Autobiography and Continuous Narrative in Lynda Barry's One! Hundred! Demons!Click to enlarge all images. Moving away from Ernie Pook’s Comeek in Lynda Barry’s impressive comix pedigree, One! Hundred! Demons! gives us the opportunity to discuss issues of collage art in comix, multi-racial graphic depictions, autobiography versus biography, and the comic auteur’s place in the comix art historical canon. I will tackle those issues in that order, but I also contend that the reverse is valuable in evaluating why this book and its divergences from Barry’s previous comic work is so important to the creation of a comix canon.
her rehashings of childhood in Ernie Pook’s Comeek, similar emotional beats present themselves in One! Hundred! Demons! to highly relatable but also highly specific ends. Stories such as “Lost World” about Barry’s neighborhood games of kickball, for example, appeal to general experiences playing outdoors with the kids on the block until the streetlamps go on, using small snippets of time to represent multiple summers’ worth of play. This condensation as well as the slower processes of brush painting and coloring give off an air of contemplation, of years and years of sitting on those memories until they formed into polished proverbs on what it means to grow and change. This process, by necessity, is one of collection and assemblage which Barry makes evident in her section title pages. Those pages give thematic hints about the comics’ content, yes, but they also reveal the processes it took to come to those conclusions: snipping newspapers, making notes, pasting two ideas together. In the second to last panel of the provided selection, an adult Barry sits on a plane remembering how her younger self used to wave at passing planes, thinking she could be seen from the sky. The yellow in her glasses, sweater, and headband is the same as the light beaming down from the lampposts in her depictions of her youthful memories, visually connecting those nights to her current adult ruminations. Rather than embodying an in-the-moment experience as in The Greatest of Marlys or The Freddie Stories, Barry embodies meditation and the very act of growth through age.
occurred to her until pointed out. A new girl tells Lynda her dancing looks “stupid.” Another admits that her mother forbids her from spending time at Lynda’s house so that her clothes don’t smell bad. In both instances, Barry was made to feel uncomfortable in her skin and place in life, painfully aware of her physicality and others’ perceptions of that physicality. This discomfort dislodges her from any one particular identity, not white enough for her “refined” peers and not Filipina enough to dance without care. She describes herself as moving through identities, a wayward figure who tries to live as many experiences as she can in order to be as many people as she can. The embodiment of this constant building up of identity is the collage – an apt way to capture the overlapping multiplicities of multiracial identities. The coming together of the book into such a coherent “oeuvre” (as Dave Eggers calls it) is, therefore, a triumph. So many disparate ideas, anecdotes, memories, and doodles come together in what I would call a continuous narrative, an art historical term for works which capture the passing of time collapsed into one singular artwork. While Barry uses much scratchier, messier lines in The Greatest of Marlys and The Freddie Stories to embody trauma, mental suffering, and the undeveloped childhood mind, she opts for a more fluid, painterly style in One! Hundred! Demons!, the characteristics of which emphasize motion above all else. Lynda Barry’s persona in this book is constantly in motion, both physically and psychologically. Though one could argue that one singular panel constitutes one artwork, I would insist that every panel contributes to one large, ever-developing journey to reconcile one person’s disjointed experiences into something intelligible. The individual stories are not presented linearly, but they are not the focus; the continuous narrative tells the story of Barry’s adult reflections back on all those disparate moments. We watch her sort through old memories and faces, progressing ever closer to conclusions drawn across time while also understanding that time passes as she performs these meditations. This is what I mean when I say that Barry’s persona is constantly in motion. Her authorial voice is actively processing each section as she writes, as she unearths each demon and unpacks its impact on her development. The book functions as one big collage, ordered in such a manner so as to form a whole picture upon turning the last page. It’s a brilliant work with messages that are more contentments than conclusions, implying that there is always more collecting and sorting to be done. In writing about her own identity, Barry then calls into question what it means to make comics about oneself rather than about fictional characters, and the subsequent difference