Reviews
One day, cartoonist Lynda Barry came across an ancient exercise by a Buddhist monk that calls for a painter to practice technique by drawing one hundred little demons. So she tried it, and after she inked a bunch of critters with tails and horns, she began exorcising some her own personal demons. One! Hundred! Demons! is the result, a crafty little first-person graphic memoir about living through the pains of everything from dating to dancing to the 2000 presidential election. Each of Barry’s “demons,” or chapters, is introduces by a full-spread page that’s a combination of squiggly drawings, multi-media collage, and old-fashioned personal photographs. Barry’s stories are often embarrassingly honest, but they’re also always relatable and never exploitive. There’s a real fondness for the mistakes and missteps of the past here, a sense of regret coupled with a nostalgia that’s impossible to resist. Barry’s artistic style is bold, colorful, almost childlike in its exuberance, and her characters--her chain-smoking mother, the hardscrabble kids in her neighborhood, her own red-haired freckle-faced childhood self--are show in all their wayward, awkward, goofy glory. And once you’ve finished cringing and chuckling your way through stories about head lice, first boyfriends, the unique smells of houses, and the ins and outs of street kickball, Lynda Barry shows you exactly how much fun you can have drawing a few demons of your own.
Poignant, pretty and resonant.