By Shaenon K. Garrity
According to Spurge (
www.comicsreporter.com) and the Drawn & Quarterly blog, Lynda Barry is moving her comics online in response to the loss of weekly newspaper clients. I've been reading Barry's comics online at the! excellent! Marlys Magazine (
www.marlysmagazine.com) for years now, but it startled and saddened me to learn that she has trouble making a living through the newsweeklies.
Not that it's a huge surprise; the newspaper comics market is brutal these days, and, from what I've heard, weekly cartoonists are hit particularly hard. Alt-weekly newspapers have always comprised a small pool of clients without a whole lot of money, and in the current market, with virtually all print media forced to cut corners, they're especially hard to sell to. All the weekly cartoonists I've talked to recently are trying to expand into other formats—daily strips, graphic novels—or thinking seriously about getting out of the weekly strip biz entirely.
And that's a shame, because I love weekly strips. Some of my favorite comics are weeklies: Keith Knight's
The K Chronicles, Carol Lay's
Story Minute and
WayLay, Matt Groening's
Life in Hell, Alison Bechdel's
Dykes to Watch Out For (although I'm always faintly perturbed to come out as Stuart on the "Which Dyke Are You?" LiveJournal quiz, no matter how many times I take it). It's a great format, allowing a little more space and flexibility than the traditional four-panel daily strip, but still encompassing a satisfyingly concise chunk of comic. It may also be worth mentioning that the alt-weeklies have traditionally attracted more diverse cartoonists than other areas of American comics, as suggested by the fact that only one of the cartoonists I've mentioned so far is white and male, as compared to almost all the cartoonists I've mentioned in my last three columns.
But Lynda Barry...even in hard times, Lynda Barry shouldn't have to struggle. Last year, when that big Masters of American Comics show toured the country, a lot of people complained that there wasn't a Mistress of American Comics anywhere among the fifteen chosen artists. Loudmouthed feminist that I am, I was one of the complainers. But in all honesty, there's only one female American cartoonist I'd consider worthy of joining the admittedly exalted ranks of Eisner, Kirby, Kurtzman, Schulz and Crumb, and that's Lynda Barry. She's that good. (I won't get into the thorny issue of who I would've knocked off the list to make room for her. Oh, all right, Gary Panter. Or maybe one of the action strip guys.)
In college, I went through a phase of obsession with Barry's weekly strip, the unforgettably titled
Ernie Pook's Comeek. At the time, it ran in the
Village Voice, next to
Life in Hell, and I used to get back issues of the
Voice out of the Vassar library and photocopy all the Ernie Pook strips. I carried them around with me in a folder and memorized them. The discovery that there were actual Ernie Pook collections, often available at the secondhand bookstores in New York City to which I would escape whenever I had train fare, was a revelation akin to first looking into Chapman's Homer. I am not too proud to admit that the best story I wrote for my senior composition class, one of the stories I submitted in place of a thesis, was written in a voice that owed an enormous, possibly actionable debt to Lynda Barry.
Even after I accumulated all of Barry's strip collections (and her novels, and errata like the oversized, glorious illustrated essay
Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!), her work remained somehow semi-mythical. There were strips in that folder I've never seen reprinted, like a sequence relating certain events from
The Freddie Stories, wherein Marlys' little brother Freddy undergoes horrible traumas and metamorphoses into the flamboyant Skreddy 57, from Marlys' point of view. What happened to those strips? They're not gone. I still have that folder somewhere.
Barry's comics are often crude on the level of draftsmanship but beautiful in all the ways that count. They tell painful truths, mostly about growing up, but we never stop growing up so they never stop being painful. I still laugh every time read one of the earliest Ernie Pook strips, "The Night We All Threw Up," where every throwaway detail is hilarious and perfect (when the kids establish sleeping-bag territories, Arna labels Marlys' area "'Land of Marlys' also known as 'Butt Island'" and her own "My land which was gorgeous and smelled like perfume from France." How many times have I used the phrase "smelled like perfume from France" in conversation? A lot of times, that's how many times). And I still cry reading
One Hundred Demons. There's a time in your life when the world is made of glittering possibilities dangling just out of reach, and if the magic isn't out there you might as well die. Barry lives in that time. What a terrible and wonderful fate.
We all have a few writers and artists who are specifically ours, the ones who hit us so hard in a very particular, personal place that their mark will be on us forever. And there are usually some oddball names on that short list. For me, it's Daniel Pinkwater and Lynda Barry. 2 good 2 be 4gotten, to quote
The Lynda Barry Experience.
The Village Voice dumped
Ernie Pook and
Life in Hell years ago to make room for a sports page. I'm glad I can still read Barry's comics online. And I'll be first in line for her upcoming book
What It Is. So things aren't so bad. But I declare it a shame that some other weird teenager, not so long from now, can't clip Ernie Pooks for her personal mobile shrine.
Previous:
#3: Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld
Next:
Top 5 lists, part oneShaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2008
