, into the experiential. The bulk of the book's space is occupied by a 133-page section titled, appropriately, What It Is. As you can see, the paper stock is blue, the images themselves appear to have been composed on sheets from a yellow notepad, and all of the text is handwritten, with certain words displayed in cursive, just as a typical comic book dialog bubble might set some words in bold. Other elements of the page include drawings, as exuberantly doodled as any Barry has done, and 'found' elements pasted down among the rest. Across the scope of her narrative, Barry suggests the importance of everything we can see that she has done. For most of the 'blue' section, the narrative alternates between two modes: (1) text and drawing-heavy narration, tracking some of the author's experiences from childhood forward; and (2) "Essay Questions" illuminated through intensive mixed-media displays, involving bits of old textbooks, altered photographs, childlike scribbles, snatches from a cache of elementary school assignments dating back to the 1920s and other miscellaneous objects. The overall texture is that of a deeply purposeful scrapbook; when Barry opts to plug in a 13-page story that first appeared in McSweeny's, it looks as if she may have literally cut the pages out of copies of the original publication, laying it all down on her yellow base. Both modes are autobiographical; that becomes clear very quickly. There's a telling bit later on in the book in which Barry presents some of her initial mixed-media designs for the Penguin Deluxe Classics cover of Little Women she was commissioned to do - her initial plan was rejected by the art director for not looking enough like 'her' work, a reaction she found both funny and sad (I wonder what that art director made of Frank Miller?). As such, Barry's 'mode one' narrative begins with her initial childlike inability to segregate living things from images, which she uses as a springboard for discussing how some images are indeed alive in the manner of memories and imaginings. Images are the base of Barry's concept of 'writing' -- in contrast to events or impressions -- and as the narrative proceeds, realizations and metaphors spring up to accompany the girl's growth. "We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay." So declares Barry as she muses on the transportation of reading, which in the uncertainty of recollection can become just as vivid as 'real' experiences. She tells of her favorite mythic monster, the Gorgon, who helped her understand her own mother, although she also explodes the notion into a larger metaphor of passive media consumption -- watching television -- as turning one to stone, both to the effect of pleasurably destroying oscillating life emotions (even providing some creative inspiration!), and freezing the recollected life into a prepared flow of images while rendering the viewer perfectly still. I have to wonder if the reader of a comic would be any less still if the characters could stare out past the fourth wall, but I presume by this understanding that the reader's involvement with filling in the gutters would transport them inside the work. All of this is bolstered by Barry's 'mode two' creations, which aren't so much answers to her omnipresent queries ("We do not know the answers," she remarks up front), as marshallings of how the contours of those questions can be understood through creative work, writing presented as the natural extension of reading. There's an excellent image repeated twice (with some variation) in the book, depicting Barry as a child seated in a darkened room, a square source of light transfixing her - the initial impression is that of a television, but Barry's linework within the light source suggests a scribbly drawing of shapes, that which lays close but cannot immediately be grasped without desire. It's perhaps the best of several visual metaphors at work in a book not lacking for anything of the type. Connections pile up as the narrative goes on. Barry does not address drawing as drawing-for-comics, but insists on the power of writing by hand: drawing words. This is linked to the concept of childhood 'play,' which can be very much like work to a young kid left alone. But just as kids give up many forms of play as they grow self-conscious to societal standards of behavior, so do people stop creating when confronted with democratic or academic decrees of what 'good' art is; this does not sit well with Barry, whose advocation of creation, writing, is in the form of a personal means of expression best kept far away from the concerns of audience or commerce, in that way that one needn't take the stage to breathe. Ah, but Barry is a respected, successful artist, one who did eventually revise that book cover! This not unimportant facet of her experience forms the concluding pages of the blue section, in which the eventual demands of art-as-work extends the societal concept of 'good' art into Two Questions the author finds surrounding her work, as she works: "Is this good?" and "Does this suck?" She depicts it as a