pass it on to their brothers and sisters. And I thought, God, I know how to illustrate that. So I made the first “Girls and Boys" comics about just that thing, about how violence between family members that aren’t getting along gets passed on to the kids. Have you ever heard a four-year-old say, “What on earth are you trying to do to me?" You know what I mean? So, that’s how that started. Now the hardest thing I have to do is keeping my personal life out of the comic strips. Really hard to do, because sometimes I'll have a specific problem in my head that I'll want to write about, that’ll have to do with me and my boyfriend, or there have been times when I've had people I was angry at and I wanted to make a comic strip about them. CSQ: You have to restrain yourself from that? Lynda: Sometimes I do it but I don't print them, I fust put them away. ‘T i TRANSPORT, WONDER IF 7 //> I CODLt? T RANSPORT o O o 4/ 6 © O o 1 11 Dead in an unfortunate crash. It’s stupid to try to make a thing live longer than its lifespan. That’s why comic strips are so boring. CSQ: You said that you thought your comic strips were “eighties. ” Why do you say that? Lynda: You know, some people have said they were “fifties. ” I try to keep them about stuff that I hear on the bus, or what my friends are going through or that I'm going through. The drawing style is real contemporary, even though some people think it's preschool, and the topics are pretty contemporary. CSQ: Many people who see both your comic strips and your portraits would be surprised that they came from the same person. Lynda: I’ve thought about that several times myself. I really have a strong feeling that it’s important to learn how to do something that will last forever—not forever, but for long periods of time, like 50 years, 100 years. Knowing how to actually render is important to me. My goal in life, ever since high school, was to be able to draw like da Vinci—to be a real master of drawing, and to be able to draw people the way they look in 1980, so that when you look at it 50 years from now it’s a document. And my comic strips just don’t fulfill that for me. But the comic strips do another thing that the portraits could never do—they talk and they're temporal and they’re weekly. I have two things that I want to do, and so I have to have two different kinds of work. My astrologer said I have Gemini in the eighth house, and that means I have to have two kinds of work or I’d go crazy. Not that I believe in astrology. The way I approach both of them is exactly the same, though. It’s almost like meditating. As I said, in doing the strip I draw the border, spend a lot of time drawing the title I’ve always thought that my real work was my portraits, and that comic strips were more of a way to support myself. My goal in life, ever since high school was to be able to draw like da Vinci, to be a real master of drawing. of the comic strip. And you know how my stuff has a lot of pattern in it? I like pattern now, but it used to be there just to keep me drawing while I was waiting to hear the thing. When I do portraits, I do this whole thing of preparing the paper and the easel and putting this one color down and doing a light sketch. It’s sort of hypnotic. I'm using the same place mentally, when I make a comic strip as when I make a portrait—exactly the same place—trying not to have myself at all in it. It’s just that the comic strips come from my head and the portraits come from the other guy's face. The worst comic strips are ones when that thing won’t happen, that feeling, that state won't occur, so I have to make up the comic strip. And I’m not real funny when it comes to making up comic strips—I mean, from here. Sometimes they come out and they’re just great. I mean, I start laughing when I hear the thing. Like doing that qne about finding your perfect love mate was a blast. I was just dying when I was doing that. The one that’s in The Rocket right now I had to make up, because it wouldn’t come and I was under a deadline. It’s really rare that it doesn't come. CSQ: You mentioned the criticism you have received for the way you draw the comic strips. Lynda: The funny thing is that I get criticism about the way the comic strips look from normal people, but then doing colored pencil portraits in the art world is about the corniest thing you can do, too. The artists tend to like my comic strips, and other people tend to like my portraits. CSQ: When you say that people criticize your drawing, do you hear that through the grapevine? Lynda: I read it in the newspaper. Listen to this, (she reads from a Seattle review) “Her comics generally inspire either strong admiration or criticism coupled with the comment that she cannot draw. ” No one ever tells me to my face that they don't like my work, except I hear that people can argue for hours about why they don't like it, giving Portrait by Lynda Barry 6 Clinton St. Quarterly
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