Aegis 2010
120
Book Review >>> Ashley Butler
What it Is Barry, Lynda. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2008. 209 pp.
In a graphic literary text that is wrought with moody collage artwork and beautifully executed narration, Lynda Barry’s What it Is is a perfectly constructed anomaly within the graphic medium. In this intricately formed graphic text, Barry provides the reader with sections of deeply personal and engaging questions that are surrounded with unique artwork and also sections of autobiographical narration from when she was a young girl trying to know and embrace her own desires as a child, a woman, and an intellectual. Targeting so many of the important (and underlying) questions that we often forget about, this graphic text forces the reader to slow down and take a minute to really get to know him or herself as a person and also the journey that brought them to that point in life. The book begins with a very brief bout of narration that is set up very similar to an average comic strip. This short piece showcases Barry herself having a conversation with a man that illustrates her own ways of thinking and communicating as well as her attitudes toward life. At the end of the two-page spread, there is an abrupt shift to a more three dimensional and tactile type of artwork that simply says “Hello! Its Me” (See Figure 1). This personal introduction into her text is something that lets the reader know that she is not claiming authority over her readers, but that she has, in fact, personally been at every level in her career and in her life. She invites all readers to take part, to get involved, and to lose themselves in order to find what they might be overlooking. After her brief introduction, Barry provides a two-paged spread of collage-type artwork on yellow legal pad paper (See Figure 2). As this is how a large majority of the book is set up, it is nice to get a couple of pages of it before she begins her artistic journey. Addressing a series of questions such as, “What year is it in your imagination?”, “What is the difference between imagination and memory?”, and “What is an image?,” Barry really challenges the reader to examine just how much imagination he or she really has left. This is a theme that comes up continuously throughout the text—not only how and why we lose the imagination that was so present at one time, but more importantly, how to go about getting it back. Since imagination is something that we generally identify with children, Barry fittingly follows those initial pages of collage-type artwork with narration from when she was a little girl exploring her own imagination. Within the narration, Barry talks about the time in her childhood in which everything (toys, photos, etc.) had a sort of ‘aliveness’ that her imagination allowed her to take part in for awhile, but eventually ended. Here, Barry makes us think about what happens the first time we realize that what is in our imagination is not the same as what is in our reality. Barry writes:
