More than just funy …

… Lynda Barry’s Infectious Genius | The Nation. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In both her prose work and her cartoons, Barry has the spooky ability to recreate the mental universe of children and teenagers. Her visual style—mixing atavistic cartoons with collage images—is itself potently evocative of childhood. One of my favorite Barry books is One Hundred Demons, a series of cartoon vignettes in the liminal space where autobiography meets fiction. “Is it autobiography if parts of it are not true?” she asks in the beginning. “Is it fiction if parts of it are?”