LYNDA BARRY recently published the illustrated novel, Cruddy, which has been praised by the likes of The New York Times Book Review, Matt Groening, Kirkus Reviews, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker. The book's 16-year-old narrator, Roberta Rohbeson, having been grounded for a very long time because of drugs and stuff, decides to be a famous author. Her tale shifts between the chemically enhanced events that led to her being grounded and some things that happened on a trip with her father when she was 11. Those things involved whiskey, cigarettes, suitcases full of cash, dazzle camouflage, Gy-Rah the Sequined Genius, The Poky Dot Lounge, a week-old corpse in a trailer, sharp knives, and plenty of blood and killing. Oh, and during the trip, her father disguised her as a young mongoloid boy and called her Clyde, but he had his reasons. studioNOTES had been wanting to interview Barry for a long time, knowing that in addition to being a cartoonist, writer and playwright, she was also a painter, but by the time we go around to it, she had come out with Cruddy, so that's what we asked her about.

studioNOTES: How did it all begin? Did you see or read something that got you thinking about the character who was to become Roberta Rohbeson?

Lynda Barry: I finally stopped thinking about it and just started writing. I tried not to think about the book unless I was actually writing it and I tend to write in the first person, in the character of someone, and that someone was Roberta. At first I thought it was Edna Arkins, the character who was in my first little novel, The Good Times Are Killing Me. But it wasn't her, it turned out. My goal was to not think about things at all. To dream it out instead, trying very hard not to edit at all as I went. The first draft really took shape when I found that I needed to slow way down and distract myself at the same time so I used a paintbrush and Tuscan red watercolor and painted the manuscript on legal paper, trying to concentrate on the calligraphic aspect of writing rather than trying to craft beautiful sentences. I figured as long as the sentences looked beautiful, the rest would take care of itself. That draft was seven hundred pages long. I used a hairdryer when I got to the end of each page so I could stack them without smearing. I can do some pretty nice handwriting now. I tried to write it a word at a time like it was being dictated. Cruddy was the result.

From the beginning, did you think it would be a book or did it start out as something else?

I was always trying to write a book. My worst fear was that it would never become one. Especially with the way I was doing it. But writing it on the computer didn't work at all. From the watercolor manuscript I went to a manual typewriter and from there I went to computer.

I'm sure you did research to make the stuff about the knives and meat cutting so, well, sharp, but what got you thinking about knives and butchering in the first place?

I did do research about knives and butchering after Roberta started bringing them up. What got me going on them was her, really. She started talking about them. My main task was to not interfere and I wanted to because I thought who would read a book with such horror in it? I'm pretty much a vegetarian and thought of myself as sort of a peaceful hippie so, you know, it was a surprise. But it was a pretty engrossing surprise. The kind I live for, it turns out.

Lynda Barry, Illustration from Cruddy, 1999, sumi-e ink on finger-painting paper

Were you making drawings of the characters and situations early on in the writing?

No. I made the drawings afterwards. After I had seen the characters enough in my mind to have some idea of what they looked like.

I know you worked on Cruddy for about five years. I understand that you were doing "Ernie Pook's Comeek," recorded The Lynda Barry Experience, re-released The Good Times Are Killing Me, published The Freddie Stories, and got married, but it sounds like the book needed a lot of cooking and stirring. Can you tell us about that?

Actually, once I hit upon the idea of writing it with watercolor really slowly the book came really fast, like in about a year. I think there was some part of me that knew I wanted to write a book another part of me would be shocked about. You know how violent Cruddy is. It took a long time for some part of me to convince the other part of me to do it. This is what is sometimes called writer's block I think. Not that I was blocked. I was writing but what I was writing seemed dead at its center. Like trying to paint without using any of the "ugly colors" that you never see used in children's clothing or interestingly in exercise clothing, and kids and exercising people end up wearing a lot of teal and raspberry and bright bright colors and looking like bad tropical fish. That is what my writing was like before I discovered the multitude of mud and blood and fly colors. After that it was pretty fun.

None of your work could be confused with, say, Sesame Street, but you've gotta admit Cruddy is darker and grimmer than anything else you've published. Did working on it color any of your other projects, in your opinion?

I don't think of Cruddy as being much darker or grimmer than, say, "Hansel and Gretel" or a lot of the Grimm's fairy tales which I thrived on as a child. If you read some of those stories as "TRUE CRIME" tales they would seem pretty shocking. To me Cruddy was always a sort of fairy tale. Plus, I found a lot of it pretty funny. I laughed a lot while I was writing it. I guess I have always had this morbid, dark side that I never let myself know about. My husband pointed out that the only shows I like on TV are the documentary ones about trauma and cops and crime. He asked me if I'd ever watched an episode of "Seinfeld" or "Friends" or any other kind of "I'll be there for you" TV shows and I had to admit I hadn't. Also, I read a lot of murder mysteries. So it wasn't much of a leap for me at all once I admitted this was true, that I've always had an attraction to trauma. And humor. Both.