paralyzing dichotomy, abrogated only by a temporary abandonment of the very concept of 'good' work when actually creating (Marion Milner's On Not Being Able to Paint is duly cited). After all, Barry characterizes her own career as a cartoonist as accidental; to invoke one of her own explanatory tales, writing is like setting your life free from a can, and while fame or fortune or even a living wage cannot be guaranteed, being out of the can is its own powerful joy. The rest of the book serves to spur action or reflecting regarding what has gone before. There's a 37-page pink section titled Activity Book -- a good portion of which served as D&Q's Free Comic Book Day giveaway for 2007 -- which provides more pointed, exercise-driven instruction from Barry and her cast of characters (a multi-eyed beastie called Sea-Man, a helpful Magic Cephalopod), much of it taking the form of expanding memory points into environments, keeping the hand moving at all times, basic steps to shore up (or establish) the bond between thought and language. A 15-page green section called Let's Make a Free Writing Kit focuses on tools to use in furthering your exercise, and a 22-page orange section, Notes on Notes, serves as both a slightly obscure appendix -- letting the reader see what Barry was doodling while working on other pages -- and a further extension of the artist's always-writing ethos, always personal. But maybe it's the most appropriate way to 'end' a book that can't have an ending. What It Is surely isn't going to lead anyone into creating a commercially viable or particularly entertaining work, because it aches to address the creative impulse on a more primal level, one of sheer self-satisfaction as a means to assure one's self of simple aliveness. As a result, it can only end with the end of life itself, and can otherwise spread into every evocative and opaque form, neat or unruly. This book is all of that, but it's mostly a success in embodying how emphatic Barry is about her means of creation, and how far inside she's ready to climb. click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is WHAT IT IS reviewed by The Austin Chronicle Updated May 1, 2008 Your Library Wants These Bad Four graphic volumes for your entertainment and edification BY WAYNE ALAN BRENNER MAY 2, 2008 What It Is You know those books that, putatively, explore what it means to be creative? Those books that, it seems, are written for people who'd really like to spend their time making art but are just too busy doing, well, other things – watching the latest episode of Lost, meeting pals for a drink at their local, shopping – to ever get around to it? This isn't one of those. This is what all those books, if they got together and looked deep into their printed souls, might admit that they truly wished they could be. This is the artist Lynda Barry at her enthusiastic best, her most sincerely encouraging, urging readers toward journeys of self-discovery and the joy of making, of appreciating, art. And how does she do this? How does she communicate such ideas, all the while documenting her own travels through those vivid realms? With artwork. With page after page of collaged images and words, with original cartoons and paintings and notes lovingly delivered via sumi-e handwriting and calligraphy. The beauty here, the sheer complexity, is almost overwhelming. It's like, um, seeing a dozen simultaneous sunrises on acid while a redheaded life coach whispers in your ear that you never have to let go of the parts of childhood that are eternally worthwhile. So of course every single page of this volume from Drawn & Quarterly is in full, gorgeous color on good thick paper. So of course, because you're alive, we recommend this book to you.   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is   WHAT IT IS in Vanity Fair Updated April 30, 2008 “The collages in legendary cartoonist Lynda Barry’s What It Is (Drawn & Quarterly) are a bathysphere-like odyssey through the depths of her funky subconscious,” so says Elissa Schappel of VF’s Hot Type column Featured artist Lynda Barry            Featured product What It Is Core female cartoonists as named by Booklist Updated March 27, 2008 My New York Diary. By Julie Doucet. 2d ed. 2004. Drawn & Quarterly, paper, $15.95 (9781896597836). With brutal honesty, Doucet, creator of the underground comic Dirty Plotte, looks back on her harrowing bohemian days in Manhattan. Her loopy, cluttered drawings and postfeminist insouciance lend her account improbable charm. One Hundred Demons. By Lynda Barry. 2002. Sasquatch, $24.95 (9781570613371); paper, $17.95 (9781570614590). This collection of long stories by the creator of the weekly Ernie Pook’s Comeek is based on an art exercise that Barry uses to exorcise personal demons, among them, old boyfriends, grandmas, liars, hippies, the 2000 election, and her own bad behavior. Summer of Love. By Debbie Drechsler. 2002. Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95 (1-896597-37-8); paper, $16.95 (1-896597-65-3). Ninth-grader Lily has moved with her family to a new community and must find her place in her new high school’s pecking order. Drechsler compellingly captures the angst, insecurities, and petty feuds typical of the teen years as Lily tries to make friends and sexually awakens. We Are on Our Own. By Miriam Katin. 2006. Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95 (9781896597201). The first graphic novel by 63-year-old animator Katin recounts how she and her mother faked their deaths and fled Budapest after the Nazis occupied it. Passages set decades later reveal that Katin’s experiences deprived her of any religious faith to pass on to her child.   click here to read more Featured artists Debbie Drechsler Miriam Katin Lynda Barry            Featured products My New York Diary (paperback) We Are On Our Own What It Is   From The Desk of Betty Bong...New Lynda Barry Workshop Updated January 3, 2008 Hellooooo beautifuls, New new new WRITING THE UNTHINKABLE with LYNDA BARRY class -- just announced! Beautiful Madison, Wisconsin! Do you like cheese, hmmmm??? Well, how about beer??? It is so great there! Only 28 seats left! Only six weeks away! Get BUSY! Just $200.00 for this amazing two-day class! Two six-hour days! You will laugh -- you will work your butt off -- we will all write the unthinkable! Okay -- just write to me, Betty Bong, at fromthedeskofmarlys@yahoo.com and I will tell you where to send your tuition! You will send it straight to Lynda! It is a simple and satisfying enrollment process! Send me an e-mail right now! THANKS +++ I love being y'all's secretary... Betty Bong Secretary, WTU PS -- yes! we hear you! more classes all over USA and Canada in 2008 -- stay tuned for classes in San Fran, L.A., PIttsburgh, NYC, Toronto, Montreal, and more! OUR MYSPACE SPOT http://www.myspace.com/writingtheunthinkable LYNDA BARRY "What It Is" OUT June 2008 on Drawn and Quarterly http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/ FAN SITE http://www.marlysmagazine.com/ click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            LYNDA BARRY reviewed by Comixology Updated December 7, 2007 COMIXOLOGY By Shaenon K. Garrity Thursday December 6, 2007 10:00:00 am According to Spurge (www.comicsreporter.com) and the Drawn & Quarterly blog, Lynda Barry is moving her comics online in response to the loss of weekly newspaper clients. I've been reading Barry's comics online at the! excellent! Marlys Magazine (www.marlysmagazine.com) for years now, but it startled and saddened me to learn that she has trouble making a living through the newsweeklies. Not that it's a huge surprise; the newspaper comics market is brutal these days, and, from what I've heard, weekly cartoonists are hit particularly hard. Alt-weekly newspapers have always comprised a small pool of clients without a whole lot of money, and in the current market, with virtually all print media forced to cut corners, they're especially hard to sell to. All the weekly cartoonists I've talked to recently are trying to expand into other formats—daily strips, graphic novels—or thinking seriously about getting out of the weekly strip biz entirely. And that's a shame, because I love weekly strips. Some of my favorite comics are weeklies: Keith Knight's The K Chronicles, Carol Lay's Story Minute and WayLay, Matt Groening's Life in Hell, Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For (although I'm always faintly perturbed to come out as Stuart on the "Which Dyke Are You?" LiveJournal quiz, no matter how many times I take it). It's a great format, allowing a little more space and flexibility than the traditional four-panel daily strip, but still encompassing a satisfyingly concise chunk of comic. It may also be worth mentioning that the alt-weeklies have traditionally attracted more diverse cartoonists than other areas of American comics, as suggested by the fact that only one of the cartoonists I've mentioned so far is white and male, as compared to almost all the cartoonists I've mentioned in my last three columns. But Lynda Barry...even in hard times, Lynda Barry shouldn't have to struggle. Last year, when that big Masters of American Comics show toured the country, a lot of people complained that there wasn't a Mistress of American Comics anywhere among the fifteen chosen artists. Loudmouthed feminist that I am, I was one of the complainers. But in all honesty, there's only one female American cartoonist I'd consider worthy of joining the admittedly exalted ranks of Eisner, Kirby, Kurtzman, Schulz and Crumb, and that's Lynda Barry. She's that good. (I won't get into the thorny issue of who I would've knocked off the list to make room for her. Oh, all right, Gary Panter. Or maybe one of the action strip guys.) In college, I went through a phase of obsession with Barry's weekly strip, the unforgettably titled Ernie Pook's Comeek. At the time, it ran in the Village Voice, next to Life in Hell, and I used to get back issues of the Voice out of the Vassar library and photocopy all the Ernie Pook strips. I carried them around with me in a folder and memorized them. The discovery that there were actual Ernie Pook collections, often