Nevermind that it was the dumbest invention ever:
Prototype drawing:
We’ll have to wait a little while until Drawn and Quarterly publishes the five-volume set of the complete run of Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek, but in the meantime, there are a bunch of out-of-print collections out there…if you can find them. I’d like to start the week off by showing off a couple scans from two, GIRLS AND BOYS (1981), and EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD (1986).
* * *
BOYS + GIRLS was Lynda’s first book. Most of it is drawn in a scrawled, punky pen style — a crazy contrast to the fluid brushwork of something like ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS! The strip was reformatted into a horizontal format, something that Chris Oliveros has emphasized will NOT be the case in the D + Q reissues.
Here I’ve restored her strip, “How To Draw Cartoons,” to its original square format:
Here’s a wacky clip of Lynda reading from the book in the the film COMIC BOOK CONFIDENTIAL:
And here’s a really cool photo of a poster advertising the book from around 1980.
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EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD is a little more refined — it was Lynda’s fourth collection, and the drawings get better and better, but the content is still nutty and hilarious. The gems from this book are these little maps that serve as chapter dividers:
Here’s the strip “What Turns Men On”:
And the strip “How to Catch a Man”:
I found this King-Cat strip from John Porcellino to be a great match for them:
Like John P’s KING-CAT CLASSIX collection, I can only think that the five-volume Ernie Pook collection is gonna be nothing short of fantastic.
On cartooning and design:
Good cartoon drawing is good design. A lot of people aren’t aware of that.
On the skills of a cartoonist:
Schulz: I have a combination of strange abilities I can draw pretty well, and i can write pretty well, and i can create pretty well, but I could never be an illustrator. It doesn’t interest me.
Rose: That’s because the idea doesn’t come from you?
Schulz: [Yes.]
On humor and sadness:
I suppose there’s a melancholy feeling in a lot of cartoonists, because cartooning, like all other humor, comes from bad things happening. People will say, “Well why don’t you have Charlie Brown kick the football?” And I say, “Well, that would be wonderful, it’s happy, but happiness is not funny.” I wish we could all be happy, but it isn’t funny.
On autobiography:
Schulz: All of the things that you see in the strip, if you were to read it every day and study it, you would know me.
Rose: To read your characters is to know you.
Schulz: Isn’t that depressing?
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