Adam Baumgold

60 East 66th Street, Manhattan

Through July 11

In the world of cartoon and comic art, Lynda Barry is a hall of famer. This wonderfully engaging show presents a selection of more than 100 original comic strips, drawings and collages from the past 35 years by the artist, best known for her long-running series “Ernie Pook’s Comeek.”

The exhibition starts with a recent set of pages made to introduce “Blabber Blabber Blabber: Volume 1 of Everything,” a collection of her comics from 1978 to 1981 published by Drawn & Quarterly. Here Ms. Barry looks back on how she got started as a cartoonist, with handwritten recollections and lively copies of images by artists who influenced her from childhood on, including Dr. Seuss, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, R. Crumb and Peter Max. On one sheet she has pasted a drawing of a dragon popping up out of a Campbell’s soup can, about which she writes, “I drew this in the 9th grade and felt incredible afterward.” That caption gets at what makes Ms. Barry’s work so irresistible. In nearly everything she has made, you feel the joy she discovers in the realization of her own creative imagination.

Ms. Barry’s magical skills as cartoonist, writer and storyteller are at their richest in the many more or less autobiographical tales told by a goofy, smart, economically underprivileged young girl named Marlys. They concern her tragicomic adventures and those of her sister Maybonne, her beloved, emotionally troubled brother Freddie, their chronically enraged mother and many other neighborhood eccentrics. Laugh-out-loud funny in one frame and heartbreaking in the next, these tales of innocence and experience belong on the shelf with Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn.”