between autobiographical comix and what she dubs “autobifictionalography.” Something interesting happens about halfway through the comic which brings Barry’s earlier questions back to mind: “is it autobiography if parts of it are not true? Is it fiction of parts of it are?” In the section titled “San Francisco,” Barry seems to reintroduce a character we previously meet by a different name. Just two sections prior, Barry describes a friend she had when she was twelve named Ev who was two years younger than herself. She explains that until turning thirteen, she never had a problem with her age; something about teenagerdom caused her to feel, once again, overly aware of herself and other’s thoughts about her having an 11-year-old best friend. Complete with one of the only photographs in the whole book, this section carries deep seated regret which at once recalls our own lost friendships while also specifying Barry’s unique experiences. In ‘San Francisco,” however, Barry refers to a different best friend of the same age named Gladys, one who she also ditches in order to chase after the older, cooler hippie crowd. It seems as though Barry writes over her regrets with Ev by constructing a scenario in which she at least set herself in motion by abandoning her friend. In the story about Ev, Barry draws herself in her room, holing herself away from everyone. In this new plot, she receives a punishment of sorts when the hippies turn out to be creeps and her mother chews her out for disappearing. Barry seems to a more conclusive end to her friendship in this new story to make up for the lack of closure she has in her other relationship. All this being said, readers feel a similar hesitation to trust the protagonist’s reality in this moment as they do while reading The Freddie Stories. We can at least deduce that Ev is the real eleven-year-old best friend, as her picture grounds her in history, but what are we then to make of Gladys or any of Lynda’s subsequent escapades? Which of her friends are real? Which of her identities is real? Is that the question that child, teenage, and adult Lynda Barry grapple with throughout their development? To make a comic inspired by or about oneself requires a greater sense of the artist’s hand than a comic devoid of personal connection, something like Laurence King Publishing’s Graphic Lives series (valuable, but more educational than personal). Because literary scholars seemingly value such personal stories more as oeuvres than, say, superhero comics, however, the auteur comix artist more quickly has a place in literature studies and art history than major, “assembly-line” comic publishers like Marvel or DC. Lynda Barry has repeatedly been accepted into the relatively small circle of “notable” comix artists, thus having a select number of scholarly writings published about her by researchers such as Hillary Chute or Melinda Luisa de Jesús. While any number of artists getting recognition for their work in comix is exciting and well-deserved, I have to question the focus on auteurism in general. In most other artistic mediums, scholars recognize the plethora of hidden names behind the celebrated giants; the film industry is the most culpable, I would argue, but so too is the art world. Any large name in the market has a team of uncelebrated assistants doing much of the labor – both manual and artistic – and even the revered masters had workshops full of apprentices filling out their large canvases. Why, then, do comix have necessarily more value when they come from one solitary genius? To conclude my discussion on One! Hundred! Demons!, what I have found is that in trying to piece together her adult identity and values, Lynda Barry has to sort through seemingly disconnected experiences in her life to find sensible throughlines. As someone who suffered from “emotional problems” on top of feeling out of touch with both halves of her ethnicity, Barry had to enact a different type of cerebral experience to write One! Hundred! Demons! – the meditation on memories as opposed to reliving those memories. To characterize this difference, I would compare Ernie Pook’s Comeek to active voice and One! Hundred! Demons! to passive voice. Writing comics from the point of view of Marlys, Freddie, Arna, or Arnold requires Barry to play a role, to invent new experiences which might be based off of her memories but ultimately take her in new directions. It’s almost like roleplay. To write about her own experiences, Barry ends up with a lot of “is” and “was” statements – “this is how it was when I was younger” or “I was this way.” She does not have to discover these experiences because she already lived them, thus the drawings are more composed and refined. The story is her exploration of a series of vignettes rather than the vignettes themselves, and she encourages everyone to try the same exercise so as to refine our own understanding of which events and people shaped our identity.
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