Cold winter rains and blasts of January wind assaulted the window panes the Saturday afternoon I spent across the kitchen table from Lynda Barry. Above a locksmith's shop, her apartment and studio are one, with views of a cash machine out front and a parking lot out back. At age 26 Lynda Barry is urgent, thoughtful, funny and well established as an artist-cartoonist with a growing legion of fans. Her comic strips have appeared locally in the University of Washington Daily, the (now vanished) Seattle Sun and, currently, in the Rocket. Barry is also syndicated in the Chicago Reader, the Los Angeles Reader and the City Paper in Baltimore. She has had both group and individual exhibitions of her art work at the ARC and The Rosco Louie Gallery, both in Seattle. And, of course, there is Girls and Boys, her collection of comic strips published in 1981 by The Real Comet Press and greeted with laughter and critical acclaim. Lynda asked that the interview be true to her use of the language, that her picture here not be painted with words and a style she would never use. I have rearranged our conversation but held closely to an accurate expression of her speech. We began by talking about how a person comes to be "funny" and how that is related to survival.

Hambly: Were you the funny kid in your family or at school? Did your humor develop as a mechanism to get you through things?

Barry: Yeah . . . but it wasn't that I had a sense that what I said was funny or that I was funny Ha-Ha. It was that I was FUNNY. I got through junior high and high school by not being afraid to be kind of a goof ball. I was kind of dumb looking and I really wanted to be cool so I was obnoxious. I was the kind of person that if I had had me for a student I would have thrown me out of class immediately. I wanted so badly to be popular and I never quite cut it. I really had this awareness about being female and felt I just couldn't compete on the regular level of being a girl. I just couldn't do it. My hair was wrong and everything was wrong. Everyone has this story. Everyone I hang out with now. I'm sure you have it ... the painful adolescence stories. So I did it another way. You just figure out a way and I wasn't afraid to be laughed at or be loud. In my family though I was never the funny kid. My brothers were a lot funnier than I... and stronger (laugh).

Hambly: So funny has something to do with the way you are and the way your experience the world, not just telling a joke or doing a strip?

Barry: I'm not just talking about me. But for people who have a great sense of humor, a lot of times it's just so integral to their system. It's how they cook eggs, how they tell a story, how they buy groceries, all that stuff.

Hambly: So you see situations and experiences from a particularly "funny" angle. The humor comes through to you whereas, for a serious person, the same situation would come across quite differently.

Barry: Right, and I think that one of the reasons for humor with me is I need to be cheered up a lot. I think funny people are people who need to be cheered up. I feel like a lot of times if I didn't try to stay on top of things and eavesdrop on every bus ride I take or look for the humor when I go for a walk or talk to people I would just be depressed all the time. Especially when I am alone here I try to look for things to cheer me up, to keep me awake and happy. So in that way I feel a need to and I have a method for turning myself on. I see things funny and I look for it, really look for it! I listen like mad to any conversation taking place next to me just trying to hear why this is funny. What are these people really saying? Women's restrooms are especially great. I hang out in them as much as I can. I linger and wash my hands twice waiting for people to come in and start talking.

Hambly: What's the method for keeping yourself up?

Barry: It happens mostly when I am alone and especially because I am an artist and I don't leave for work. I go to work the minute I open my eyes and when I know I am going to work on a project I have this whole preparation ritual which is to get myself in a good mood and to feel energized. Lots of it has to do with acting stupid alone in my apartment. I mean like playing really stupid songs and acting them out. It's a whole energizing process. Maybe everybody does it. I do dumb stuff like playing my favorite dumb Barry White song and lip-synching into the mirror so it looks like his voice is coming out of my mouth. I mean Barry White is so bad. It's really funny to me. This kind of stuff just gets me up. This whole ritual is to create the feeling that I am just about to go to a party. That's the frame of mind I want to work myself into. The attitude. I guess what is unusual is that I can make a living from it.

Hambly: How did it happen that you gained the confidence to define yourself as an artist and a cartoonist?

Barry: That is really important and it took a long time. Now when somebody asks me what I do, I say, "I'm an artist," or I say, "I'm a cartoonist." It doesn't even cross my mind that once I felt self- conscious about saying that. I had great art school training. I had a teacher at Evergreen [Washington State College] who was an artist, not just an art teacher. I worked with her exclusively for two and a half years. It began there, this whole way of thinking of myself as an artist, that this was a choice I could make at that time, not off in the future when I graduated and looked for a job as "an artist." I took this all very seriously, you understand. You couldn't talk about it. It was that serious. Deadly. But I guess when I really started to say it and believe it was when I stopped having another job to carry me financially. People started calling me an artist... I didn't have to correct them. Cartoonist was the weirdest name I finally let myself have. I would never say it. When I heard it I silently thought "what an awful word." It made me sound like a cartoon. It was like an insult to my fine art. It's in the last two years that it has really become effortless. But it is really weird trying to sneak into having an identity. It's like people are going to come at you with a Geiger counter and say, "Oh yeah. Well let's see if you really are."

