ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS! - Serio Comics 18
ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS! written and drawn by Lynda Barry, published by Drawn & Quarterly
Today it felt right to re-read and enthuse about Lynda Barry.
Barry is an American cartoonist, first known for her underground weekly comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek, which started running in 1979 after Matt Groening of later The Simpsons fame ran it in his college paper.
She moved into books in 1988 with the illustrated novel The Good Times Are Killing Me, about an interracial friendship between two young girls, later adapted into a play.
Her second illustrated novel, Cruddy, about a girl who finds hope in drawing after falling into a rough life, first appeared in 1999.
Three years later at the beginning of the 21st Century she published this book One! Hundred! Demons!
A graphic novel she termed "autobifictionalography"
Which as someone who has authored a graphic novel currently subtitled A Semiautobiogaphical Seriocomic that has a character who looks like me with a different name and a character who doesn’t look like me but has my first name…for various ‘autobifictionalography’ reasons…
It’s probably a major reason I relate to her work :)
As well as the fact that she was one of the first major graphic novelists
(Barry won an Eisner in 2009 and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019)
To follow me on IG!
Way back sometime in 2018/2019 when cartoonist Sean O’Neill did the covers for my first two comedy Haggadahs for the Jewish Holiday of Passover.
Later I saw Lynda speak with Chris Ware in 2019 in LA and was blown away by their differences, Chris Ware’s neurotic perfectionism, and Lynda Barry’s freewheeling spontaneity, seem to be two poles in my own process which swings between sometimes casual and fluent and other times painstaking and nitpicking.
Today felt like a good day to revisit one of the first heroes to acknowledge my work because I’m happy to announce that Sean O’Neill is back to do the cover of my 6th comedy Haggadah, a casual and spontaneous one, which will be published very soon.
Though his cover is not quite press-ready this Friday evening it’s going to be called:
Here is Lynda’s Instagram account, thenearsightedmonkey, where she often posts about teaching children and students and adults at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where she is currently an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity.
Without too much more adieu, some enthusiasm about ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS!, which is available from Goodreads, indie retailers at Bookshop.org, from the publisher, at Skylight here in LA, and via Amazon.
One of the things I love about Lynda Barry’s work, and she claimed this at her reading in LA, and many times, is that it is not the most literary writing or artistic drawings.
This is helpful to remember and even speaks to something Scott McCloud, who was enthused about in Serio Comics 13, discusses in his seminal book on comics theory, Understanding Comics, which is that sometimes you don’t want complex art or complex writing, because, for instance, too complex art paired with too complex writing makes reading slow and cumbersome whereas complex writing paired with simple art is more easy to understand, or complex art paired with simple writing is similarly easier too.
More and more, we see, especially with the rise of memes, which are arguably another form of comics, that both simple writing paired with simple art, can also be good.
Barry is also particularly good at capturing the emotional ups and downs of many, not just artists, who attempt to achieve things that look easier than they are to actually do.
The publisher, Drawn & Quarterly, writes that Barry was “inspired by a sixteenth-century Zen monk’s painting of a hundred demons chasing each other across a long scroll…to confront…various demons from her life…that haunt, form, and stay with you.”
They list the number of vignettes as 17 but the number of life moments within those 17 are probably actually 100 or more like this revelation about children and our parents and their parents…which is handled with a light comic touch but also gravity.
If you notice, Barry also has a subtly beautiful and powerful way of accentuating certain words in the dialogue with cursive instead of regular penmanship.
Which is something meme artists do with their own toolbox to accentuate words too.
A lot of her observations are low-key yet cerebrally haunting, for instance, the observation that some adults don’t remember their childhood, sometimes quite literally, this doesn’t even often mean something tragic happened, but it’s still eerie.
Barry also gracefully depicts how we sometimes end up falling in love with people who have qualities like the worst parts of people we know well.
Before hopefully ending up in more balanced versions of that like Barry’s story about a rescue dog who instead of tough love needs to be a little extra spoiled than other dogs.
But my favorite aspect of Barry’s work is how she can be generous to pretty much all of her characters, even those that may have hurt her, she can see the reasons why.
It made me think of a line from a book I read with my family recently on holiday.
Jean Hanff Korelitz remixes Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and says something like:
“To be a writer, is to understand all, which is to forgive all”
I don’t think you have to be a writer, or a particularly good one, to do that, or sometimes fail at that ;)
Lastly, I remember it was after this Lynda Barry and Chris Ware reading in October 2019, after the SHOULD WE BUY A GUN? project had languished as a screenplay for a number of years, that I told the person I was with at that time, who it is also a bit semiautobiographically based on, that I wanted to pivot and make the project as a graphic novel…that person…to be honest…criticized the idea…said I didn’t know enough about the form…and they don’t make money anyway…and other negative reasons not to support the new vision, but I guess we can thank, in part, Lynda Barry, whose philosophy that night which won the MacArthur that year too, was basically, “If I can make comics, anyone can” for helping inspire the second act of this journey and its results, the ‘author’s copy’ available to buy now…
The weekly serialized version for paid subscribers on this Substack…
And hopefully a third act of a version traditionally published soon :)
Don’t forget I’m a fan of not just 5 Act Shakespearean structures but also 8 Sequence approaches and the FILM CRIT THEORY HULK idea that Acts are limitless…
For Paid Subscribers check out an excerpted section from The Spoof Seder Haggadah!
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