Against His Immense and Terrible Flesh

pulpatoon:

I spent the morning scanning Lynda Barry cartoons as examples of parallel and tangential relationships between pictures and words in comics.  And, in the process, I reminded myself just how incredible Barry is, and just how irresistible her characters are.

She has a tumblr, which seems largely focused on a class she’s teaching: thenearsightedmonkey.tumblr.com/

and an etsy shop, which is sadly empty at the moment: www.etsy.com/shop/LyndaBarryArt

So, she’s not a quick Google search away. You’ll have to pick up a book. But do it. She’s the best.

I know this will sound like I’m denigrating Barry’s work when I say the following, but I really am celebrating it: Whenever I meet someone who talks about wanting to create comics but they “can barely draw stick figures” (eesh), I use Barry as one of my examples of someone whose artwork isn’t what one might, at first glance, consider to be particularly sophisticated* but whose comics are nonetheless compelling, engrossing, emotionally complex, narratively fluid, and perfectly suited to the atmosphere she’s trying to convey. Lynda Barry is a master of the form, even if she isn’t exactly drawing Bridgman’s Guide bodies flipping over three-point perspectives…

The right art for the story should be the mantra of comics.

*And you’d be wrong, there’s more smarts involved in Barry’s comics than in any hundred quasi-photo-realists in the medium BUT NOW I AM JUST RAMBLING…