An expansion of character and trauma in The Freddie Stories by Lynda BarryClick to enlarge all images. The bottom cover is the one I purchased, which I believe is the first edition version published in 1999, one year before The Greatest of Marlys. The above cover is the second edition published in 2012, and features scarier, expressionist imagery. The second edition also includes "Lost Stories," an expansion to Freddie's story written after both the original 1999 publication and the 2000 Marlys collection. Afterword (not included in 1999 Publication) and select "Lost Stories"All pages reproduced for research purposes only. Email website author with copyright concerns, and I will respond as soon as possible. The Washington Post describes Lynda Barry's style in a review of The Freddie Stories as "chicken scratch flourishes," which, though a good description for her elegant messiness, also applies to The Greatest of Marlys. Today, I would like to see if we can find any potential differences between the original Ernie Pook's Comeek strips and the seemingly redone versions in this book. (Note: this book released one year prior to The Greatest of Marlys but replaces the character of Freddie in for the Arnold strips I referenced in my post on the Marlys collection. Another version of The Freddie Stories was published in 2012 including a set of “Lost Stories” which expand upon Freddie’s troubles, implying that he was rewritten over Arnold instead of the other way around.) On the very first couple pages, Barry greets the reader with a set of lavishly detailed, architectural fleuron designs (pg. 286) on the title pages. This relates to my ideas on the omnipresence of Barry’s adult, artistic voice serving as the framework for a child’s story which comes out of her subconscious. The architectural elements are her insertion, the platform she gives to the stories that unfold from her hands which shape them into coherence and tint them with her adult reflections. We see more of them in the strips from the mid to late 90s in The Greatest of Marlys, further leading me to believe that The Freddie Stories is a later venture on the artist’s part. The stories of Freddie and his family are tragic but otherwise silly and insignificant until they are given more significance by Barry’s framing of them. I am not the first to acknowledge the significance of architecture to comix, as many have noted that the two-dimensional built environment serves as a narrative tool as well as a point of conceptual interest wherein our three-dimensional, temporal reality is collapsed into a two-dimensional plane. Space and time can overlap and intersect one another in graphic narrative, as seen in many historical accounts such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus or Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde. Dr. Gențiana Dumitraşcu writes in “The city in the frame” that the famous architect Le Corbusier actually took quite a bit of interest in the drawings of cartoonist Rodolphe Töpffer, using Töpffer’s techniques of “sequential presentation” to show clients the experience of the buildings in a step-by-step, linear flow. Combining perspectival drawings with floor plans, cross sections, elevations, and more, Le Corbusier and other architects, especially those with painting backgrounds, created not just buildings but complete narratives in their structures. By referencing architectural ornament in the borders of her frames, Barry relates her drawing practice to those of architects. When I refer to a comic as “architectural,” however, I mean it more in the sense that Scott McCloud means it in his chapter “Time Frames." Comic structures do not simply reference architecture – the panels themselves act as the architecture of the reading experience. Just as a well-designed building has an internal logic that guides visitors through its interior, so too does a well-designed comic have an internal rhythm which guides the reader’s eyes in a particularly desired manner. In some cases, that guiding flow is purposefully ruptured so as to make a thematic point, but the comix medium in its entirety has developed a language like any other medium: novels, film, painting, sculpture, etc. Every medium has its tropes and expected anatomy, but it is uniquely the medium of comics which can reflect on the condensing of time and space in its two-dimensional format by setting up such an expected structure and then breaking it by altering the very building blocks which platform their narratives: the panels. All this being said, Lynda Barry’s strips appear deceptively straightforward in their composition. Larger books like The Greatest of Marlys and What It Is allow one page to each of its strips, while her smaller publications like The Freddie Stories and One! Hundred! Demons! split up the four panel strips across two-page spreads. In both cases, the reader knows to read left to right, across the row(s) – a very traditional comix format. As I discussed with The Greatest of Marlys, however, Barry covers half of her panels in a thick wall of text, as though crawling down into the world of the characters. Indeed, such infringement would fit with my analysis of the dual authorial presences in the work – that of adult Barry’s, and that of the children characters. The narration boxes provide the more cerebral reflections upon the action, thereby having an extra sense of “knowing” like an adult thinking back on their youth with added wisdom. Splitting the panels between action and mental thought also allows for us to see into the mind of Marlys’ brother, Freddie, who she describes as having “emotional problems” alongside his caring and down-to-earth personality. One of the main differences between The Freddie Stories and The Greatest of Marlys lies in how much the reader can trust that the action drawn into the bottom half of the panels is, in fact, reality. The entirety of Ernie Pook’s Comeek is written from a child’s perspective, so Barry understandably exaggerates her drawings to match a child’s imaginative vision. For the most part, however, there is a striking amount of reality beneath the child-like drawings, emotional beats that resonate because children notice a lot more than we give them credit for. Because Freddie appears to see things that no other character can see, however, the reader relates less and less because his cerebral experiences cannot serve as a stand-in for the typical American childhood like those of Marlys. The more authorial voice that Barry lends to Freddie, the farther we delve into a mental experience that can only be expressed through drawings because they do not physically exist.