Kurt Vonnegut said that an author writes everything for one particular person (in his case his sister). Is this true for you, and if so, who?

It's not true for me. I may be able to write because of certain people but I don't have anyone in mind at all when I write.

You do a lot of visual work as well as a lot of writing. Granting that there are obvious differences between the two mediums, what is similar about your approach to both?

Actually I have always made pictures and have always been attracted to pictures, and what I know about making pictures is what helped me with the writing of Cruddy. There is a certain reciprocity in drawing, one line or color suggests the other, only it isn't mellow. It's kind of like being a surgeon in a trauma unit, the patient seems to be dying on the table and it's up to me to keep it alive by doing one thing and then another as the emergency suggests. There is a state of mind that I imagine ER people have to have, trying to keep someone alive. It's a heightened state but it's not panic. And it's addictive. I've heard that people who work in trauma units have a hard time working anywhere else. No day is the same, no one knows what's coming next. When I draw or write it is very much about trying to keep something alive, from the first living stroke of the paintbrush or pen. There has to be that risk of death, or the work itself is dead on arrival, dead from the beginning. Then I'm just embalming, you know? Although that is something I'm interested in too. The whole funeral business. But that's a tangent. The point is the action in making the work is like drawing a living thing up from where ever artwork is before it's visible. Children do something similar when they play. There is always an element of danger and trouble when kids play. Conflict of one sort or another. You don't play army men to have them march in straight lines over and over. Something's going to happen. People like doing this. The Greek gods loved doing this.

Can you tell me about the image of Roberta on the cover? What is the original medium, size? How about the illustration of Clyde/Roberta and Cookie on page 12?

When it came time to do the art for Cruddy, I wanted to find a way to do it that wasn't so much illustrating as it was painting in the way I just talked about. I messed around for a while until I hit upon the idea of doing finger painting. I got some finger-painting paper from the art store, which is a paper with a very shiny coating and you can really mess around on it and even wipe it clean. The painting of Roberta is a finger-painting that I did line work on afterwards. If you look at it really close you can see finger smudges. I used watercolor for it. The interior illustrations, including the one you mentioned, were done the same way but with sumi-e ink. I had a very pale gray wash that I painted on and then ran my fingers around in it until it made kind of a finger scribble and then I would read the chapter and look at the scribble and mess around until a picture sort of showed up. Then I did line work on it to draw it out. I really had a good time doing that. I did the paintings pretty fast. About five of them a day. That was a happy time for me. To just go into my studio and know what I was going to do but not exactly how I was going to do it. I like to have some structure. Without it, work is much harder

Cruddy is dark and violent-and very funny. What is the relationship between dark and funny?

I guess hysteria.

Lynda Barry, The 23 Headed Capricorn, a drawing based on the photo on the front page of studioNOTES issue #26.

How did you know when Cruddy was finished?

Roberta stopped talking. She said the last words and they were so clearly the last words and it was very strange. On one hand I was overjoyed to be finished and that state lasted for a while. And then I felt funny, not sad really, but disoriented because she was gone and she'd been so alive in my head for so long and now she is totally gone. No where to be found.

What art have you been looking at?

I looked at A LOT while I was writing Cruddy. I looked at a lot of photographs, looked at photographs of the area around the Hoover Dam around the time they were building it, looked at documentary photos by anyone who was doing work all the way up to 1970. I looked at illustrated books, and for some reason I really needed to see a lot of religious art from India. There are some paintings in these caves, I can't even remember the name of them now, but they are falling apart, the frescos are just coming off the walls, and at the library the book I found that had photos of them was printed not very well and I found myself really drawn to them. The fragments and the bad printing. I spent a lot of time in the library looking at visual art in the form of etchings and lithographs. I spend a lot of time in the library anyway. I go a couple of times a week and sit around looking at the art books.

Finally, what are you working on now?

I've been reading some Greek mythology and have been doing some comic strips with mythological monsters in them. It started when I wondered how to kill the Hydra. You know that being with the heads that people bring up all the time when problems seem to multiply. You cut off one of her heads and two more spring up in its place. So I went to the library and found two different versions of what Hercules had to do when he faced her. In Bulfinch's Mythology it said the Hydra had nine heads and the middle one was immortal. So you couldn't actually ever kill the Hydra. What you could do was cut the heads off and quickly sear the open neck with fire and no more heads would come. But the middle head, the immortal one, well, Hercules just buried that one under a rock. That's the story I like the best. The other one said the Hydra had a hundred heads to begin with and you had to sear them all but once you did that she was dead forever. That's not nearly as fun as thinking some developer is going to stumble on her someday. There is a mall going in just a few blocks from my house and I have my little hopes. . . .

Evanston IL, 10.29.99

-BENNY SHABOY

(c) studioNOTES, the journal for working artists.