Lynda Barry makes us contemplate some simple yet complex questions that get at the heart of what we are doing in class together this semester.
- What is an image?
- What images are alive, specific and spontaneous in your mind?
- How does memory work? How is memory like play?
Lynda Barry's Tumblr, where she posts assignments for her students (yes, she's a teacher!): http://thenearsightedmonkey.tumblr.com/
A GREAT interview with Barry on The Rumpus:
A brief piece about who Lynda Barry is as a comics teacher:
In this piece, she says: "I was especially interested in people who didn't draw or who didn't feel they could draw... I was blown away, especially by the people who had quit drawing around adolescence, what happened with their work when they started to draw again."
After becoming familiar with Lynda Barry's life and work, and, more importantly, with her approach to reconstructing the past and making sense of her memories, please write a 300-400 word response to her work. In your post, discuss her art style, page design, and her storytelling abilities in One Hundred Demons. I look forward to reading your writing.
I love that her work does not follow a timeline and that it popcorns from memory to memory. Her page design and layout is much different than Brown and Wertz. Besides the obvious use of color within her panels and the page backdrop, she also has two panels on every page. While her hand drawn panel style is much like Brown’s, it feels more bold and prominent to me. Also, her panels consist of mostly narrations and dialogue, which I related to Brown’s style. Barry’s drawing of self is much different from Brown and Wertz in that it is very realistic and true. After doing a quick image search on Google you can easily see that her images are really bound to reality.
ReplyDeleteAfter watching the YouTube video I went back and read the memoir again, mainly because I now I had this awesome voice to fill the pages. I loved the video! Much like the Rumpus article stated—she is infectious. Her personality and quirkiness is endearing and uplifting. She really does have the ability to take over a room—even through a computer screen.
I love her chapter “The Aswang”! Her use of colors, cutouts, and textures gives the chapter and memory depth. The textures and objects make the memory three dimensional, and allowed me to be able to take part in it. Also, I noticed within the chapter that her narrations contain block and cursive lettering. At first I did not completely understand why. I read it as an emphasis on those words, but why? Why did she emphasize certain words that didn’t really require emphasis? Where these words written in cursive to mirror her Wisconsin accent? Within “The Aswang” chapter, I loved that she was able to figure out and realize that she did not have an endearing relationship with her mother and did with her grandmother, but that her mother had the same relationship dynamic with her own mother and grandmother.
My big take away from Barry is that she refers to art as the “image world” and that it provides emotional and mental health, and the excerpt from her book What It Is found within the video: “We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay”.
Amanda Hart! This is a great post, so thank you for kicking things off here this time 'round. I LOVE the points you raise here:
Delete1. her work has texture and three-dimensionality, which does something to the reader, the reading experience, the transaction with the book as object, as text. A collage approach to crafting visual text. You'll see a version of this again in Long Tack Sam, though more autobiographical than nostalgic and/or evocative.
2. she emphasizes certain words with loopy, cursive writing. why? in other places, her printing is oversized and childlike. why? how does Barry impact our reading just with her attention to lettering? Other authors we've read?
3. accessing the image world provides us with an escape, with healing, with making sense of our non-linear lives. Why do images live inside of us? How can we access them? Communicate them to others?
Amanda: Any one of these points is a viable place for a seminar paper exploration. You are paying attention to interesting stuff! Thank you.
Lynda Barry’s work is so different than the two works we have read thus far in presentation as well as the way she presents her material. Visually, it is clear that Barry’s work is original. Her page size is different than that of the other artists and I’m pretty sure she mentions in the introduction that her “canvas” is a legal pad. I like how she color codes the sections of her book by painting the background a different color for each section – it is a mental reminder that connects each piece of that piece of the narrative together. I would say that she is similar to Brown in that her construction is episodic, not linear; she devotes chapters to “demons” which do not exist on a timeline, but exist throughout her life, and this is how she tells her story.
