[ published on July 11, 2006 in my previous blog, "The Flatland Oracles"]
The purpose of this blog/blog category is to recommend things to other people that have helped me cope with life's failure to live up to fantasy. On the list of those who have helped me along the way, Lynda Barry's name ranks near the top.
I first encountered Lynda Barry's comics (essentially short stories in graphic format) at Salon.com, where it is described as a "serial comic." If you haven't read her comics, you can find One Hundred Demons there---this link is to the last one in the series-----but if you do a search, you'll find the rest of them.
Now the "serial comic" is a genre of which I've always been particularly fond, though my preference isn't for the serial, but for the final product (the whole enchilada) after a publisher puts them all together and you can read them as an ongoing story. (I have plenty of recommendations for those adults who have never experienced the joys of 'comics as light literature.') Though the serial comic is designed to be read in daily or weekly small doses, that is not how I prefer to read them. Even when I first discovered Barry's work at Salon, I didn't read the serial in little bites (they just left me hungry for more and mildly dissatisfied). I'd wait awhile for the backlog to build up, then greedily devour a rich and pungent meal of them in one sitting. When it comes to serial comics, I always prefer to be super-sized.
At some time during the early evolution of my Barry-love, I stumbled on a Barry collection, The!Greatest!of!Marlys! at a local bookstore. Once I had it in my hungry little hands, I rushed back to my cave and disappeared until I'd read it straight through, emerging to reassure Nick that I was still alive and to demand that he make a run for sufficient chocolate and Jordan almonds to sustain me. I didn't even stop to sleep.
Barry's work evokes aspects of childhood and adolescence that I think most novels about childhood don't come close to touching. Furthermore, her novels are set in or grounded in a Seventies sensibility. Even the slang the kids use is Seventies slang.
While my childhood experiences were very different from the experience of the children in Barry's novels, I have a lot of the same points of reference. As a child and adolescent during the late Sixties and early Seventies, I suffered from vague free-floating anxiety and generalized angst for which I had words because no one had yet named it; and which in any case I assumed was the ordinary way for a child to feel (and maybe it is). I dealt with it was through drawing, keeping journals, and playing made-up games with other kids. I spent a lot of time trying to bring myself into some sort of relation with the world, trying to work out how to be.
The kids in Marlys! come from a poor family where the adults are mainly just background static. In my experience, a lot of kids growing up in that period (whether rich or poor) had parents who simply didn't factor much into their day to day experience. At mealtimes and when you couldn't avoid interacting with them; that was about it. "Soccer moms" hadn't---thank GOD---been invented in those days. We didn't have videogames or computers but we DID have the right (the lucky ones) to be left alone as long as we didn't make trouble for anyone or get sick or in trouble at school.
"Parenting"---again, thank God!---wasn't a verb in the days in which the story of Marlys and her cousins appears to be unfolding. Meals appeared and bedtimes were set without our input; but we were allowed to roam free (extraordinarily free compared to today) and to choose our friends without much interference and without having to inform our parents of our exact whereabout every damn minute as long as we stayed within a certain range. The world of the children in Marlys! is that world, a world of curious freedom, arbitrary restrictions, and remote, vaguely terrifying adults.
The children are as ordinary and extraordinary as all normal children. The ordinary part of them is what other people mainly see. Marlys is fat, freckled, and homely (though wildly imaginative and---as she often reminds the others---"gifted"). Arna is shy and withdrawn, but also sensitive and deep. Arnold is outwardly a tough guy, but has a tender side he mostly hides from his siblings and cousins (the soft side emerges when he falls in love with a silent, strange girl that he---and the other children---refer to as "the hare-lip.") Freddy is a gentle oddball. Maybonne, 'the teenager,' is pretty and puts on a convincing game face to the younger kids, but has the uncertainties and anxieties that an adolescent has and had.
A lot of the stories deal with the miseries of childhood. Since these children come from families where there is little money, gifts---from the Sears catalog! Remember the Sears Catalog?---are few and far between and when a doll or a dress is destroyed, it is gone for good; there aren't any replacements. I don't think any words could convey more effectively than Barry's drawings the grief and horror of a child who---ignoring the instructions---feeds milk to "Baby Tiny Tears" (who "came with a whole wad of accessories which is the best part of any doll"). "You were supposed to let her only drink water," Arna says, "but some of us felt sorry for Baby Tiny tears and let her drink milk. This was a big mistake, especially if it was summer and you left her take in the hot sun for about five hours afterwards." The picture portrays with breathtaking accuracy the horror and revulsion of a little girl whose favorite doll reeks irrevocably of rotted milk and it's your own stupid fault. Sears Catalog Part 1. Ah, how it takes me back!
