Far out!! Wow!! YES!! Lynda Barry #1!!

September 5, 2022 11:14 AM

New York Times Magazine: A Genius Cartoonist Believes Child’s Play Is Anything But Frivolous

Every interview with wise and wonderful Lynda! Barry! is a brilliant gem and this one is no exception.

posted by MrJM (24 comments total)

Lovely! Our children (age 5, 12, 14) often complain that we are “strict” because we require them to spend a lot of time doing unstructured, screen-free play…but the benefits have clearly been worth it, for a lot of the same reasons Barry lays out in the interview.

We end up doing a lot of “art time” to fill those screen-free hours, drawing, painting, doing small crafts, etc…and when they complain about it, we say: “you’ll thank us when you’re older”, which of course they hate lol.

Going outside and just running around is also an important part of that play time. Especially for our five year old.
posted by Doleful Creature at 11:41 AM on September 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

a) Lynda Barry is a genius
b) this interview proves it
c) I hated Lynda Barry until I started loving her

let me explain c):
"Ernie Pook's Comeek" was printed in the back pages of my favorite alt-weekly (along with Matt Groening's "Life is Hell" in my favorite alt-weekly. In my early teens, Barry's stuff was so opaque, so busily drawn, so deeply weird, so clearly "adult" that I just sort of whooshed past it on the way to Groening's strip, which was the exact opposite. Not much later, I flipped.
posted by chavenet at 11:46 AM on September 5, 2022 [12 favorites]

My favorite part: "I know that you’ve done work on pairing Ph.D. students with kindergartners so that the children can help the graduate students with problem-solving. What does that look like in practice? "
posted by aniola at 12:04 PM on September 5, 2022 [6 favorites]

There are just so many gorgeous ideas in here that I want to - well, take out and listen to and play with.

"Why is it acceptable that they’re all miserable?"
"there’s such profound amnesia about what kids are actually doing. There’s total amnesia of the experience of deep play."
"from the kid’s perspective that toy is playing with them."
"I felt — not like a kid again, but I surely wasn’t in my 60s. I didn’t feel young. I felt out of time. I still feel that way. "
"Art is a public-health concern because it keeps you from killing yourself and others."

She has thought so deeply about these things, and listened so well and openly to herself and to that wisdom.

I am grateful and glad to be alive at a time when she's making art and teaching us all how to listen, and how to notice.

Thank you so much for posting this, MrJM. It's wonderful to get to spend a little time with Lynda Barry today.
posted by kristi at 12:14 PM on September 5, 2022 [8 favorites]

Chavenet, same.

Decades later I was reintroduced after my mom took a class with her, and she is now an extended family favorite.
posted by kittensofthenight at 4:43 PM on September 5, 2022

There's a lovely photo in this piece of Lynda in her studio, sitting on the floor at a desktop that's raised just a bit above that floor and I feel like this opened up a whole new domain of ways I might work. Whole chunks of the world are perfectly happy sitting on the floor, maybe I could be too. Hmm.
posted by spincycle at 4:49 PM on September 5, 2022

This post reminded me to finally go buy Lynda Barry's Syllabus. Hooray!
posted by marlys at 5:36 PM on September 5, 2022 [5 favorites]

I met Lynda at a party in the late eighties, where I was the only kid. I was probably eight or ten. My dad had dragged me to this incredibly-boring-to-me dinner at his friend's apartment, and I believe Lynda was there with the guy she was dating. She spent what I remember as the whole evening talking to me and drawing with me. She drew me a wonderful picture of a goldfish bowl on a cat on a dog on a horse on an alligator on Mars. Later I would read the story of the Musicians of Bremen and immediately think of that picture. She was incredibly kind to a lonely, bored kid who loved drawing. She sat there and talked with me and really listened to me. Eventually my dad intervened and made me leave her alone, saying that she shouldn't have to spend the whole night entertaining me. It seemed to me that she was much more interested in me than in the other adults. When I grew up I assumed that he was correct, and picking up on some signals I hadn't noticed. Maybe he was, but after reading this I wonder if maybe I was right all along.
She is just a lovely person.
posted by Adridne at 6:26 PM on September 5, 2022 [45 favorites]

You were right all along, Adridne.
posted by MrJM at 7:30 PM on September 5, 2022 [4 favorites]

"Ernie Pook's Comeek" was printed in the back pages of my favorite alt-weekly (along with Matt Groening's "Life is Hell" in my favorite alt-weekly.

I seem to have a vague recollection of what you speak.
posted by y2karl at 7:56 PM on September 5, 2022

This makes me immediately want to go out and find a child to chat to about my work problems!
posted by artisthatithaca at 12:51 AM on September 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

I was surprised to hear about her childhood & depression, even though I'm old enough to know better. I haven't engaged super deeply with her work, but I've been impressed by the creativity and joy in everything I've seen (and I'm now very motivated to seek out more). Having survived my own version of a not-dissimilar childhood, I ruminate a lot about how much capacity for joy it crushed out of me. I feel better about the undimmability of my own inner light, seeing how brightly Lynda Barry's burns in spite of being From Circumstances.
posted by terretu at 2:33 AM on September 6, 2022

I had never heard of her before, but I'm glad that I have now! What a cool person she is.
posted by Too-Ticky at 5:11 AM on September 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yeah, this is fantastic:

I have a friend who’s a writer. No matter what we’re doing or whom he’s around, he’s on his phone. We were sitting out in a parking lot, and there was a guy who came out who was in this full orc costume with a shield. I thought, I’m not going to say anything. Let’s see if my friend looks up. The guy passed right by him and — it was outside a hotel — tried to get through a revolving door. There’s all this bump ba bump ba bump, and if my friend would have looked up, he would have seen an orc go by! But he never looked up! Then later I told him, and he’s like, “That didn’t happen!” It totally did happen!