ReplyDeleteBarry’s narrative is also different than Brown’s or Wertz’s in that I feel she tries to make sense of it all. Not that I think she comes to conclusions, nor do I get the impression that she is trying to. Instead, it feels as though she is trying to get close to some sense of “what it all means,” whatever that means. I get this sense specifically through the rhetorical questions she periodically asks throughout her own narrative. This direct connection to the reader was also missing from Brown’s and Wertz’s memoirs – while we could place ourselves in their shoes and imagine life through their eyes, Barry is inviting us into the memoir itself, asking us questions along the way.
Her art is different from Brown’s and Wertz’s in a number of very obvious ways – color, style, use of collage, etc. Something that stood out to me was her depiction of motion. Barry would draw an image that, outside of the context of the narrative, may be seen as monstrous because it does not actually look like a human. For instance, the dancing figures on page 46 are shown with multiple limbs. It is only through the context of the written narrative, and the sparse motion lines that a reader is able to see that these creatures are, indeed, human.
The strongest link that I have found through each of the three artists is their presentation of self, both physical and written. None of them are very kind to themselves! It makes me wonder if these individuals are actually self-deprecating or if it’s a narrative tool they use to make it more compelling or interesting.
Jessica,
DeleteThank you for this thoughtful, powerful post. There are three shining golden nuggets here in this succinct piece of writing.
1. Making Meaning of Lived Experiences (phenomenology!!!!): "I feel she tries to make sense of it all. Not that I think she comes to conclusions, nor do I get the impression that she is trying to. Instead, it feels as though she is trying to get close to some sense of “what it all means,” whatever that means. I get this sense specifically through the rhetorical questions she periodically asks throughout her own narrative."
2. Breaking the Fourth Wall: "This direct connection to the reader was also missing from Brown’s and Wertz’s memoirs – while we could place ourselves in their shoes and imagine life through their eyes, Barry is inviting us into the memoir itself, asking us questions along the way."
(from Wikipedia, "Fourth Wall": "The idea of the fourth wall was made explicit by philosopher and critic Denis Diderot and spread in 19th-century theatre with the advent of theatrical realism, which extended the idea to the imaginary boundary between any fictional work and its audience...
Speaking directly to or otherwise acknowledging the audience through a camera in a film or television program, or through this imaginary wall in a play, is referred to as "breaking the fourth wall" and is considered a technique of metafiction, as it penetrates the boundaries normally set up by works of fiction."
3. Artist's depiction of self: "The strongest link that I have found through each of the three artists is their presentation of self, both physical and written. None of them are very kind to themselves! It makes me wonder if these individuals are actually self-deprecating or if it’s a narrative tool they use to make it more compelling or interesting."
You are paying attention, and these are three awesome starting points, perhaps, for seminar paper explorations. If not, you are doing a great job of reading closely and of practicing how to "get at" a seminar paper topic or question. Thank you!
When reading One Hundred Demons, I instantly noticed that the style varied from the previous two memoirs we have read thus far. Barry's stories of each of her demons are not told in order, and each section is represented in a different vibrant color. One thing I noticed right away about Barry's page design is that the panels are drawn with mostly text above, followed by illustrations and text balloons below. There is the same amount of gutter space in each page, and the panels are slightly crocked, which tells us that they were hand drawn. In many panels the words overpower the panel, and leave the image to look squished as if there is not enough space. In the majority of the panels the text balloons are placed between Barry and the other characters, which portrays Barry as isolated and alone from the other characters. This ties into the theme of loneliness that is present throughout the memoir. The art style of One Hundred Demons is also unique. The characters are represented cartoonish, and Barry often exaggerates the facial features of particular characters. When we see Barry drawn as her young self, she draws her skin very lightly and covers herself in freckles. Her mother on the other hand, is drawn with much darker skin and always drawn with an angry facial expression. This tells readers that she feels distant from her mom, and it also represents their relationship as a negative one. Overall, I found that Barry's colorful artwork and cartoonish drawings allowed her to tell a story about some of the dark demons of growing up while remaining playful. I believe the colorful artwork helped to counteractive some of the serious issues that the book focuses on. I think this would also be a great book for an adolescent to read who is also struggling with some of the problems that Barry did growing up.
ReplyDeleteLynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons, wow. I opened up this book and immediately had no idea what to do with myself. All the little doodles scattered everywhere with no necessary use to the story, I was terrified. But I eased in by telling myself it was just a book while examining every little detail, and I came out with a lot of awakened memories.
ReplyDeleteThe page setup that Barry presents for the stories was relaxing to me and my fear of visual art. For the stories each page had two brightly colored panels that created a comforting pattern that cradled me. After a few stories I knew exactly what to expect of the pages. Her inclusion of a final page with only a small picture in the corner of what I assume represented the “demon”, gave me as a reader, time to reflect on my own life and how this demon affected her life. This created a closure to the story that was a personal reflection for me as the reader.
Inside the panels is a very different picture than the other two memoirs we have read so far. Not only are they all in color, but there are so many words. The words themselves are what seem to tell the story, and the pictures are complimentary. They really make the story come to life, for instance, when Barry is speaking on her ex-boyfriend being like her mother and she makes his face look like her mothers. That really hits home the point and I find myself laughing at the pure nightmare of seeing someone I’m in a relationship with as being my mother.
I really enjoyed the introduction to the book where Barry is directly speaking to the reader and speaking on the creation of her demons. She represents herself drawing the panels we are looking at and she admits to having fun doing this. And now I look back on it and I see that her monster helper has a monkey on its body and in one panel, Barry is drawing the monkey. I think this is the monkey that she talks about in the Rumpus interview and I begin to think about just how much she is letting us into her world in this book.
It has to go without saying that color is truly what helped this book instantly stand out. In the beginning pages, she talks a lot about her red hair and the lighter color of her skin compared to “The Professor”. Without color, I do not think that the image in relation to the text would have been as strong. The emphasis on color is really what Lynda is using to her advantage. Even the different “demons” are color categorized in the text, as each chapter has its own particular color. Looking at the side of the book, you see a rainbow, a quick and easy glance at the “demons” you will read about.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I was a little skeptic at first, the “scrapbook” images at the begging of each chapter where kind of fun to look at. When I first glanced through this book, I did not quite understand what those pages were initially for. My first impressions were similar to Nate’s, “All the little doodles scattered everywhere with no necessary use to the story, I was terrified.” This is a text you have to read from start to finish, or else the meaning will be lost.
There are some definite comparisons to the other authors as well. Like Brown and Wertz, the style of the drawings are fairly simplistic, focusing more on the characters and what is immediately interacting with them. Barry seems to have mastered a technique of “movement” in her panels, however, while Wertz’s and Brown’s felt slightly more static.
Like Brown, Barry also uses her own handwriting when composing the text for the book. One thing that helped hers stand out a little more is the use of cursive writing as emphasis on particular words. “Of course, my MOM worshiped grandMA”. (p93) This helps the reader pay attention as they read along, and you sort of “hear” where she is placing the emphasis when she writes like this.
Like our other authors, this text is composed of memories, and not necessarily a linear timeline. I am finding that reading texts that are formatted in this manner are a little easier to approach, and they humble the writer some. They are human, and human memories are not always linear, but “episodic” and spontaneous.
What I also found unique about this piece was how the panels were aligned, they are all the same shape and size, and there are two panels per page. Like Brown, these pages are done in a format that is less “professional” and more unique to the artist/writer. This, however, sometimes leaves the panels a little cramped with text, and I am not entirely positive that this is for an artistic/comic reasoning. Sometimes, I think it helps add to the scene; on page 103, for example, there is a substantial amount of text between the characters. In this scene, Barry is using the text as a “wall” between the two arguing characters. Meanwhile, on page 115, the space feels cramped.
Overall, this is a very unique novel that was worth reading.
One Hundred Demons by Lynda Barry is very interesting. Like Jeffrey Brown, Barry does not follow a timeline. Her work seems scattered, but in the end everything makes sense. At one point in the story Barry may be in middle school then the next part she is elementary school. However, even through the random structure of her life one can see how she grows throughout the memoir.