available at the secondhand bookstores in New York City to which I would escape whenever I had train fare, was a revelation akin to first looking into Chapman's Homer. I am not too proud to admit that the best story I wrote for my senior composition class, one of the stories I submitted in place of a thesis, was written in a voice that owed an enormous, possibly actionable debt to Lynda Barry. Even after I accumulated all of Barry's strip collections (and her novels, and errata like the oversized, glorious illustrated essay Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!), her work remained somehow semi-mythical. There were strips in that folder I've never seen reprinted, like a sequence relating certain events from The Freddie Stories, wherein Marlys' little brother Freddy undergoes horrible traumas and metamorphoses into the flamboyant Skreddy 57, from Marlys' point of view. What happened to those strips? They're not gone. I still have that folder somewhere. Barry's comics are often crude on the level of draftsmanship but beautiful in all the ways that count. They tell painful truths, mostly about growing up, but we never stop growing up so they never stop being painful. I still laugh every time read one of the earliest Ernie Pook strips, "The Night We All Threw Up," where every throwaway detail is hilarious and perfect (when the kids establish sleeping-bag territories, Arna labels Marlys' area "'Land of Marlys' also known as 'Butt Island'" and her own "My land which was gorgeous and smelled like perfume from France." How many times have I used the phrase "smelled like perfume from France" in conversation? A lot of times, that's how many times). And I still cry reading One Hundred Demons. There's a time in your life when the world is made of glittering possibilities dangling just out of reach, and if the magic isn't out there you might as well die. Barry lives in that time. What a terrible and wonderful fate. We all have a few writers and artists who are specifically ours, the ones who hit us so hard in a very particular, personal place that their mark will be on us forever. And there are usually some oddball names on that short list. For me, it's Daniel Pinkwater and Lynda Barry. 2 good 2 be 4gotten, to quote The Lynda Barry Experience. The Village Voice dumped Ernie Pook and Life in Hell years ago to make room for a sports page. I'm glad I can still read Barry's comics online. And I'll be first in line for her upcoming book What It Is. So things aren't so bad. But I declare it a shame that some other weird teenager, not so long from now, can't clip Ernie Pooks for her personal mobile shrine.   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry              LYNDA BARRY Free Comic in The Arizona Daily Star Updated July 17, 2007 Here's a freebie that's eye-catching ALBERT CHING ARIZONA DAILY STAR 3 May 2007 NPR/indie rock fan? Search for the "Lynda Barry Sampler," a collection of works from the noted nonmainstream cartoonist, put out by Drawn and Quarterly, which publishes thoughtful, definitely nonsuperhero comics. Bonus points: Barry used to date "This American Life" host Ira Glass. Featured artist Lynda Barry            Lynda Barry in Newsarama Updated May 22, 2007 05/21/07 NEWSARAMA Activity Book (an excerpt from What It Is) (Drawn + Quarterly; review by Mike) – This little FCBD gem stuck up on me, printing a preview of Lynda Barry’s upcoming book, What It Is, due spring 2008. Barry currently teaches the writing workshop Writing the Unthinkable, and in this comic’s pages, she translates the exercises of her workshop into comics form. Activity Book mixes her hilarious, chaotic, design-oriented illustrations with a series of exercises meant to strengthen the writer’s ability to visualize scenes and translate them to a page. True to its name, it has places where the reader/writer is encouraged to make his or her mark directly onto the comic itself. The exercises, though repetitive (one can hope that the full-length book will have some more variety), are interesting and helpful. I suspect that this will be the first comic since Jill Thompson’s Scary Godmother Activity Book that I’ll mark up with my own pencil!   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry              Lynda Barry on Jog - The Blog Updated May 16, 2007 5/14/2007 The Internet is my benefactor. JOG - THE BLOG *In a short follow-up to something I mentioned the other day, I finally got a hold of Drawn & Quarterly's Free Comic Book Day thing from this year, a little pamphlet titled Activity Book, which is actually an excerpt from Lynda Barry's Spring 2008 project What It Is. I didn't manage to find any loose copied sitting around in stores, by the way - luckily, someone with an extra copy heard my cries and gave me free comics succor, which was nice. I'm pretty glad I got a copy of this book, because it strikes me as one of the most personal of the 'How To Make Comics' projects that tend to proliferate on FCBD, being essentially a series of excercises the reader can perform in order to get their storytelling juices flowing. Lots