#lyndabarry

Pretty extraordinary 2-pager from #lyndabarry

Hello! My name is Anna Sellheim and I will be curating the Our Comics Ourselves tumblr this week. I write comics about mental health and progressive politics. This will be a mix of both comics that were important to me growing up and helped shape my creative voice, as well as work that I find particularly exciting now.

So the greatness that is Lynda Barry has already been addressed on this blog literally in the last post, but I am going to talk her earlier fiction work here. The Greatest of Marlys is a book that I discovered in a crappy beach front tourist book shop when I was 14. It is a collection of Barry’s long standing alt newspaper comic Ernie Pook’s Comeek.

Marlys started out as a bratty stuck up nerd that was hated by her cousins, Arna and Arnold. Originally the strip consists of the dynamics between them and occasionally other kids in the neighborhood. Basic things like going to school, popularity among various cliques, Arna and Marly’s dreams of growing up to be beautiful teens, etc. were covered in early strips. These comics are strong in and of themselves because when they portray the perspective and feelings of these kids, they feel legitimate and authentic. 

As the strip goes on, it gets less humorous and a lot darker. There’s extreme parental neglect, death, illness , abandonment, and other heavy topics that are addressed in the course of the series. But there’s beauty in these stories and the characters all come away with dignity, even at the worst moments.

The Best Of Marlys is just one collection of these kids’ stories, there are quite a few collections out there (such as The Freddie Stories; be warned this book will break your heart).

Lynda Barry has been doing genius level work for decades and I am so glad that she is finally being recognized as the titan of the industry that she truly is. Her work is all heart. I’m going to end this with my favorite comics of Lynda Barry’s ever, some of the comic strips that I think about most regularly:

You can find Lynda Barry at on tumblr here (Do not ask me why this site won’t let me tag her correctly). I am @annasellheim and my website is here.