Barry

I would agree with the person who described Lynda Barry’s book as ‘endearing’.  It is very endearing, partly because of her fascination with childhood and with childhood imaginations.  The book is funny when it could be sad.  It is sincere….  It doesn’t seem to trade in the irony we’ve seen in so many comics.  I thought her description of sending in the arts booklet, and her fear of getting in trouble over it, was particularly funny (and endearing).  Barry has a real way of understanding and remembering her childhood.  It is the kind of story she could have written with her “thinking up stories” exercise.  Likewise, Barry does not inundate the reader with facts of age, or year.  She does inundate it with images—following her writing suggestions to the tee.  It is these images that really create the feeling of childhood.  A world filled with imaginary creatures and Barry’s own raggedy appearance, of a kid who spends plenty of time rolling around outside without bathing.  It says something about her memories that what she remembers about the drawing exercise is “Draw the pirate or the leprechaun or the lumberjack or the deer…”  She consistently remembers the images very clearly.

Barry’s fears over the drawing booklet are also funny in relation to her “Two Questions” strip.  She has a certain nostalgia in that strip for the worriless days of drawing in childhood, when she didn’t have to wonder “Is this good?  Does this suck?”.  It is amusing to remember that Barry experienced some illogical fears and neurouses as a child artist, too.

I am not entirely sure that “What It Is” is exactly a comic book.  This may be one case in which the term ‘graphic novel’ applies for practical purposes and not just as an attempt to make it sound fancier.  If a comic book is necessarily put across through linking frames (even if the frames are not necessarily visible, as in “Dogs and Water”, the space might be there), then Barry’s book is something else.  But as a story that is entirely dependent on its images to communicate its meaning, “What It Is” is an excellent example.  Barry’s book is completely inelligable without its pictures in a way that none of the books we’ve read so far have been.  To a certain extent, many of the graphic novel’s we’ve read in class could be turned into words-only stories, through additions of description, etc.  They might lost alot of their meaning or value this way.  “What It Is” would be completely untranslatable to that form.

Barry acknowledges in her writing exercises the importance seeing images has even to prose, words-only writing.  She has relied on images her in what seems a very unique way.  She has a real obsession in understanding and translating the meaning behind her thoughts.  It doesn’t necessarily seem that she comes anywhere near to an answer to many of the questions she poses.  But her choice of collages and drawings are apparently as meaningful to those questions as a page of text would be.  Not that I can assign a meaning to all of it.  But the pictures are certainly not chosen at random.