ReplyDeleteUnlike the other two graphic novels we have read thus far Barry utilizes color. The colors she uses do not seem to be totally random. Colors like word seem to have meaning. In most of the panels other than the ones in which she is forced to incorporate a lot of detail the colors seem to set a mood. The colors affect the reader in an unconscious way in which the reader can get a sense of what the characters in the panel are feeling.
Sometimes Barry writes her words in cursive, or underlines them. The underlined words seem to indicate words of importance. The cursive words seem kind of random and I am not sure why she writes them in cursive even though they seem as if they should have a purpose. Also, unlike Wertz, Barry censors her swearing. She utilizes symbols such as @%*# to indicate a curse word. I’m not sure why Barry does not simply write out the curse word other than she wants readers of all ages to read the book, but at least when I see icons lined up in a manner in which Barry uses I usually just connect the dots which I believe anyone who would read this book would be able to do.
This book, I thought, stood out a lot to me in different ways from the other ones. Of course, as Danielle mentions, the color makes all the difference. This book really comes to life with all the colors she uses. I think it's funny how ridiculous she makes herself look, especially in the panels about dancing. How her arms are in several places at once and have motion lines surrounding them. For me, I really appreciated the chapter about her and her friend Ev, which at the end she puts the real life photo in. It shows that she actually thinks on it all the time and wants to show her sorrow for ditching her friend. The chapter where she does acid I think particularly shows the importance of her use of color. Also, I found the end to be hysterical that her mother happens to drive by which would be the worst experience of all time, I'd imagine. But her final panel where she says "It wasn't like i had never been robbed before" really struck me. I knew she didn't mean that he literally robbed her, but as the chapter was called "the visitor" she implicates how much of her that boy took away. She really cared for him and in the end he was just using her. One of the most striking moments to me was how she depicted her mother's yelling as sort of a joke, emphasized through her funky and almost silly drawings and completely unrealistic people. However, in the chapter she discusses about her favorite teacher, she introspects the fact that she's from a violent home. She sort of slyly inputs the fact that her mother bordered on verbally abusive, but looking back on it she realizes how it helped her grow as a person. At least that's what I took from it. There's so much going on on every single page. Within the panels and just on the pages itself. I really like the way she used the full page, instead of multiple panels. By sticking to her two panels a page method she was able to input more of her art, which I think made the memoir more uniquely her own.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, I love Lynda Barry’s handwriting. I’m not a huge fan of her mixing cursive with print, but I love the handwritten, all caps print. I think the handwritten narration lends itself well to a memoir because we get a sense of the author’s personality through visually seeing their writing.
ReplyDeleteAs far as her overall art style, I’m not a huge fan of her joint-less characters but I LOVE her use of color and section dividers. I appreciate her large, two panels per page style. I think this style allows the reader to absorb more of the page rather than trying to grasp everything all at once. It also gives the artist more room to express both words and images. As seen with Brown and Wertz, the panels are hand drawn as are the characters, portraying McCloud’s “amplification through simplification” allowing the reader to identify with the characters. Also similar to Brown and Wertz, Barry sections her book into little episodes. Like Wertz, Barry illustrates her section dividers and also color codes the sections to differentiate one from another. While her section dividers are a visual assault on the reader, Barry also uses them to set up the section that follows, so while it may take a minute to absorb all of the detail on these pages, the content is interesting if not essential to the following “chapter.”
I really like Barry’s inclusion of her process, both in the beginning and the end of the book. I love her depiction of her drawing demons on the yellow legal pad and her encouragement for the readers to draw their own demons with a step-by-step setup guide. Her quirky hodge-podge style lends itself to her feeling of awkwardness which is constantly brought up in the book.
I’m not really sure if I follow the narrative, if there even is a narrative to be followed aside from the episodic glimpses into her life that jump around chronologically. But despite her simplistic art style and a narrative that leaves me wondering what the hell it all means, I really enjoyed reading One Hundred Demons, but more specifically the chapters on the lost panda bear and leaving things behind and the chapter about the way things smell. I felt those chapters were the most relatable, at least for me.
