Excerpted from an essay, by Douglas Wolk, entitled "Comics Raw and Cooked" on The Barnes & Noble Review.
One
way of thinking about drawing style in comics is to reduce it to a single axis:
the continuum of styles between "raw" drawing and "cooked"
drawing. Those terms are borrowed from Robert Lowell, who, in turn, borrowed
them from anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and used them in 1960 to describe
two competing schools of American poetry. In comics, it's not a competition -- art-comics
are a little too collegial for that. But it's easy to reframe Lowell's ideas to
describe what cartoonists do. Raw drawing is (or presents itself as) the barely
mediated expression of the artist's impulses: it eschews rules and
straight-edges, it flows directly out of the brush, it bubbles over with life.
Cooked drawing originates in the conscious mind: it's precise and rigorous,
with a firm distinction between "correct" and "incorrect"
execution, and it's best suited to carefully planned narratives. Raw vs. cooked
isn't a useful way to classify most
cartoonists; most of them work somewhere between those two poles, and a lot of
them change their position on the line from moment to moment. But the Canadian
art-comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly has just published a pair of
remarkable books that perch near opposite ends of that spectrum.
Lynda Barry, the creator
of the weekly strip "Ernie Pook's Comeek," is about as invested in
raw drawing -- as a practitioner and advocate -- as it's possible to be. Her new book Picture This is a companion piece to her earlier What It Is, which was a sort of illustrated version of her
famous "Writing the Unthinkable" workshops; that one was a bunch of
images and doodles and personal stories surrounding a set of writing exercises,
and this one is a similar framework for drawing exercises. For Barry, though,
they're very similar processes; they're all about putting a pen or brush down
on paper and moving it until something comes out. Drawing, she claims, is
"not something that you are good or bad at. It's something else. You move
your hand and you scribble all you want and it feels very good."
As you might guess from
that description, Picture This isn't
particularly structured, and it's very scribbly. Its interior is in the form of
four quarterly issues of an imaginary magazine, and its focus is whatever Lynda
Barry feels like drawing that day. (Which means, of course, that it's gorgeous;
part of why drawing feels so good to her has to be that funny pictures and
wonderful shapes appear where her brush meets the paper.) There are questions meant
to spur readers into making marks of their own ("Why do we stop drawing?
Why do we start?"); there are panels and strips about Marlys, the
pigtailed protagonist of "Ernie Pook's Comeek"; there are pasted-in
words and phrases from old magazines and school papers; there are a bunch of
images of a character that Barry calls the Near-Sighted Monkey. (Barry's
pleasure in drawing it, a kind of ultra-stylized self-portrait, is palpable.)
Most of all, there are decorations: hand-scalloped borders, circles and blocks
and leaf shapes, flowers and curlicues.
Barry
jokes that "if you use coloring books past the age of ten, you will wreck
your imagination forever"; then she provides a bunch of shapes to trace
and color and cut out, as well as a diagram to make "a chicken in
winter." Is it possible to make the leap from thinking about tracing and
cutting out a chicken shape to actually doing it? Not easily: Barry notes over
and over that children are willing to take the risk of making pictures in a way
that most adults aren't, but maybe the reason for that is that some adults -- like
her -- have a gift for it, and others don't. And the suggestion that raw
self-expression is not just a universal right but a universal delight is a
little disingenuous coming from someone who's so good at it.
--Douglas Wolk
The collages in legendary cartoonist Lynda Barry's What It Is are a bathysphere-like odyssey through the depths of her funky subconscious.” —Elissa Schappel, Vanity Fair On What It Is
“Meditations, stories and images float past in a random fashion, segueing between darkness and hope, or adulthood and childhood, the way they might in dreams or memory. ” —CAROL KINO, The New York Times On What It Is
“What It Is is part diary, part showcase, part manifesto for the power of the imagination. It's bold and beautiful; angry and sad; joyful and loving and nervous.” —JULIA KELLER, Chicago Tribune On What It Is
…taps into…the fuzzy-wuzzy part of the brain that sees elephants in clouds (or in this case, rabbits in water stains)—and asks, "Do you wish you could draw?" In more than 200 pages of riotously distinct collages made with brush and paint, notebook paper, cutouts, tape and glue (with support from the colorist Kevin Kawula and, it seems, a "golden egg"), Barry sets out to show you—no, to remind you of—the pleasures of inking, smudging and, most important, fumbling your way to inspiration.
—The New York Times
