Blabber Blabber Blabber: Volume 1 of Everything
Kicking off a series reprinting Barry’s complete comics oeuvre, this volume collects the earliest installments of Ernie Pook’s Comeek, a mainstay of alternative newspapers for more than two decades, as well as two books from the late ’70s and early ’80s. The earliest pieces rely heavily on absurdist humor, but Barry soon began deriving both laughs and poignancy from deftly limned characters (including Ernie Pook himself, who would swiftly vanish from the strip bearing his name). Barry’s embryonic drawing style is scratchier and rawer than her later work, although she’d never shake the rough-hewn quality that makes her art immediately recognizable. In introductions to each section, handwritten and drawn in the scrapbookish mode of her autobiographical examination of creativity, What It Is (2008), Barry discusses her influences, from Dr. Seuss to Robert Crumb, and traces her artistic evolution. The declining fortunes of the nation’s alternative newspapers prompted Barry to drop Ernie Pook in 2007; this retrospective serves as a reminder of what her fans have lost. --Gordon Flagg