In Barry’s hand, demons are the life moments that haunt you, form you, and stay with you: your worst boyfriend kickball games on a warm summer night watching your baby brother dance the smell of various houses in the neighborhood you grew up in or the day you realize your childhood is long behind you and you are officially a teenager.Īs a cartoonist, Lynda Barry has the innate ability to zero in on the essence of truth, a magical quality that has made her book One! Hundred! Demons! an enduring classic of the early twenty-first century. (Oct.Inspired by a sixteenth-century Zen monk’s painting of a hundred demons chasing each other across a long scroll, acclaimed cartoonist Lynda Barry confronts various demons from her life in seventeen full-color vignettes. The result is simultaneously poignant and hilarious-never one at the expense of the other-and so are her loopy, sure-lined drawings, which make both the kids and the adults look as awkward and scrunched-up as they feel. Barry's demons are the personal objects and effects that remind her of the in-between emotional states from her early life. The structure of the book is a drawing exercise that allows a hundred demons to flow out of the artist's pen onto paper. Here, though, Barry gets a chance to stretch out, drawing out her memories and impressions into long, lively, sometimes sweet and sometimes painful narrative sequences on a seemingly endless list of curiously compelling topics: the scents of people's houses (one is 'a combination of mint, tangerines, and library books'), dropping acid at 16 with a grocery bagger, the colors of head lice and the art of domesticating abused shelter dogs. The semi-autobiographical vignettes of this new work, originally serialized in Salon, follow the same basic format as the strip: blocks of enthusiastic first-person commentary at the top of each panel, squiggly, childlike-but stylized-drawings and dizzy word-balloon dialogue between the characters. Childhood's cruelties and pleasures, remembered in luminous, unsparing detail, have become the central topic of her work. Knows, Barry has a pitch-perfect sense of the way kids talk and think. As anyone who's read her comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek

Lynda barry 100 demons