Sears Catalog Part 2 addresses the agony of the birthday present which doesn't live up to expectation. Dispensing with the advice of her cousins, Marlys---a physically unattractive child obsessed with 'glamour'---is seduced by the photographs in the catalog into buying the "exclusive molded rubber glamour wigs for your young little miss." I remember those wigs! The little girl next door had them. My mother kept my hair cut as short as a boy's for reasons I will never know, and I remember trying to convince her to let me wear one of them to school. Arna: "When the wigs finally came they were about five hundred times worse than I ever could have imagined. Marlys started crying and for once I didn't blame her. They looked like a bathing cap with a bad infection...Like old gum in the dirt." MARLYS (crouched on the floor, spraying tears in all directions): "Can you even believe it?"
Obviously, I was less realistic than Marlys and Arna because I thought---just possibly---that someone might believe that they were real hair. The one I favored was a peculiar silvery yellow color (perhaps intended to be platinum) in a bouffant Sixties style, but when I turned it upside down, it looked--to me---like the long hair I longed to have.
The cartoons I love best are about the anxieties, jealousies, humiliations, and occasional and often inexplicable joys of young children left to their own devices. The joys were usually of your own making; the others were inflicted on you by life. In Extra Credit, Arnold, Arna's brother makes a model of South America "out of chewed-up gum. You might think that would be ugly but it came out beautiful. He said gum was perfect because ther's 13 kinds for the 13 countries and gum lasts good." (Adults everywhere, because that's what happens: EEEEEEEW.) But Arnold puts his heart into making this map. ARNA: "When he presented it to Mrs. Brogan she said it could spread disease. I had Mrs. Brogan last year and should have known to tell him the topic of her whole life is germs. Arnold said just spray it with Lysol, kills germs on contact! Don't throw it out! But no." Humiliation and heartbreak. Who doesn't remember what that was like?
There is also the matter of love, of falling in love, I mean. Children do. On this topic, the narrative of the characters can verge on poetry. Marlys falls in love with a teenager who smacks her in the butt with a tennis racket while Marlys was "bending over one day, looking at some ants." That's how love happens when you're young (meaning "under 35.") To express her love for "Richard the Teenager," Marlys insists on doing the Mexican hat dance ("It was her specialty"). "The upstairs window shoved open and Maybonne's head came out yelling Bug off Marlys, will you? But no, she couldn't. She couldn't, she couldn't, she just couldn't." Marlys' Love.
ARNOLD: "The kiss of Jeanette the hare lip was incredible...She said close your eyes. With her hand covering her mouth she said close your eyes. And she kissed me....Then I said close your eyes and it was my turn. My turn to move her shaking hand away from her mouth and kiss her strange and beautiful lips." The Kiss of the Harelip.
The children in Marlys!---Marlys in particular---often cheer themselves up with storytelling and make-believe (one of my favorite things in the book is each child's drawing of his or her dream-house), but they are exceptionally clear-eyed when it comes to other people and the behavior of other people. For this reason, one often tells the other's story
There's also sex. Barry addresses (and illustrates) a moment that I've seldom seen so aptly expressed: the innocent discovery of sexual pleasure before you have information or words to know what it is. "In my cousin Marlys's back yard was the clothes line T-pole which we loved to hang upside down on....If you hook your legs just right and swing, there's this feeling you can get like your pants are itching you in this most perfectly gorgeous way." As my friend Sarah remarked, there is no better description anywhere of, uh, that. T-Pole. And you really need to see Barry's drawing of the faces of the upside-down Marlys and Arna to appreciate their appreciation.
One Hundred Demons is similar but different. Though I read it first at Salon, I bought the hard cover version. It's a work of art, really, and---fittingly---about the size and shape of the autograph albums we used to pass around in school in the Seventies. The book is amazingly beautiful to look at, filled with gorgeous collages addressing unexpected subjects as well as Barry's cartoons. Barry painted the cartoons using the technique for painting used "by a Zen monk named Hakuin Ekaku, in 16th Century Japan. I checked out some books, followed the instructions, and the demons began to come." (DEMON: "They were not the demons she expected...At first they freaked her, but then she started to love watching them come out of her paintbrush.")
One of the recurring subjects of One Hundred Demons is Barry's relationship with her terrifying mother, but there are many others. The perspective is different from Marlys!; it's told more from the perspective of an adult looking back at childhood than from the perspective of the child, but it is equally deep and insightful and funny (sometimes horrifyingly funny, which is a good kind of funny). Some of the subjects are more overtly disturbing, but again, in a good, clean, purging way. Guess what: You are NOT alone. Whatever hurts that you can't articulate has happened to others who can.
My favorite of all the Demons is Dancing. It exactly tracks my own experience: first the sheer pleasure in movement, then the desire to dance yourself, then the perhaps well-meaning friend who lets you know that you can't dance and look stupid. "I don't blame that girl for knocking me out of my groove. I was about to start Junior High School. It was going to happen anyway. But it was a long time before I got it back." Like Barry, I'm still "secretly spaz-dancing alone in my room."
(Barry's graphic novel Cruddy is reviewed at Salon. It's an excellent review by Heidi Bell, so I've linked it here.)
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