Who says Twitter isn’t good for anything?

a loyal follower tweeted that they would like to see some pages from the latest Lynda Barry book so here they are.

Thank me, people.

The war over wind

Article about wind turbines, with a comic by Ms. Lynda Barry.

see magdaZINE’s whole set

This story pretty much perfectly describes our experience with our adopted and previously abused dog Milo. He needs more love than discipline…

“Two Questions” by Lynda Barry

Wonderfully long profile in the Chicago Tribune. Lots of goodies: how little she was making drawing Ernie Pook and why she decided to quit, how WHAT IT IS has sold 30,000 copies, the novel she’s writing “about a man who decides he’s not going to live long enough to write a book so he creates the spines of books he might have written”, gushing quotes from Chris Ware, Ivan Brunetti, Alison Bechdel…well worth reading!

Don’t miss the photo gallery with pictures of her work.

What It Is is based on something I learned from my teacher, Marilyn Frasca, at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. I studied with her for two years in the late 1970s. Her idea seemed to be that everything we call art, whether it’s music or dance or writing or painting, anything we call art is a container for something she called an image. And she believed that once you understood what an image is, then the form you give it is up to you.

The question “What is an Image?” has guided all of my work for over 30 years. Because of what I learned from Marilyn, there isn’t much of a difference in the experience of painting a picture, writing a novel, making a comic strip, reading a poem or listening to a song. The containers are different, but the lively thing in the center is what I’m interested in.

It’s the living thing we activate when we read a book. Like Scrooge, for example. I know Scrooge came from a book, came from the hand of Dickens, but where is Scrooge really? Where is he right now? He’s not inside a book. If I say Scrooge and you know just who I’m talking about, and so do the first 1,000 people we stop on the street to ask if they know who Scrooge is, where is Scrooge located?

Scrooge is an image. Batman is an image. The alphabet is an image. I’d say Abraham Lincoln is an image, too. Although the bones of Lincoln are in a specific location, that’s not what we mean when we speak his name. We don’t mean his bones. Images are entities with no fixed location, they can occur to us at any place at any time. You and I can talk about them, though you and I have never met.

Lynda Barry, “Monster Stories,” from What It Is

Lynda Barry on keeping a journal on legal paper:

…the way that I set up my desktop is, I’ll have a comic strip on my left side, and I’ll be working on it, and when the comic strip dries up—because it always does; everything you do, the wheels fall off a little bit—instead of sitting there and going, “Oh, what comes next,” I would just move my pen over and start scribbling stuff. And while I was drawing sometimes I would hear a sentence in my head, like, “Take a ouija board attitude toward your brush.” So there’s January 11th, and most of these were done while I was doing What It Is. There was something about the legal paper—I felt freed by it. I also thought, if other people see it on legal paper, then they’ll be like, “Legal paper is good enough! You don’t have to go to the art supply store and buy some special paper!” So I liked it and I’ve been keeping a journal this way for years and years and years. I have thousands of those pages.