"Something happens to us as we get a little older. 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." - Lynda Barry, on What It Is
Illustrations (c) Lynda Barry
First things first: Lynda Barry is The Funk Queen of the Galaxy* and must be acknowledged as such. As an artist and author, she is and always has been true to herself, which is a rare and wonderful thing. She's weathered radical changes in the newspaper and syndicated comic industry over the last three decades or so, stood her ground and stuck to her [sometimes uncomfortable] subjects in the face of the mostly male popularity contest that is her chosen field, and reinvented herself mid-career as a graphic novelist, editor, creativity guru, and--as of Spring 2012--Artist in Residence at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She even won the Eisner Award (which is sort of like the Oscars of the comics industry) in 2009 for best reality-based work for the book we're going to be looking at tonight.
So, respect.
I've been a fan of her work since the days her comic strip, Ernie Pook's Comeek, appeared in various alterna-weeklies back in the Stone Age (okay, the '80s). Carefully Xeroxed copies of her comics decorated my lockers and college bulletin boards and walls, as did the now scarce and much-coveted Poodle With a Mohawk poster. (In a rare moment of foresight, I actually kept that one, and eBay informs me this was a wise decision...or in the parlance of the Poodle Fred Milton, So Deeply #1!)
Early on, I internalized the quirky lingo and mannerisms of the surrogates she used for her oddly confessional comic storylines: the regular cast of children and teenagers, semi-autobiographical, with adults lurking around the fringes dispensing questionable advice and displaying even more questionable behavior, plus a poetically inclined poodle. The images were not refined, drawn as they were in her characteristically stylized and sometimes rough way, but the voices of the characters were something else entirely: absolutely perfect.
And by "perfect," I mean the exact opposite of the polished, idealized youthful characters usually found in popular culture (and regrettably common to most popular literature aimed at young people). These were real kids: raw, rude, flawed, offbeat, quirky, amazingly brave, easily hurt, marginalized, introspective, dreamy, weird, wonderful, awkward, enthusiastic, bored out of their minds, charmingly clueless, occasionally wise, and always painfully truthful. There were hyperkinetic goofballs desperate for approval and attention and jaded older siblings full of misinformation and longing for love; they dealt with dramas great and small, each given the same pure attention to detail by their creator.
Barry has a singular ear for the rhythms of childhood speech. She's able to capture, the way few others do, those odd little conversations and inner monologues and eccentricities and the kind of magical thinking that goes on before you've quite figured out how the world works and what you have to do to survive in it. She replicates the conversational shorthand of families and close childhood friends; reading her work, you always feel as though the voice of each character is deeply authentic, rather than invented...as if the kids themselves took over and wrote it themselves. Since the work is clearly based on her own experiences, perhaps in a way they were. Whatever it is, it always feels like the real deal, and just as in real life, that can be hilarious or heartbreaking (and sometimes both at once).
In those pre-internet years, I hoarded the carefully clipped comics and was always thrilled to find her work in print when I visited some new place or other. Later on, books began to appear, most featuring the same cast of characters, and I bought each one I could find: Everything in the World, The Fun House, It's So Magic, Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! (a coloring book!), Shake a Tail Feather, Down the Street, Big Ideas, Come Over Come Over, Girls and Boys, My Perfect Life. Her book The Good Times Are Killing Me was adapted as a play; her illustrated novel Cruddy garnered good reviews as well, despite its dark subject matter and hybrid format.
More recently, there have been bigger, splashier collections of comic strips (The Greatest of Marlys, The Freddy Stories) and experimental graphic novels (ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS!). Not long ago, Barry joined forces with Drawn & Quarterly to release new works and republish her back catalog as collections, beginning with the recently released Blabber Blabber Blabber: Volume 1 of Everything.
