It’s so magic

Does anybody around here remember Lynda Barry?Her books were introduced to me by my wife, who used to collect her colorful, acidic comics back in the early ‘90s and proudly noted that the cartoonist is part Filipina. (The Wisconsin-born Barry is one-quarter Pinay.) Therese and her Fil-Am friend in the States, Nina Guerrero, would marvel over the childhood exploits of Arna, Marlys and older sister Maybonne — and the dozens of obvious Filipino references that were woven into the satirical landscape.

Like Mrs. Dawsin, the dark old woman who smokes cigarettes with the lit end in her mouth and whose main English vocabulary consists of “No, my darling.” (This character is apparently modeled after Barry’s Pinay grandmother, Rosario Landon.)

There’s the obligatory “Talent Show” (“like on a Sunday when you’re stuck at your cousins and there ain’t one decent thing to do”), where kids show off their magic, dancing and singing skills, warbling through Hey Jude and other current tunes. (Ring any bells, all you Filipinos forced into performing at family get-togethers during the holidays?)

Then there’s the weird bakla babysitter who “acts like a lady running around with a high voice making you laugh” and uttering phrases like “I am a bery beautpal one today, darling,” “My hairs is eso preety” and “My lobly pigure is pabulous, no?”

This sort of material is common here, but to Wisconsin-born Barry, it must have seemed deeply exotic: all part of an original, hard-to-shake American upbringing. In books like The Fun House, Down the Street and It’s So Magic, Barry — whose mentors have included Matt Groening and This American Life host Ira Glass (whom she dated at one point; it ended badly) — has an uncanny ability to recall the precise details that make childhood so memorable, and so horrible. Her take on school days in The Fun House will make any grown-up kid — American, Filipino, whatever — click back to the days of science projects and field trips, penny candy stores and first love. It’s bittersweet and true-to-life. And really, it’s just a riot to read.

Barry — whose black-and-white ink-drawing style mostly using crude sweeps of brushwork amounts to a sort of modern naïve art — never leaves out the little details (like hair growing out of an adult’s ear, which she indicates on the page with an arrow and the words “Hair growing out of ear”). Her memories are so vivid they’re surreal. Almost Lynchian, you might say.

In a parallel universe, her books (which came out in a gush from 1984 to 1990) might have been as popular as Groening’s Life As Hell comic strip series, which led (indirectly) to The Simpsons’ international acclaim and universal marketing opportunities. Her approach fits in with other “adult comic” pioneers of her time like R. Crumb and Harvey Pekar. But it’s also suggestive of Filipino artists and their peculiar horror vacui: the obsessive need to fill every two-dimensional space with details, details, details. Maybe she could have had an animated TV series with Fil-Am actors voicing most of the parts, such as the Elvis imitator who sings about not stepping on his “Eh-blue eh-suede eh-shoes.” She might have been huge.

What’s missing in Barry’s work is a pronounced sense of irony, something that perhaps puts her a little out of step with this irony-obsessed generation: she mostly plays the memories straight, relating things in a flat, matter-of-fact tone. But her insights into the magic (and frequent psychic pain) of childhood still hold up remarkably well in these postmodern, Gen-X, consumer-driven times.

It’s mostly the little details — like the fried bananas served for breakfast — that will tip off Filipinos to Barry’s ancestry. But it’s her guileless ability to make all of these oddities and peculiarities in life seem perfectly normal, all easily imaginable as part of the American way of life. Not only Filipinos are depicted — other ethnicities such as African-Americans and Italians make appearances — so one comes away with a pretty accurate picture of what life must have been like for a sensitive, acerbic little misfit who seemed to lack the ability to hide away all the pain and warts that adults preferred kept out of sight.

So what happened to Lynda Barry?

Well, she did produce a more adult-oriented memoir called The Good Times Are Killing Me. This was then made into an off-Broadway play. As mentioned, she dated Ira Glass, who has been credited with “Mixing and Sound Effects” in at least one of her books. According to Barry in a 1998 Chicago Reader article, “I went out with him. It was the worst thing I ever did. When we broke up he gave me a watch and said I was boring and shallow, and I wasn’t enough in the moment for him, and it was over.” Barry even wrote a story of their relationship, titled “Head Lice and My Worst Boyfriend.” It’s contained in the 2005 compilation of her work, One! Hundred! Demons! Her latest book of collage and confession is still in progress, titled What It Is.

It would be nice to see Barry’s work get rediscovered, especially by Filipinos. They may find the American references a little puzzling, but some things translate with remarkable ease. Childhood is just such a state.

Born in 1956, Barry currently teaches a workshop titled “Writing the Unthinkable” through the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, and The Crossings in Austin, Texas, where she shares her creative method, which she apparently learned from her teacher, Marilyn Frasca, at The Evergreen State College.

Barry has shuttled around from Seattle to Chicago to New York and back again, but she presumably still thinks a lot about Wisconsin, a place where Filipinos are probably more numerous than they were during her childhood, though still likely to seem exotic and interesting to the local folk.