Lynda Barry

Lynda Barry – Life, Creativity, and Memorable Quotes

Dive into the world of Lynda Barry — American cartoonist, writer, and teacher. Explore her life story, her comics and books (Ernie Pook’s Comeek, One! Hundred! Demons!, What It Is), her creative philosophy, and some of her most memorable quotes.

Introduction

Lynda Jean Barry (born January 2, 1956) is an American cartoonist, author, and educator whose work defies easy categorization. She combines comics, memoir, visual collage, and creative pedagogy to explore memory, imagination, childhood, identity, and art-making.

Barry’s work is beloved not just for its raw emotional honesty and imaginative energy, but also for the ways she shares her methods with others—inviting readers and students into the process, rather than just serving up polished outcomes.

Early Life and Family

• Barry was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, though she later grew up in Seattle, Washington, raised in a working-class, racially mixed neighborhood.

• Her parents divorced when she was about twelve.

• Her father worked as a meat-cutting professional, of Irish and Norwegian descent; her mother was a hospital housekeeper of Irish and Filipino ancestry.

• Barry’s mother reportedly disapproved of her reading and ambition to go to college, discouraging those pursuits as impractical.

• While in high school, Barry held a nighttime job as a janitor at a Seattle hospital to help support herself.

Her upbringing was marked by economic challenges, tension, and a sense of being at odds with conventional expectations—conditions that would feed into her creative voice.

Youth, Education & Formative Influences

• Barry attended The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where she studied fine arts.

• During her college years, Barry began drawing comics compulsively, especially after a breakup. She made sketchbook comics, often spontaneously and intuitively.

• Her early comics caught the attention of Matt Groening (future creator of The Simpsons) and John Keister, who published her initial works in student and local papers under the title Ernie Pook’s Comeek.

• Barry has spoken of her teacher Marilyn Frasca as pivotal, teaching her creative techniques and ways of accessing images.

In these early years, Barry cultivated a mode of work in which drawing and writing emerge in tandem—she often resists plotting ahead, preferring a conversational, exploratory process.

Career and Major Works

Comics & Strips

• Ernie Pook’s Comeek
  Perhaps Barry’s best-known comic strip, Ernie Pook’s Comeek began in 1977, published in alternative newspapers across the U.S. and Canada for decades.

• She also drew for Esquire magazine a full-page color strip exploring relationships called The Story of Men and Women.

Books & Graphic Works

Barry’s published oeuvre spans fiction, memoir, and books about creativity:

• The Good Times Are Killing Me (1988) — an illustrated novel about an interracial friendship between two girls; adapted into a play in the early 1990s.

• Cruddy (1999) — a dark, episodic illustrated novel exploring violence, dislocation, survival, and identity.

• One! Hundred! Demons! (2002) — Barry calls it an “autobifictionalography” combining memoir, collage, and images to wrestle with internal demons.

• What It Is (2008) — a hybrid work: part memoir, part workbook, part drawing exercise guide, designed to help readers unlock their capacity to see and make images.

• Other works include Making Comics, Picture This, Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor, and Blabber Blabber Blabber.

Creative Teaching & Workshops

• Barry leads workshops (e.g., “Writing the Unthinkable”) across the U.S., offering her techniques for unleashing creativity through drawing and free-writing prompts.

• At the University of Wisconsin–Madison she has held roles as Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity, taught residencies, and given classes that emphasize process over polished product.

• Her creative pedagogy emphasizes image over text, playful experimentation, working with notebooks, and protocols that lower resistance to making.

Awards & Honors

• What It It won the 2009 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work.

• In 2016, Barry was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame.

• She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019.

• She also received the Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013, among other honors.

Her works remain influential not only in comics but in arts education, creative writing, and expressive practices.

Historical & Cultural Context

• Barry emerged amid the alternative comics movement (1970s–1980s), when independent papers and zines provided outlets for voices outside mainstream comics.

• Her work resonates with feminist, autobiographical, and hybrid-genre trends in late 20th and early 21st century graphic narrative—combining visual form, memory, and identity.

• As comics and graphic novels gained critical respect, Barry’s blending of image and text, her exploration of trauma, childhood, and voice, place her among key innovators in the medium.

Legacy and Influence

• Barry’s influence extends beyond her own publications: many artists, writers, and educators cite her techniques and creative philosophy as transformative.

• Her approach challenges the idea that writing must begin with “the big idea” or with plot; instead, she foregrounds images, intuition, and surprise.

• What It Is and Syllabus are often used in creative writing and visual arts classrooms to help students unblock and reclaim a visual voice.

• She helped broaden acceptance for experimental, hybrid graphic works that fuse memoir, collage, and pedagogy.

• As a teacher and enabler of creativity, Barry’s lines of influence reach far: readers may not engage with all her books, but many carry forward her methods.

Personality, Talents & Character

• Inventive & playful: Barry’s work often embraces the unexpected, the associative jump, and the strange lyricism of memory.

• Courageous vulnerability: Her comics frequently reveal personal pain, shame, confusion—and yet do so with humor, grace, and honesty.

• Teacher and guide: She does not just exhibit creative work—she teaches ways to make, to resist perfectionism, to open up the page.

• Resilient and intuitive: Despite early discouragement and personal hardship, she maintained a drive to make meaningful work, trusting instinct over formula.

• Restless experimenter: She has shifted mediums and formats (strip, novel, collage, workbook) in service of expression, rather than sticking to a single genre.

Famous Quotes of Lynda Barry

Here are several memorable quotations attributed to Lynda Barry that speak to her artistic vision, voice, and insight:

“We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay.”

“If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.”

“Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.”

“I was unable to sleep and I would stay up and draw these little cartoons. Then a friend showed them around. Before I knew it I was a cartoonist.”

“It’s not hard for me to be funny in front of people, but most of that is just horrified nerves taking the form of what makes people laugh, and afterwards I’d always feel dreadfully depressed, kind of self-induced bi-polar disorder.”

“I am about as detailed as a shadow.”

“If I didn’t try to eavesdrop on every bus ride I take or look for the humor when I go for a walk, I would just be depressed all the time.”

“Humor is such a wonderful thing, helping you realize what a fool you are but how beautiful that is at the same time.”

These reflect Barry’s worldview: that creativity is needed to endure life, that laughter and pain intertwine, and that art-making is a way to live more fully.

Lessons from Lynda Barry

1. Embrace the image first. Barry teaches that stories often begin visually—drawings, impressions—not always via planned narrative.

2. Trust intuition & surprise. Her creative method privileges surprise over control, allowing the page to lead.

3. Make for no reason. She often emphasizes the importance of creating work without expectation, simply to stay alive inside.

4. Vulnerability is power. By drawing fear, shame, memory, loss, Barry shows that exposing inner life can resonate deeply.

5. Teach by doing. Barry doesn’t just share her finished works; her value lies in opening pathways for others to make.

6. Playfulness sustains serious art. Even in heavy territory, her work often carries a spirit of play, metaphor, and wonder.

Conclusion

Lynda Barry is a singular, transformative figure in contemporary comics and creative arts. She doesn’t simply produce stories—she opens doors into how we see, remember, and imagine. Her work remains vital not only for readers but for makers: people who want to reclaim a creative voice, even if they felt discouraged or blocked.