of emphasis on observation, and (moreover) developing skills in transmuting silent personal observations into something that might eventually resound on the page. It's not so much geared toward the communicative, in the writer-audience sense, but the writer's own solitude in processing the stuff of past and present surroundings into the stuff of stories. As a result, it naturally adopts a more personalized feel, as Barry cannot avoid spilling out her own interior workings in teasing out better workings within the reader. I think I was most struck by the element of anxiousness in the book, a real grasp of how little illusion barriers crop up to impede progress toward storytelling, especially the simplest illusion of believing, simply, that you don't have much of interest to say. Barry is wise enough to know that a mere ticking off of events in a person's life doesn't really make for good stories, nor does purely swimming in emotion - she posits the wielding of the 'image' as necessary, that being not necessarily drawings but charged things that crackle with the stuff of living, as opposed to the 'obituary' nature of facts' simple relation. Above all, the act of creation is held up as a self-evident good, one that needs no attachment to the validation of capital or reknown to better the outlook of the creator - this isn't a recipe for 'breaking in' to any industry or whatnot, but a genuine attempt to promote what Barry sees as the betterment of life itself. As a result, it doesn't care much to deal with 'styles' or trends of the sort - heaven knows some readers may find Barry's own patchwork visual approach to be cluttered, although her linework is disarmingly smooth and lovely. I appreciated it as a dumping out of the contents of one head to facilitate further dumpings on the part of the reader, and I think it's a worthy FCBD pursuit to put out a book of that sort. So, I'm saying I'm glad I got the thing. I do believe D&Q will send you a copy with any order from their online store, if you can't find one and don't want to wait until Spring 2008. click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry            Salon.com gives Lynda Barry Free Comic A+ Updated May 8, 2007 Steal this comic From superheroes to "The Simpsons," ultraviolence to kid stuff, our guide to Free Comic Book Day offers graphic fun for all. By Douglas Wolk SALON.COM Activity Book (Drawn & Quarterly) Lynda Barry, the cartoonist behind "Ernie Pook's Comeek," teaches an unusual sort of writing workshop. This excerpt from a forthcoming book is basically her introductory lesson, and it's a joy in its own right, deliciously drawn (with fragments of collage worked into each page), insightful and bubbling with delight in the process of artistic creation. A+   click here to read more Featured artist Lynda Barry              World Literature Today spolights D+Q authors Updated March 16, 2007 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY March- April 2007 Lynda Barry, Miriam Katin, Guy Delisle, Jason Lutes, Chester Brown click here to download the PDF (1.44 MB) Featured artists Guy Delisle Miriam Katin Lynda Barry            Featured products We Are On Our Own Shenzhen: A Travelogue From China D+Q to publish Lynda Barry Updated January 17, 2007 For Immediate Release As reported in this week's issue of Publishers Weekly, Drawn & Quarterly has announced plans to publish seven titles by the acclaimed and legendary cartoonist Lynda Barry, starting in 2008 through 2011. The publishing plan includes new material, collected material and plans to reprint the complete seminal strip "Ernie Pook's Comeek" which was created in 1979, and has been syndicated for more than two decades. The deal includes world english rights. Barry's first book "What It Is" will be comprised of completely new material and will be published in early 2008. Following "What It Is" in Fall 2007, is the first of a five-volume hardcover reprint collection of "Ernie Pook's Comeek." Each of the five volumes in the reprint series will have an introduction penned by Barry herself, complete with visual ephemera. Also planned is a new collection of Barry's freelance work for various magazines over the years. In May of 2007, Drawn & Quarterly will publish a "Free Comic Book Day" issue with all Lynda Barry material. "Lynda Barry is one of the world's most influential, inventive and ground breaking contemporary cartoonists whose fans stretch well beyond the comic book medium," said Chris Oliveros, President & Publisher of Drawn & Quarterly. "To borrow a word from Dave Egger's New York Times Book Review of Lynda's comics, her "oeuvre" should always be in print, and Drawn & Quarterly is thrilled and honored to be the company that gives her work the publishing treatment that it deserves." Drawn & Quarterly is Barry's first comic book (only) publisher, and will join the company's esteemed coterie of the world's best cartoonists including Seth, Chester Brown, Julie Doucet, Chris Ware, Adrian Tomine, Joe Sacco and more. ###   Featured artist Lynda Barry            copyright ©2010 drawn & quarterly