Lynda Barry

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Lynda Barry (born January 2, 1956) is an American cartoonist and author. One of the most successful non-mainstream American cartoonists, Barry is perhaps best known for her weekly comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek. Barry's cartoons often view family life from the perspective of adolescent girls from the wrong side of the tracks — particularly sensitive, freckled Arna and the cousins with whom she lives; her best friend, pig-tailed Marlys, who is confident and mean, and the older Maybonne, who goes out with boys — but she often ventures far afield from this, such as in her strips featuring a poetry-spouting poodle named Fred Milton. She also garnered attention when her book The Good Times are Killing Me, was made into a play.

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[edit] Personal life

Born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, Barry moved as a child to Washington and currently lives near Footville, Wisconsin. She is one quarter-Filipina.

[edit] Work

While Barry's work is humorous, the undertones are usually serious. It depicts life as harsh but occasionally joyful. Her work addresses themes of intolerance and psychic pain, and at times includes some starkly left-wing political work. Her comics do not strive to depict beauty or demonstrate artistic virtuosity — in that sense being similar to her peers Matt Groening (like her, a graduate of The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington), Lloyd Dangle, and Mark Alan Stamaty — but for all their grubbiness are extremely expressive and evocative. Barry's early work was rendered with pen and had a distinctly New Wave, '80s look, but she told the Comics Journal that she was forced to give up the pen because it was hurting her wrist, turning to a brush which gave her work a much looser, child-like quality.

[edit] Books

Barry's books include The Good Times are Killing Me (ISBN 1-57061-105-X, also a musical play that appeared off-Broadway), The Greatest of Marlys, The Freddie Stories, Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel and One! Hundred! Demons!, a collection of the series published in venues such as Salon.com. Her backlist includes Everything in the World, The Fun House, It's So Magic, Naked Ladies Naked Ladies Naked Ladies, Shake a Tail Feather, Down the Street, Big Ideas, Come Over Come Over, Girls and Boys and My Perfect Life. Barry offers a workshop titled Writing the Unthinkable through the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York and The Crossings in Austin, Texas, where she teaches the process she uses to create all of her work and which she learned from her teacher, Marilyn Frasca, at The Evergreen State College. Barry is a big fan of Mary Parker Follett's Creative Experience.

[edit] Relationship with Ira Glass

For a time in the 1980s, Barry dated Ira Glass, who would go on to host the influential PRI radio program This American Life. (Glass was present during Barry's 1989 The Comics Journal interview[1], and on a later appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, Barry discussed her misery following their breakup.) During their relationship, Glass influenced the development of Barry's strip by serving as a sounding board for Barry's ideas.

Barry does not remember the relationship fondly. Barry is quoted in a 1998 Chicago Reader article as saying of Glass, "I went out with him. It was the worst thing I ever did. When we broke up he gave me a watch and said I was boring and shallow, and I wasn't enough in the moment for him, and it was over."[2] Barry has written a comic story about the relationship, entitled "Head Lice and My Worst Boyfriend," in her book One! Hundred! Demons!.

[edit] References

  1. ^ The Comics Journal, Number 132, November 1989, pp. 59-75.
  2. ^ Miner, Michael. "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted?" Chicago Reader November 20, 1998.

[edit] External links

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