Moments like these are juxtaposed by very “real” experiences, especially the overarching narrative involving Arnold’s friend Jim-Jimmy-Jim who sets fire to the house of his sister Joanne’s undocumented boyfriend in anger at their relationship. We initially read this story from Arnold’s perspective in The Greatest of Marlys, but Barry retells the crime from Freddie’s point of view beginning with the strip “The Very Pink Flowers.” In that strip, Freddie says that the image of Joanne’s flaming nightgown “burn[s] in [his] brain” just as it did in Arnold’s telling. The next strip, “My Discovery,” takes place under the cover of the night, which Barry enacts with thick brushed strokes and panels filled with dark, flame-like leaves. The trail of the fire iconography through the following strips leads right up to the fire itself, the only reprieve from the darkness and leaves like flames being the strip “The Morning” in which Freddie tells Hector about the plan. Despite the daylight seeping through the strip, Freddie describes Jim-Jimmy-Jim’s presence as “the shadow” which waits just outside the back door. That darkness, scratching and slicing its way through the drawings per Barry’s hand, almost never leaves the comic’s visual language after this point; it takes up space in both Freddie’s and the readers’ minds. This story arc scars both boys, resulting in similarly haunting imagery in the parallel “Red Sparks Flying” and “Red Sparks Fly” climaxes. I want to compare and contrast these two strips, as they show how Barry handles the representation of psychological trauma in two different children. In Arnold’s version, the image of the burning figure takes precedence in the drawings – a black silhouette of a woman whose mouth opens in a violent scream to reveal the charred house inside in place of a throat. This imagery creates a cyclical effect wherein the mind’s camera could continuously zoom into the screaming woman’s mouth, a clever way to imply repetition without need for redrawing the strip multiple times. The reader can tell that this specific moment plays over and over in Arnold’s head, perhaps the most traumatizing thing he has ever experienced. The cyclical, obsessive nature of Arnold’s mind returns in the strips “I am babysitting” and “Cut” in The Greatest of Marlys, Barry using concentric circles and dark, slashing lines to represent Arnold’s feverish mindset. All of Arnold’s strips also use lowercase handwriting instead of Barry’s uppercase script. In my ongoing interpretation, Barry uses this lowercase writing to signal a child’s direct hand in the writing as opposed to her own, another layer of childhood embodiment. That choice feels more weighted in the Arnold strips because it contrasts an innocence in his messy handwriting with violently chaotic imagery, both supposedly coming from the same mind. By contrast, Barry does not explicitly embody the same kind of violent obsessiveness in Freddie’s version of the story. The text of both strips is similar, but the drawings in Freddie’s version lack the repetitive opportunity that Arnold’s has. Instead, Barry draws attention to Freddie’s physical head in the second panel, emphasizing the crack of Jim-Jimmy-Jim’s sneakers against his skull with a white explosive shape bearing resemblance to the flames drawn throughout the other three panels. The burning woman only appears in her usual form in one of the panels and turns into an angry skull by the last drawing. Though the quality of the lines in Barry’s work has moved from aimless to deliberate since the earliest Ernie Pook’s Comeek strips, the messiness still prevails in both the woman and skull figures to create darkness and texture. The darkness is certainly present in Arnold’s strips, but it does not live so pervasively in the rest of his strips as much as it does in Freddie’s. The texture also seems more unique to Freddie’s strips, as the obsessive lines of Arnold’s “I am babysitting” and “Cut” seem less interested in conforming to the actual forms that Arnold sees so much as covering them completely. The world is otherwise normal behind the “filter” that Arnold’s mind casts over it. By contrast, the lines which cover the skull in the last frame of “Red Sparks Fly” helps shape and model the surface, suggesting that the violence which both boys experience sinks a little deeper into Freddie’s subconscious.