Not just making a great point, but illustrating why I like to go to cons: you might see an orc trying to go through a revolving door with their shield.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:39 AM on September 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thanks for sharing this! Adridne: thank you for sharing, too. That is just wonderful, and no surprise.
I have written here before about how much Lynda Barry meant to me, starting when I was the age of her characters. A couple of years ago, I started an Instagram to share my art, which is a work in progress at best, and I added her Instagram (thenearsightedmonkey) because it's delightful and I wanted to fill up my feed. Lo and behold, she left me an encouraging comment on one of my first efforts! With all the followers she must have, she took the time to look at a new one. I will treasure it always.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:25 AM on September 6, 2022 [6 favorites]

I! AM!! SO!!! JEALOUS!!!! of Adridne!!!!! (That's my attempt to mimic Barry's prose style--think Marlys. Always think Marlys. Unless you're thinking Maybonne.)

Lynda Barry is a miracle, is what I'm trying to say. One thing I have noticed about her work is that seemingly most of her adult characters run the gamut from confusing to terrifying. This to me is a lot of what makes it so powerful: lots (most?) of her comix are from the perspective of a baffled, confused, or frightened kid. (Have you read "Cruddy" yet? Read it and tell me it's not terrifying.) The word "childlike" is often used to connote innocence, wonderment, trust, and other such things, but in our culture of hypocritical and toxic positivity we seem to forget that for many children, childhood can be a disorienting and scary experience. In "Come Over, Come Over," IIRC, there's a strip about childhood "resilience" that touches on this.

In conclusion, Lynda Barry is so incredibly great.
posted by scratch at 7:36 AM on September 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

Although Barry doesn't say she does horror, Cruddy has a brief side story about a missing boy that is absolutely as horrifying as anything Stephen King wrote about the kids in Derry. As well as I remember it, I don't remember much else about the book, which went a bit over my head when I was younger. I should reread it.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:49 AM on September 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

That's funny, Adridne, I am the same age and found myself as an only kid at a couple rando grown-up parties and bbqs where Lynda and her boyfriend attended, I don't have a cool story though! I just knew her as the Poodle With A Mohawk t-shirt lady, which seems like fame to me at the time.
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 11:49 AM on September 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

That's wild, Stonesock!
I'm pretty sure everyone else at the party worked together, and they usually spent their time talking about work stuff, so she may actually have been as bored as I was.
posted by Adridne at 2:51 PM on September 6, 2022

…was said boyfriend Ira Glass?
posted by St. Hubbins at 4:25 PM on September 6, 2022

I've been familiar with Lynda Barry's work all along, but I'm not a fan of her drawing style. I'm glad to learn more about her from this post & etc. She's very cool.
posted by kirkaracha at 5:08 PM on September 6, 2022

I'm with chavenet… I always looked forward to the comics section of the Austin Chronicle and Life in Hell. Ernie Pook's Comeek was a wtf for me. What I thought was sloppy drawing and bad lettering turned me off until I started reading it and laughing.

Syllabus looks wonderful… anyone have any other recommendations?
posted by jabo at 6:06 PM on September 6, 2022

One! Hundred! Demons! was my entry point with Lynda Barry and remains a favorite, many years later.

If you like the looks of Syllabus, I would also recommend "Making Comics." I was lucky enough to see her on the book tour for that one a few years back in Chicago (at the Hideout -- an absolutely perfect venue, joined by Chris Ware, and I want to say Kelly Hogan emceed, maybe?), and she was incredible. I'm old and jaded, and would describe myself as possessing miniscule artistic talent... and yet I walked out wondering, "huh, when DID I decide I couldn't draw? When DID this stop being fun, and start being embarrassing?"

It's a helluva hard thing to do, brushing back all those inhibitions, and yet her talk left me feeling like it was a whole lot sillier to hide behind 'em.

I still can't draw, not really, but I mind a lot less.
posted by theoddball at 7:33 PM on September 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

I saw her on the same book tour with Chris Ware and it blew my mind. I attended because I wanted to introduce my artistically-inclined teenage daughter to Lynda Barry and came out of it feeling like my own life had changed significantly.

I started one of her suggested practices, of drawing a cartoon panel of a moment in your life each day. On the morning of my fiftieth birthday I hiked to the top of a hill in a nearby park and drew myself triumphant at the summit. I don't think it's possible to have commemorated that moment better. Thank you, Lynda.
posted by Sublimity at 4:36 AM on September 7, 2022 [1 favorite]