Girls + Boys

by Lynda Barry, 1981, Reprinted in 1993 by Harper Perennial. 94 pages.

1 September 2007

I read this whole book of comic strips while taking a walk through the quiet neighborhood where I live. My favorite part was the story of the Donut Boy of Seattle, Wash, who struggles with life until a psychiatrist tells him to stop whining and get a job like everyone else.
Lynda Barry’s drawings are ugly depictions of ugly people. Her stories are often short, usually just enough to establish that the main characters have some serious problems. They seem to come right from that fine borderline where ideas first become reality: Is this idea worth putting to paper, or should I just crumple it and throw it away? All these scrawled pictures seem to make the case for salvaging every idea, bringing it just far enough into the light, then moving on and ferrying the next one over. With all her stories of miserable single women and bullied children, Barry seems to have been acutely tuned into the emerging spirit of the 1980s, which I certainly remember as a decade when America decided the underdogs had received all the chances they deserved. Lynda Barry doesn’t spare her characters moments of huge embarrassment and suffering, but she also doesn’t follow the Regan era prescription that if you just ignore all the “losers” they’ll just go away. I’m glad that Barry decided to scrawl out this little collection of odd thoughts and nightmare stories, and I’m curious to see what she drew next.