LYNDA BARRY

Hate [graphic essay]

Lynda Barry (b. 1956), daughter of a Filipino mother and an American father, grew up in an interracial Seattle neighborhood whose cultural mixture of languages, customs, wrong-side-of-the-tracks marginality, prejudices, shifting friendships, and antagonisms forms the matrix of many of the comics for which she is known. The life she depicts is harsh, tenuous, but with redeeming features and sparks of hope and love that shine, incandescent, through the dark. By the time she graduated from Evergreen State College (1978), she realized that her cartoons could make her friends laugh, and “Ernie Pook’s Comeek”—now a widely syndicated strip—was born. Her course, “Writing the Unthinkable,” may reflect her second novel, Cruddy (1998). Her most recent publications include Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book (2010) and Blabber, Blabber, Blabber: Volume 1 of Everything (2011).

One! Hundred! Demons! her autobiography in graphic form, was published in 2003. “Hate” is one chapter; there is no chapter on “Love,” perhaps because Barry regards love as “an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.”