The bestselling, idiosyncratic curriculum from a 2019 MacArthur Fellow will teach you how to draw and write your story
The self-help book of the year.--The New York Times Hello students, meet Professor Skeletor. Be on time, don't miss class, and turn off your phones. No time for introductions, we start drawing right away. The goal is more rock, less talk, and we communicate only through images. For more than five years the cartoonist Lynda Barry has been an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison art department and at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, teaching students from all majors, both graduate and undergraduate, how to make comics, how to be creative, how to not think. There is no academic lecture in this classroom. Doodling is enthusiastically encouraged. Making Comics is the follow-up to Barry's bestselling Syllabus, and this time she shares all her comics-making exercises. In a new hand-drawn syllabus detailing her creative curriculum, Barry has students drawing themselves as monsters and superheroes, convincing students who think they can't draw that they can, and, most important, encouraging them to understand that a daily journal can be anything so long as it is hand drawn. Barry teaches all students and believes everyone and anyone can be creative. At the core of Making Comics is her certainty that creativity is vital to processing the world around us.Writing exercises and creativity advice from Barry's pioneering, life-changing workshop
The award-winning author Lynda Barry is the creative force behind the genre-defying and bestselling work What It Is. She believes that anyone can be a writer and has set out to prove it. For the past decade, Barry has run a highly popular writing workshop for nonwriters called Writing the Unthinkable, which was featured in The New York Times Magazine. Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor is the first book to make her innovative lesson plans and writing exercises available to the public for home or classroom use. Barry teaches a method of writing that focuses on the relationship between the hand, the brain, and spontaneous images, both written and visual. It has been embraced by people across North America--prison inmates, postal workers, university students, high-school teachers, and hairdressers--for opening pathways to creativity. Syllabus takes the course plan for Barry's workshop and runs wild with it in her densely detailed signature style. Collaged texts, ballpoint-pen doodles, and watercolor washes adorn Syllabus's yellow lined pages, which offer advice on finding a creative voice and using memories to inspire the writing process. Throughout it all, Barry's voice (as an author and as a teacher-mentor) rings clear, inspiring, and honest.Deliciously drawn (with fragments of collage worked into each page), insightful and bubbling with delight in the process of artistic creation. A+ -Salon
How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? For decades, these types of questions have permeated the pages of Lynda Barry's compositions, with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving. What It Is demonstrates a tried-and-true creative method that is playful, powerful, and accessible to anyone with an inquisitive wish to write or to remember. Composed of completely new material, each page of Barry's first Drawn & Quarterly book is a full-color collage that is not only a gentle guide to this process but an invigorating example of exactly what it is: The ordinary is extraordinary.
Lynda Barry's bestselling treatise on creativity, What It Is, is now available in paperback
How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? What is an image? What is the past? For decades, these questions have permeated the pages of Lynda Barry's compositions, with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving. Barry's What It Is demonstrates a tried-and-true creative method that is playful, powerful, and accessible to anyone with an inquisitive mind who wishes to write or to remember. In this exploratory workbook, confessional, and memoir each page is a full-color collage that is a gentle guide to the creative process packed full ofswirling collaged images with pen and ink drawings on Barry's signature legal paper. Barry's award winning book is an invigorating example of exactly what it is: The ordinary is extraordinary.You'll wonder how anything can be so sad and so funny at the same time. --Lev Grossman, Time
Inspired by a sixteenth-century Zen monk's painting of a hundred demons chasing each other across a long scroll, acclaimed cartoonist Lynda Barry confronts various demons from her life in seventeen full-color vignettes. In Barry's hand, demons are the life moments that haunt you, form you, and stay with you: your worst boyfriend; kickball games on a warm summer night; watching your baby brother dance; the smell of various houses in the neighborhood you grew up in; or the day you realize your childhood is long behind you and you are officially a teenager. As a cartoonist, Lynda Barry has the innate ability to zero in on the essence of truth, a magical quality that has made her book One Hundred Demons an enduring classic of the early twenty-first century. In the book's intro, however, Barry throws the idea of truth out of the window by asking the reader to decide if fiction can have truth and if autobiography can have a fiction, a hybrid that Barry coins autobiofictionalography. As readers get to know Barry's demons, they realize that the actual truth no longer matters because the universality of Barry's comics, true or untrue, reigns supreme.Welcome to the world of Marlys and Maybonne
Lynda Barry's comics were my YA, before YA really even existed. She's been writing teen stories with an incredibly clear voice since the early 80s. [The Greatest Of Marlys] is raw, ugly, hilarious, and poignant. --Raina Telgemeier, Smile & Drama Eight-year-old Marlys Mullen is Lynda Barry's most famous character from her long-running and landmark comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek, and for good reason! Given her very own collection of strips, Marlys shines in all her freckled and pig-tailed groovy glory. The trailer park where she and her family live is the grand stage for her dramas big and small. Joining Marlys are her teenaged sister Maybonne, her younger brother Freddie, their mother, and an offbeat array of family members, neighbors, and classmates. Marlys's enthusiasm for life knows no bounds. Her childhood is one where the neighborhood kids stay out all night playing kickball; the desire to be popular is unending; bullies are unrepentant; and parents make few appearances. The Greatest Of Marlys spotlights Barry's masterful skill of chronicling childhood through adolescence in all of its wonder, awkwardness, humor, and pain.The creative-drawing companion to the acclaimed and bestselling What It Is
Lynda Barry's Ernie Pook's Comeek... made the world look wild, ugly, joyful, and mysterious.?--The New Yorker
Maybonne Mullen is riding on a bummer according to her little sister Marlys. As much as teenage Maybonne prays and tries she just can't connect to the magic of living. How can she when there's so much upheaval at home and school, not to mention the world at large? And yet Marlys always seems able to tap into it. In It's So Magic, the Mullen family dynamics are in flux. Uncle John makes a brief return to town to the delight of the girls. Freddy is finally reunited with his sisters. Marlys falls in love for the first time. And after they finally settle into a routine at their grandmother's the Mullen siblings' mother might be ready to take them back in. With war in the background and precarious parental support, the siblings long for peace, finding it in the small things like grocery store turkey drawing contests and fishing trips. Narrated by Maybonne, Marlys, and Freddy, It's So Magic captures Lynda Barry's unparalleled ability to depict the magic of youth experiencing firsts in a world that contains as much humour as it does hardship.The classic book featuring Maybonne Mullen and her little sister Marlys is back in print!