I find the work she does fascinating. Lynda Barry is very interested in the details, however small they may be. What I find Barry uses for details in One Hundred Demons is the color and the specifics of her memory that she uses to construct her demons. Unlike Wertz or Brown’s graphic memoirs, Barry’s is very colorful and larger paneled. In the beginning of chapter pages it’s reminiscent of a scrap book of words, pictures, and color. To me, these pages really set the mood of the chapter/ demon to come. Setting this mood is important to Barry because each demon comes with different emotion the reader is supposed to feel. For example, in “Common Scents” I got the feeling of pride for who you are and where you come from, as well as a sense of quirky humor. I was also very interested with how Barry decided to draw herself. Like Brown, she draws herself in an unflattering way. From the get go this gave me the impression of awkwardness and honesty.
ReplyDeleteBarry’s page design is very different from the other graphic memoir’s we’ve read. The two panels per page style seem purposable for her style. She utilizes a lot more writing in her text boxes and word bubbles than Brown or Wertz and the larger panel size allows her the space. Her writing is where I find most of the small details of her work coming out. She chooses to write about very personal, almost lost to the mind’s details that I feel like we all can relate to. As I read I felt like everything she wrote about she wrote about for a reason. Each seemed to be an essential part of who she was or milestones. Her memoir about dancing really stood about to me because of the message. The idea of becoming self-conscious of yourself and being told something about you is “uncool” causing you to change and become more introverted. That’s powerful and sad because I feel like even the most self-confident person in the world can have doubts. What is it about us that causes us to change when we are threatened to be seen as different from the group? Is being young? I love how Barry included such a personal piece.
You can look at a lot of the various aspects of "One Hundred Demons" and see differences and similarities to the other texts we've read (artwork, layout, tone, etc.), but I think the thing that jumps out at me the most is how Barry "works things out." I really like what Jessica has already posted about this: "I feel she tries to make sense of it all." I get that same feeling. You can imagine reading this memoir is like eavesdropping on the way Lynda Barry's mind works, how she figures out the sum of her life. Barry is more critically self-aware than Wertz or Brown, not because she understands herself better, but the emphasis is on tracing back an infinite chain of "whys." In her chapter about the Aswang, Barry writes: "Monsters hardly ever started out as monsters. Something always transformed them. Was this also true of the Aswang?" And later, "Who was the first Aswang in the world? I'm 44 years old but I still don't know the answer."
ReplyDeleteI think something she says in the Rumpus interview sheds light on this. She takes a radical turn in her image-making and draws a monkey, but she doesn't know why. "So I drew it again, and I drew it again, and I drew it again, and then I thought, 'Aw, I’ll do a hundred,' and when I drew a hundred, it wasn’t enough. Then I thought, 'Aw, I’ll draw a thousand,' and still not enough. So I’m still drawing that monkey."
I feel like that is Barry's aesthetic, and maybe the monkey will never make sense, but the process of getting there is an art in itself. That's why I feel she is so reflective, why she uses pieced-together scrapbooks to tell her story. You can see it in how she teaches, too. She's interested in the psychology of remembering, the weird associative bridges we make between our brain, words, memory, science, and art.
Lynda Barry’s 100 Demons does have some similarities to the other authors we’ve read. Like the others it is the story of her life. Like the others her story is full of humor, but has it’s serious parts. Like the others her style is very cartoony/iconic. Like Brown she switches back and forth through time.
ReplyDeleteHowever there are many differences. 100 Demons is in color. There are only two panels per page. Instead of just relating the story of her life without added meaning, her story is highly thematic and full of messages. The chronology of her story is not decided by the order in which they happened, but how the fit into the different themes, the different demons. The other had sort of Seinfeld “story about nothing” thing going on, but 100 Demons is about something, it’s about a lot of something, each demon has a message. On the back of Wertz’s book, Fiona Apple said that she just wanted to put 2D Julia on the front her bike and go off into the world. Similar sentiments about wanting to be friends with or date Julia were mentioned by other students. Lynda Barry is different, I want strap 2D Lynda Barry to my back and have her be my Yoda. (For those who don’t get the reference, in The Empire Strikes back Luke Skywalker carries Yoda in a backpack). From my back she could see different events unfold in my life, perhaps events that did not seem so great at the time, and say what great lessons I will learn from these moments, as she does in her own life in 100 Demons.