Another creature, a star-eyed, top-hat clad figure appearing in Freddie’s dreams, helps internalize the hallucinations so that they no longer cover others’ faces. A second dream creature Freddie deems “the Night Monster” or “the Fellow” is dark, drawn in a series of scratches with sharp claws and squinting white eyes. Perhaps another manifestation of the darkness which pervades the arson story, Freddie describes the creature as “rotting” but insists that he will never truly die, manifesting whenever he tries to repress his fears surrounding death and violence. When his classmate, Glenn, asks him to play prisoner of war in his basement, Freddie alludes to some kind of assault which he does not name, and the next morning, he learns that Glenn passed away by choking. In both situations, rather than addressing the cause of violence and death directly, Freddie uses the Night Monster as a coping mechanism to explain how his innocence and Glenn’s life were taken away. This creature as well as the star-eyed figure haunt Freddie throughout the remainder of the strips and cause hesitation in readers to trust that what Freddie “sees” in the drawings has any semblance of reality. On the topic of warped depictions, Barry’s drawing style for Ernie Pook’s Comeek involves drawing adults, bullies, and teenagers more grotesquely than those perceived as innocent, namely children. This suggests an inner revulsion towards the adult figures which manifests in extra wrinkles and snarling faces. The older people in their lives often put down the children’s carefree attitude and dismiss their legitimate anxieties, perhaps contributing to a perception of adults as curmudgeonly and apathetic. Graphic art styles, like children’s minds, hone in on choice details in their simplification process, making it really easy to make someone look old and angry with the simple inclusion of a few extra lines. If an aunt’s pointed, wrinkly nose and an uncle’s flabby neck such as those in the strip “Never Been” stand out in the mind of a child, those points of interest become their sole characterizations in a child’s (and Barry’s) illustration. Caricature works as a kind of expressionism because it unearths one or two main features of a person’s visage and fashions an entirely new silhouette around them, especially certain facial features like noses or wrinkles. Elements of caricature and exaggeration become heightened in the mind of someone with a warped sense of reality, especially a victim of trauma. As Freddie feels more guilty about his classmate’s death, his visions of the Fellow and the star-eyed being creep further into his daytime life, almost becoming his new reality. Strips such as “Here Comes the Sun” and “High” use intensely detailed and shaded imagery to ensnare Freddie within his fearful mind, the floral motifs which once simply framed strip titles now reaching around his body, the very architecture of the drawings choking him out. In “?EIDDERF,” Barry once again references the architectural floral motifs to represent an out of body experience. In the last panel, two Freddies appear – the first in a hospital bed, and another laying on a hammock of the floral vines above the bed. As a demarcation of the panel architecture, this separation of Freddie’s physical and corporeal existence via the floral ornamentation implies two separate planes in the drawn world, all depictions of which appear scratchy as though done in a fit of anxiety. Barry’s marks collect and tangle up to form the Fellow creature, his body feathering at the edges. Despite this, Freddie says that the most fearful part of him is his mouth, which Freddie begs him not to open. The mouth, claws, and eyes of the Fellow are formed using negative space, carved into the darkness which has followed Freddie ever since the arson incident. That Freddie is more afraid of the lighter parts of Barry’s drawing can perhaps be attributed to the fiery death that he witnessed firsthand, the flames which lit up the night and burned themselves into Freddie’s (and Arnold’s) memory. I do not think such visual consistencies are coincidental, giving further credence to Barry’s skill in comic creation. After the arson incident, multiple people around Freddie refer to him as “dead” or “dead boy,” beginning in him an interest in the biological consequences of his (and the comic’s) existence. In “What it is like to be Dead,” Freddie speaks about all living beings consisting of cells, saying: “only