Happy Women’s History Month! All through March, we’ll be celebrating women who changed free expression in comics. Check back here every weekday for biographical snippets on female creators who have pushed the boundaries of the format and/or seen their work challenged or banned.

Lynda Barry is one of contemporary independent comics’ most celebrated creators, known not only for her strip work in alternative weeklies from the ’70s to the ’90s, but also for her incredible biographical and autobiographical works that capture highly interpersonal and introspective aspects of her life in a way that the comics industry hasn’t seen before. A pioneer of the biographical and experimental comics form, Barry opened the door for many of the themes and styles that have taken over independent comics today.

Born Linda Jean Barry in Wisconsin in 1956, she moved with her family to Seattle, Washington shortly thereafter and spent most of her childhood there, exposed to a world of urban diversity and culture. As a young adult growing up in a time and place where the booming underground comix movement of San Francisco was just a stone’s throw away but had been in full-swing for at least a decade, the comics scene in the Pacific Northwest began changing to accommodate a more contemporary young society—a society of young intellectuals and bohemians who were searching for a new way to look at their complicated, emotionally conflicted modern world. Mixing the free press of the underground with the accessibility of a broader educated readership, alternative press—specifically alternative weeklies—was born and Lynda Barry was at the forefront of this movement representing not only the voice of men and women both, but importantly herself—a giant step that would in later years bloom into a whole genre in and of itself in the comics industry.

With her comic Ernie Pook’s Comeek, Barry was able to reach out to a new comics reader who was looking for more complex and challenging works than those that were being written for the everyday newspaper. Running for two decades and syndicated across North America in various alternative weeklies, in juxtaposition to the underground comics which remained fairly isolated to a particular community and its creators, Barry’s work and voice reached all sorts of people and places while allowing her the ability to freely express herself in a new and growing form.

As her popularity grew and the alternative weekly scene and comics changed, Barry would further grow with it, becoming not only a comics creator, but an illustrator, writer, playwright, and teacher. Using the comics form, she experimented with collage and illustration as a means to get her voice and story across. If that meant adapting her illustrated novel The Good Times are Killing Me into an off-Broadway play, so be it. It was the drive to express herself and her creativity that allowed Barry’s works to permeate a variety of audiences and ultimately act as inspiration for other contemporary comics creators.

In 2009 Barry won the prestigious Eisner Award and R.R. Donnelly Award for her graphic novel What It Is. A memoir, a graphic novel, a piece of literature, and an instructional workbook for a new generation of creators to find and express themselves through the comics medium, What It Is represents explicitly who Barry is in the motley world of comics today—a creator, an educator, and an inspiration for an industry in motion and change.

–Contributing Editor Caitlin McCabe

