Blabber Blabber Blabber: Volume 1 of Everything by Lynda Barry

Drawn + Quarterly Press has been publishing Lynda Barry, my favorite cartoonist, for some years. Now they're putting out collections of her early work, some of it long out of print, in Blabber Blabber Blabber: Volume 1 of Everything, comics from 1978-81.

I used to have all Barry's books beginning with Girls and Boys, but sold most of book collection when I was out of money in the early 90s. Getting these back again, plus a lot of her weekly strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek, is a real treat.

Also a treat is Barry's illustrated introduction where she talks about how her drawing style developed. I especially liked her distinction between "sweet" (like Peter Max) and "bitter" (like Robert Crumb) and how she needed to reach a bittersweet style for better expressing what was true to her.

You can see her line changing drastically through the book, yet always retaining something that's Lynda Barry. Her characters also change quite a bit: early on, a lot more grownups and adult romantic difficulties than her current work, which is almost entirely from a childhood point of view. Re-reading these strips made me wish she'd explore more grownup themes in her work.

Not all of her early work is especially strong, and I was baffled by such repeated themes as the six-inch-tall person on the breakfast table. Some of it is just "Huh?" If you're a devoted Barry reader, like me, the book will be most valuable for how it shows the development of a great artist.

A quibble: The publishers chose a rectangular format that fits with the recent Barry books on writing and drawing, but since her comics are square, this means a lot of wasted space and squeezed-in panels with tiny writing.