Those newer works represent a hybrid genre all their own: the creative memoir how-to comic (and yes, it's exactly as awesome as it sounds). The most recent of these is Picture This, which explores the origins of visual creativity and is meant to kick-start the artistic process, in ways that echo her popular creativity workshop, Writing the Unthinkable. But the work we'll be taking a closer look at is the first of this new genre, the mind-blowing What It Is.
"The ordinary is extraordinary." - Lynda Barry, What It Is
It's difficult to get a feel for this book through quotations alone. Even the most enthusiastic description of the work will be missing its necessary "other half," its visual component, and won't do it justice. Fortunately, NPR did a wonderful feature on the book and its author a while back, including an image gallery that you can find here. Click through to get a sense of Barry's visual style and the glorious oddball beauty of her approach.
Aside from the raw truth of her literary voice, it was her visual approach to storytelling that drew me in so long ago. Like Barry, I'm something of a creative outlier: a former illustrator and a sometime writer who has never been 100% comfortable sticking to one or the other. Words invade my art, and my writing doesn't seem complete without illustration, and I think I gravitate toward this artist/author as someone who is perhaps a kindred spirit. A few years back, while prepping ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS! for publication and writing What It Is, she started making a few bucks on the side by selling her original art---mostly ink wash practice sketches and small pieces using themes from the books she was working on---on eBay.
I couldn't resist.
I bought one as a gift, and one for myself (Lucky Cephalopod, a piece using the glow-in-the-dark octopus character that pops up in What It Is and Picture This), and when I got these in the mail a few days later, I was delighted to note that she couldn't resist illustrating the Priority Mail envelope the artwork came in. Not only that, she even added a little secret surprise to each purchase: an ink drawing of Meditating Monkey, something she creates to warm up before working on the "real" piece of art at hand. I was genuinely surprised and felt as though that Lucky Octopus was already working its magic.
Barry is adamant that a facility for drawing or storytelling is not a prerequisite for doing either (or both), and that creativity is what it is, and is within us all. Much of her focus (in both the book and in her creativity workshops) is on getting us to let go of assumptions about what we can or can't do, and what we should or shouldn't try.
What It Is traces her path to becoming the artist/author she is now, but she's also clear that your path will probably be a different one, and that that's a good thing. She asks you to forgive yourself for not being what you're "supposed to be" and to cast away the self-critical voice so common to thwarted or "stuck" creatives (or to those who have always believed that they're NOT creative, either because they never felt like their work measured up to some kind of arbitrary standard of perfection, or because someone else told them that they weren't creative). Barry herself was told she couldn't draw; she did it anyway, because she had to.
That's the other piece of the puzzle: just doing it. Putting in the time, and allowing yourself to respect creative time as worthwhile. Making an effort, even if the results aren't perfect, for no other reason than to get whatever creative spark that is inside you OUT, and to have fun. To tell your story. To share your vision. To experience the joy of making something wholly unique to you. Like kids do; like most adults have forgotten how to do.
So, how did this book change things for me? I mean, before reading it, my life wasn't completely devoid of creativity. I still write these days, though it's mostly dry, technical stuff -- research papers and the like, plus the weekly piece I put together for GUS here on Daily Kos (helps me keep my hand in, in terms of feature writing). I'm a veritable design whiz when it comes to putting together a snappy PowerPoint on the fly, but I can't say that I get to flex my creative muscle much on the job otherwise. And I might be able to get my craft on when I'm "off duty", or amuse someone with a doodle on a napkin, but truth be told, I'd pretty much lost touch with how much fun it was to write and draw for fun or profit. This book shook me out of a long creative dry spell and put me back in touch with that feeling.
Maybe it'll do the same for you? Dang! Give it a shot! What have you got to lose?
Dang! Read this book! It will change your life!
*Just ask Matt Groening (creator of the comic strip Life In Hell and a little TV show called The Simpsons that you may or may not be familiar with). Groening should know; they used to date back in college, and remain dear friends. She also used to go out with Ira Glass, but that's neither here nor there. Ms. Barry clearly has some serious mojo, is what I'm sayin'.