Lynda Barry

Linda Jean Barry (born January 2, 1956), known professionally as Lynda Barry, is an American cartoonist.

Barry is best known for her weekly comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek.

Her career began in 1977 when Groening and University of Washington Daily student editor John Keister each published her work without her knowledge in their respective student newspapers, titling it Ernie Pook's Comeek.

Barry was known as the class cartoonist in her grade school.

While studying fine arts at Evergreen State College, she began drawing comic strips compulsively when her boyfriend left her for another girl: "I couldn't sleep after that, and I started making comic strips about men and women. The men were cactuses and the women were women, and the cactuses were trying to convince the women to go to bed with them, and the women were constantly thinking it over but finally deciding it wouldn't be a good idea."

Her first comic strip was created in 1977 and published in the Evergreen State College newspaper.

These were the cartoons Groening and Keister published as Ernie Pook's Comeek.

Barry also credits her start in comics to Evergreen State professor Marilyn Frasca, saying, "The lessons I learned from her when I was 19 and 20, I still use every day and have never been able to wear out."

After graduating from Evergreen, Barry moved to Seattle.

When she was 23, the Chicago Reader picked up her comic strip, enabling her to make a living from her comics alone.

She later moved to Chicago, Illinois.

As she described her career start:"[Editor] Bob Roth called me from the Chicago Reader as the result of an article [her college classmate] Matt [Groening] wrote about hip West Coast artists — he threw me in just because he was a buddy, right? And then Bob Roth ... called and wanted to see my comic strips, and I didn't have any originals. I didn't know anything about originals, that you don't give them to newspapers because newspapers lose them. So I had to draw a whole set that night and Federal Express them. So I did, and he started printing them, and he paid $80 a week, and I could live off of that. And because he's with this newspaper association, the other papers started picking it up. So it was luck. Sheer luck. [Matt] got into the Los Angeles Reader. For a long time the Los Angeles Reader wouldn't print me, and the Chicago Reader wouldn't print Matt even though they're sister publications.

So we both worked on the publishers and the editors to get each other in.

Her limited edition self published Xerox book called Two Sisters about sisters Evette and Rita was published in 1979.

It was really funny: when we got into each others' papers, everything sort of took off for both of us." Collections of her work include Girls & Boys (1981), Big Ideas (1983), Everything in the World (1986), The Fun House (1987), Down the Street (1989), and The Greatest of Marlys (2000). In 1984, she released a coloring book with brief text called Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! She also wrote and drew a full-page color strip examining the everyday pathology of relationships for Esquire magazine, starting in 1983 with the strip "The Story of Men and Women". In 1989 Barry's strip appeared weekly in more than 50 publications, mostly alternative newspapers in large cities.

Barry has described her process as developing a story while working, not planning it out in advance.

In answering a question about her book What It Is in an interview with Michael Dean for The Comics Journal, Barry said:

"There were big realizations and small ones. The biggest one was the same one I had when I wrote Cruddy. The realization that the back of the mind can be relied on to create natural story order. It's not something I have to try to do, or think too hard about. If I just work every day on a particular project, it seems to begin to form itself if I keep moving my hands while maintaining a certain state of mind."

Commercially published collections of Barry's comics began appearing in 1981.

She garnered attention with her 1988 illustrated novel The Good Times are Killing Me, about an interracial friendship between two young girls, which was adapted into a play.

She has written two illustrated novels, The Good Times are Killing Me (1988) and Cruddy, also known as Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel (1999).

Her second illustrated novel, Cruddy, first appeared in 1999.

Three years later she published ''One!

Hundred!

Demons!'', a graphic novel she terms "autobifictionalography".

Due to the loss of weekly newspaper clients, Barry moved her comics primarily online by 2007.

What It Is (2008) is a graphic novel that is part memoir, part collage and part workbook, in which Barry instructs her readers in methods to open up their own creativity; it won the comics industry's 2009 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work.

In recognition of her contributions to the comic art form, ComicsAlliance listed Barry as one of twelve women cartoonists deserving of lifetime achievement recognition, and she received the Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.

In July 2016, she was inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame.

Barry was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship as part of the Class of 2019.

She is currently an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

In 2020, her work was included in the exhibit Women in Comics: Looking Forward, Looking Back at the Society of Illustrators in New York City.

Linda Jean Barry, who changed her first name to "Lynda" at age 12, was born on Highway 14 in Richland Center, Wisconsin.

Her father was a meat-cutter of Irish and Norwegian descent, and her mother, a hospital housekeeper, was of Irish and Filipino descent.

Barry grew up in Seattle, Washington in a racially mixed working-class neighborhood, and recalls her childhood as difficult and awkward.

Her parents divorced when she was 12.

By age 16, she was working nights as a janitor at a Seattle hospital while still attending high school, where her classmates included artist Charles Burns.

Neither of Barry's parents attended her graduation.

Her mother strongly disapproved of Lynda's love of books and desire to go to college; she said they were a waste of time, and that it was time for Lynda to get a job.

At The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, Barry met fellow cartoonist Matt Groening.