Lynda Barry also uses scene-to-scene transitions the most, she doesn’t tend to stay in the same place for more than a panel or two much of the time. Moment-to-moment transitions are the next most common transitions. I also detected a little action-to-action. She doesn’t really seem to use subject-to-subject or aspect-to-aspect much, this is probably because she tends to put everything relevant all into the same panel. For example there is no shifting from person to person as they speck to each other, they both reside in the same panel. Perhaps this goes with some of philosophy of life in 100 Demons, a person is not an island, we do not reside in separate panels, by share our lives together with in the same panels. I did not detect any of the elusive non-sequiturs.
Lynda Barry’s 100 Demons is profound and full of meaning. The others have no real meaning in it, the meaning it has is what the reader brings to it. Jeffery Brown pretty much says this straight out in his work, and I think it can be applied to Julia Wertz’s work as well. But Lynda Barry put meaning into her work. She isn’t just relating events as they were, she has something more to say. In fact what she has to say is more important than what actually happened, she even states in the introduction that there parts that are not true, she refers to 100 Demons as an autobifictionalography. Meaning and the philosophy of life supersede reality in importance.
Barry causes the reader to question image and the conventional idea of what image is. Her pages are at times collage-like and mixed with drawing, painting and graphic or computer illustrations and cut-out photographs. These all come together to make one lively and bright image on the page.
ReplyDeleteThe image that resonantes in my mind is the page that features the two panels where Barry realizes she caught lice from the school children and she is telling her then boyfriend that she gave it to him. The next page features a panel where Barry has turned her boyfriend's image to that of her mother to display the realization that Barry has sought her mother in her boyfriend. I loved this set of images so much because even before I flipped the page I could see the resemblance in the way Barry drew her mother and her boyfriend.
Memory works in that past recollections connect with present recollections, and Barry illustrates this in her work really well, especially in the panels that I mentioned that I liked so much. It's really interesting that Barry realized what she sought in her boyfriend.
Barry's work is really interesting because it is most of the time very light-hearted. The light-heartedness is reinforced by the vibrance in the images and the simplicity in the art, however, sometimes Barry in reflection of the narrative she provides will get really deep, or dark. (I'm not sure how to word this.) This is especially true in the section about cicadas. I didn't expect this section to take the turn it did, but I was really struck.
Lynda Barry made me think a lot about how memories influence your writing. A Story starts from a spark of memory in your past even if you can’t remember exactly why that moment matters or why you even remember it. Her story telling make what can seem like a pointless memory a life lesson. She has the ability to extend one small memory into an entire story. Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons was like taking a trip through Barry’s memory’s lane. Her narrative is more like her looking back at the things that have happened to her after she understood them unlike Julia Wertz who seems to be writing from a point of view of herself while in the middle of the chaos she was undergoing. Others have noted that Barry does not follow chronological order; instead she organizes her stories/chapters by the demons of her past. Together they make up her life story. I really enjoyed her art style. It was different in so many ways than the other two graphic memoirs we have read in class so far. I loved the simplistic of it. Having only two panels to analyze per page allowed me to slow down and focus more on each individual one. I also enjoyed finally having some color brought into memoirs. I loved the font and the size of the font she uses for her text boxes because it’s like reading a traditional story. I find it clever of her to use her text boxes to narrate. Barry does a lot of zooming in. Her detailed description of her blanket with the kittens chasing balls through flowers show her emotional attachment to it. She complimented her description of the blanket with an illustration of it. One thing I am starting to appreciate about graphic memoirs is the visual mapping of things…literally seeing what I am reading. It helps us digs deeper into an author’s mind and into the text.
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