Lynda Barry and Chip Kidd should have their own sitcom. That was my first thought after their joint International Festival of Authors appearance last Sunday. I've seen postmortems which suggested that they didn't have much chemistry together, but for such outsized personalities they both played off poor straight man Bill Douglas nicely. Kidd is a regular at IFOA and his deadpan wit is still one of its best attractions, whether gently mocking Douglas for calling Margaret Atwood "Peggy" or replying to Barry's admission that "I was the girl guys dated before coming out..." with "Full disclosure: Lynda and I used to date." He spat out "poet" as if the very word was curdling inside his mouth ("I wake up next to a poet every morning, so it's a struggle..."). Most of his information about Bat-Manga - the search for obscurities that don't actually exist in DC's archives, staunch right-to-leftism, the book's idiosyncratic lettering - will be old news by now. For me, the most valuable segment was his discussion of artistic methods with Barry.
It took a while to get there. Even though the pair's lines of conversation eventually drifted into the same orbit, I feel like they had to be acclimatized to each other first. Barry began by explaining why it took so long for What It Is to come out: Sasquatch, who'd released One! Hundred! Demons!, quickly soured on comics, and incredibly no other publishers took an interest in her until Chris Ware pulled some strings. During this time she apparently made a living by selling stuff on eBay. After some more atomized exchanges they progressed into a discussion about each other's vastly different working methods, focusing heavily on composition. Barry seems to view composition as pen-and-paper intuition, with her rarely-used computer as a mere facilitator; Kidd does most of his work on one now, which prompted some mutual bemusement, but he still located common ground by recalling "happy accidents" that resulted from random quirks in Quark.
Of course, there's random chance and there is random chance, as one of Barry's stories underlines. She's lived in rural Wisconsin for years now; one relative of her nearest neighbours was a lifelong teacher with packrat habits, and when she died the cartoonist helped clear out the enormous mess that had piled up in her often-flooded basement. Wearing a toxic-hazards suit, Barry came across a massive stack of kids' school assignments, turned into a sedimentary hoard over the course of decades. The neighbours let her throw it all in a garbage bag, and now bits of that putrid junk are reverently reused in What It Is. It's fitting: from her goofy, forthright manner to the warm stream-of-consciousness encouragement she gave everyone getting their books signed, Barry came off as the best grade-school teacher I never had.
BONUS NOTEBOOK DUMP!
- Barry was supposed to do the Little Women cover for that series of cartoonist-redesigned-classics ("They wanted a girl") but her embroidered-on-velvet design was deemed insufficiently "Lynda Barry" so it went to Julie Doucet instead
- John Updike just rejected a Chris Ware cover. Someone's about to get shivved by Art Spiegelman!
- The title of What It Is came from childhood pimp slang ("all of us wanted to be pimps when we grew up")
- Canadians writers are predictably more mild-mannered about covers
- The Barry-edited Best American Comics 2008 was supposed to include an excerpt from Paul Pope's Batman: Year 100 as a conscious response to comics' "lunchtable mentality" (DC are fine with that, I guess)
- Shitty computer lettering "is the typographical equivalent of bad toupees."
- "I want to make something so I can make out with guys."
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