Lynda Barry captures all the glorious magic and excrutiating pain of junior high school in this Ernie Pook Comeek collection from the early 90s. The star of this collection is 14 year old Maybonne who relays the angst and insecurity of life through hand scrawled diary entries, class assignments, and letters, in cursive with doodle and bubble letters. Of course, there is the ever-annoying yet adorable little sister Marlys who never fails to read her big sister's diary. Barry deftly portrays the capricious nature of teen friendships, adolescent peer-pressure, and the kill or be killed nature of a middle school's social scene in her signature style. No one but Lynda Barry can so naturally zero in on the joyous urgency yet heartbreaking poignancy of childhood. In an authentic teen voice full of diffidence and melodrama, the bespectacled and freckled Maybonne relates all of life's indiginities on equal measure. Heartbreaking stories of a broken home, child molestation, an alcoholic absentee father and a bitter mom emerge between strips about home ec class, summer vacation, and babysitting, illustrating Barry's peerless ability to make the reader both cry and laugh.Maybonne and Marlys Mullen endure the mortifying highs and lows of middle school in this Lynda Barry classic.
Collected from the strip Ernie Pook's Comeek, which was serialized in alternative weeklies across the continent, My Perfect Life captures the moment when Lynda Barry finds the perfect balance in longer-form storytelling between the bellyaching laughs and the brutal reality checks. Along with the 2022 release Come Over Come Over, this collection continues to spotlight the life of teenager Maybonne Mullen. She suffers through the utterly relatable insults of junior high and the excruciating embarrassment caused by her little sister, Marlys. Hovering in the background, however, is a broken home, parents struggling with addiction, a grandmother who takes her granddaughters from the diverse big city to a bewilderingly bland small town. Yet fitting into the new school and surroundings is, of course, paramount to a young teenager. Maybonne begins September full of life and excitement. As the school year progresses, she experiences bullying, her first boyfriend, family drama, drinking, and more. The book ends with Maybonne withdrawn and jaded as the reality of her world outweighs the magic.From her first comics published in the Evergeen State College school paper to her influential weekly comic strip, Ernie Pook's Comeek; from her bestselling creative how-to memoir comic books, What It Is and Picture This, to her novels, graphic memoirs, plays, and awards in between, Lynda Barry has been part of the North American alternative comics scene for thirty years.
Fans around the world rejoiced at D+Q's announcement of Blabber Blabber Blabber: Volume 1 of Everything, which collects all of the seminal Ernie Pook's Comeek, some of which has been out of print for decades, and includes her earliest books, such as Girls and Boys and Big Ideas, and features an introduction penned by Barry, complete with photographs. Reflective of the early 1980s before the appearance of Barry's well-known characters Marlys and Arna, the comics in Blabber Blabber Blabber cover the more adult subjects of bad love, bad perms, being single, Prince, and miserable break-ups--resulting in one of the most oft-quoted Barry sayings: Love is an exploding cigar which we all willingly smoke. Though Barry's early drawing style is most often described as scratchy, her affinity for large swaths of text and narration; her fondness for exclamation marks, angular shapes, and cursive penmanship; and her uncanny ability to zero in on the very essence of life all within a few panels is as present as ever in this collection.THE TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF TROUBLED ADOLESCENTS FROM BARRY'S ACCLAIMED COMIC
The Freddie Stories traces a year in the life of Freddie, the youngest member of the dysfunctional Mullen family. These four-panel entries--each representing an episode in the life of Freddie--bring to life adolescence, pimples and all. No matter what happens, it all seems to go wrong for Freddie--he's set up as an arsonist, mercilessly teased in school, and bossed around by classmates. With consummate skill, Lynda Barry writes about the cruelty of children at this most vulnerable age when the friends they make and the paths they choose can forever change their lives. In The Freddie Stories every word of dialogue, every piece of narration, and every dark line evokes adolescent angst. These short, moving stories are collected from Barry's beloved Ernie Pook's Comeek, which was serialized across North America for two decades. Re-packaged here with a brand-new afterword from Lynda Barry, The Freddie Stories is an adult tale about just how hard it is to be a teenager, and it's classic Barry work--poignant, insightful, and true.Lynda Barry's classic heartbreaking and heartwarming coming of age novella back in print
Young Edna Arkins lives in a neighborhood that is rapidly changing, thanks to white flight from urban Seattle in the late 1960s. As the world changes around her, Edna is exposed to the callous racism of adults--sometimes subtle and other times blatant, but always stinging. By weaving the importance of music in adolescence with the forbidden friendship between Edna, who is white, and Bonna Willis, who is Black, Lynda Barry captures the earnest, awkward, yet always honest adolescent voice as perfectly in prose as she does in comics.