things made of cells burn and only things made of cells die.” His fixation on death manifests in another modelled skull, coupled with the crisscrossing wires of reinforced glass to draw a link between living cells and juvenile detention cells. Encased within Barry’s hand drawn panels, yet another layer to Freddie’s interest in cells emerges. His body, perishable, is made of cells, just like the building that houses him and the comic strip through which Barry tells his story. Barry’s adult authorial voice calls attention – through Freddie’s younger voice – to the temporality of her drawing and the character-mind she embodies. The “rotting” but omnipresent body of the creature Fellow represents this unending presence of mortality in the comic, a being which Freddie sees everywhere and exists in the corners of Barry’s panels as a set of lively scribbles. All creatures in and including the comic panels are comprised of “cells,” and all get to live or die through Barry’s acts of drawing. In terms of scholarly writing on The Freddie Stories, not much exists, though I did find a psychoanalytical paper published in 2019 by David Lewkowich and Nicholas Jacobs which analyzes readers’ experiences reading a graphic novel that grapples with “difficult knowledge.” The study brought a group of future language arts teachers together to read graphic novels and discuss, and the paper includes comments from four of them on The Freddie Stories. Many of those comments fall in line with my own observations, which makes sense given that we are all students and mostly the same age. Though much of what they focus on is thematic and content-based rather than the book’s drawings, I value this piece of scholarly writing for the weight it gives to readers’ mental experiences with graphic novels. One element of comics they touch on which I have yet to even mention in my project is the concept of the gutter, which is wholly unique to the medium. The comic gutter is the space between panels, an absence in the storytelling which requires the reader to “fill in the blanks” and resolve the cuts between panels, themselves. Lewkowich and Jacobs use a selection from the strip “Dreamy” to discuss an invisible resolution which occurs between comic panels, describing this example as “a space of mental and physical transformation for the character” (21). The readers describe the drawings themselves as “continuous and vastly alive” (22), a beautifully fitting comment for Barry’s imaginative and engaging artwork. They then go further, arguing that the gutters are similarly enlivened by the interpretive work the reader does to try and understand how Freddie’s skull hallucinations go away in that transformative, in-between moment. I had not considered the embodiment of the gutters, but given my interpretation of the panel architecture as being Barry’s artistic framing of her inner child, it makes complete sense that her “editing” (like a film’s purposeful cuts) is also a part of that framing. Barry’s childhood embodiment lies in both what she chooses to draw and what she chooses to leave out, but even with what she can pull from her subconscious, the full extent of Freddie’s cerebral experiences lies outside the bounds of her own. The rest of his story that Barry does not showcase within the borders of the panels therefore lives in the gutters – the absence “where reading persists” (22). Lewkowich and Jacobs also argue, however, that part of the resolution of the gutters done by readers is informed by their own repressed childhood memories. As the repression of trauma is one of the major themes of The Freddie Stories, it feels purposeful (and a little harmful) for Barry to call upon mental health experiences at large in writing her comics with an air of adult reflection. Freddie does not know that he experiences hallucinations and dissociative episodes because of his trauma, but Barry writes for an older audience who can and do know how to characterize his distress. Lewkowich and Jacobs ultimately question whether comics can perform psychoanalytic, therapeutic work in conquering one’s repression, allowing readers to “play with (and dream) their inner histories” (23). That is perhaps the most visceral form of resonance with a reader that a comic can achieve, I would contend.
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AuthorFiona Murphy. Artist. Student. YouTube fanatic. ArchivesCategories
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