On more than one occasion while reading Lynda Barry’s graphic novel “What it is” I’ve tried to pause and think about what it is exactly that unsettles me about her creative style throughout the book. In the beginning it took a few pages in for me to shake the feeling that I was falling down a rabbit hole. There seemed to… Read more →
What is an image? What is/where is your imagination? What happens when we read a story? Most pages in the first half of “What It Is” presents you with one or more of these kinds of questions amid strange, dreamlike, and sometimes-disturbing imagery. The book doesn’t answer them for you, but that isn’t the point. You’re meant to think… Read more →
When I first started reading Lynda Barry’s “What It Is”, I was confused. It was so different to the other books we have read in class and it felt like a scrapbook with no solid point. After reading through it, one theme stuck out to me. Throughout the novel, Lynda Barry asks questions that focus on perspective and images. We… Read more →
Unlike painting, drawing, sculpture, textiles, comics aren’t necessarily made of any one material. They are more of a collage. Bill Kartalopoulos, the series editor for The Best American Comics, wrote that “comics represent a conceptual strategy that can embrace all kinds of artwork into its method.” One of the best examples of the collage style in comics, and the most literal, is What… Read more →
I entered this class knowing little to nothing about comics, so I was rather intimidated by the idea of producing one myself. Creativity is a huge factor in such a process. I didn’t know where to begin. As a young girl, I read a lot and would often write my own stories. I also loved to draw. But as I grew older, my interests shifted;… Read more →
“An unasked question is the most futile thing in the world” – Darren Shan As a child I loved the question “why” and “how”. Not only for the questions of “why do I have to do that” etc. but “Why I the sky blue?” or “How come every time I sleep I go to a different place?” I rarely got… Read more →
What is story telling? In Lynda Barry’s graphic novel What It Is, storytelling is chaos. It is imagination and creativity. It is images, and most evidently, it is memory. Barry’s book is split generally into two sections. The first contains much of her own stories and memories from childhood, interspersed with hundreds of images; the pages purposefully chaotic and all over… Read more →
Since opening What It Is, I’ve been enthralled. The collage art style combined with simple, thick-lined doodles reminds the audience of childhood from the beginning, which enhances the narrative of a child growing up. The narrative is further broken down into portions of remeniscing on both the speaker’s and the audience’s childhood, divided by sections exploring complex subjects like the relationships between the imagination, the… Read more →
Manga is a style of Japanese comic books and graphic novels. They are sold readily at bookstores that also sell American comics. Manga is read opposite of the way we read American comics, many first time readers find it confusing. These Japanese comics might be stylized and read differently due to the way japan reads and writes but there is… Read more →
This week in Graphic Novel, we finished up Watchmen with a few articles before we started to touch Lynda Barry’s, What It Is. At first glance, this book seemed very out of this world, very different. It felt like I peeking into someone’s head and observing how their imagination works. I also find it a bit strange that we have… Read more →