Hambly: When did you begin drawing the cartoons?

Barry: I started doing cartoons when I was about twenty-one. I never thought I would be a cartoonist. It happened behind my back. I was always a painter and drawer and I just started doing them as a joke in my apartment when I was in college at a really low time, again, to cheer me up. It was a very low time in my life when I was unable to sleep and I would stay up and draw these little cartoons about the problem. So I just started putting them together. Then a friend who was working on the University of Washington Daily showed them around and asked if the Daily could run a couple. I didn't even think of putting my name on them or anything. Before I knew it I was a cartoonist. The sensation is that it happened behind my back or that it happened in a dream. Now the strips are nearly effortless unless I am really emotionally upset... a wreck. But I can sit down and I know the deadline is two hours away and I haven't a thought in my head. But two hours later I have a strip.

Hambly: Does that ease of creating a strip take away any of the value for you as an artist?

Barry: No, I can't separate the strips from my painting that easily in the working sense. The whole reason I did such an odd, wild looking style in the first place was to keep me interested, to wake me up, and now I can draw the style effortlessly. But when I sit down and I am sick of the way I draw it makes it hard to do a comic strip. The only way to get out of it is just to keep drawing. The beautiful thing about the working process is that just when you think you can't do it another minute something gives. Even the tiniest glimpse of something new comes and you know you have to be there tomorrow to work on it and coax that thing out. It's happening in the work I am doing now. Last night I was really tired and I couldn't imagine doing thirteen of the paintings I was working on with the same technique. Then I saw a shape in there that I have never seen before. I caught kind of a new angle on it and it was wonderful - just knowing I'm going to have this thing I can play with and coax out. That is the way I work. I do a lot of making friends with my work, just trying to be kind and friendly. When I was a kid I had this relationship . . . mind you I never would have called it that when I was a kid . . . but I had this thing going. My mother put these four pictures of the Northern bathroom tissue girls up on the end of my bed. They were real soft and had kittens. They were four different colors and every girl I knew had them in her bedroom. I remember thinking if I would just be good enough and quiet enough and friendly enough they would move. Remember how you used to be able to feel your bed breathing and the walls spinning when you were a kid? So the girls in the Northern tissue wrapper moved and I found I could do it with them really well after a while and I could do it with a lot of other pictures. I used to get myself kind of hypnotized and I still do that. Not to the extent or with the faith I had when I was a kid but now when I draw or paint I still try to become the thing I am working on. I get into this trance-like state.

Hambly: Do you work like that when you are doing a strip?

Barry: Yes. That is why I think the comic strips have a kind of continuity to them that isn't a continuity I could have made up in my speaking life. Even when I read them back there are a lot of funny coincidences in them and some seem to be complete in a way I couldn't have done if I were trying just to think of a punch line. There is an otherness to them.

Hambly: When I read Girls and Boys I found some cartoons to have an underlay to them, a separate layer of feeling that isn't always funny. You know?

Barry: Like this one:

The process of remembering and then it stops and in the final square you fill in with your own memories and in that way it becomes personal, it's your own cartoon.

Hambly: That's the way that one works.

Barry: It doesn't work for a lot of people. I have had people comment that it is too emotional . . . therefore, not funny. The thing I have always had to work on is believing my work, letting something like this be in the paper and believing that it is right and OK. Some of my friends, especially the tough ones, think this is stupid. I knew they would but I made it for people who would have the sensation of funny/ not-funny you described because that is what it is like for me. The sensation in leaving the last frame blank puts you on this emotional cliff all your own. I heard this lecture with Anais Nin talking about being criticized for publishing her diaries. People told her it was her own experience and she was stupid to think it would transfer. It was interesting to hear her talk about just having the belief that it was significant and that it would mean something to someone else. It wasn't just her thinking she was a cool person. There is that line in my work. Some of it is autobiographical, some of it isn't. And it's gotten to the point that people think that whatever I put into strips has happened to me in my life. If I put a girl in who secretly has cancer they would think that was happening to me.

Hambly: How do you deal with the inhibiting effects of looking ahead to how people will respond to your work?

Barry: I have had to really come to terms with that. How much can I use from my real life before it becomes too rigid and it's just my life and no one can understand it? There was a beautiful time in the beginning when I just did it and didn't analyze the consequences but I think that time ends in everyone's work. You get to a point where you have to sit down with yourself and say look . . .

Hambly: So you can depend on your own life experience for material for just so long and then when you feel it is a dependency it's time to let go?

Barry: And you have to find a new way to look at your work. I think the whole thing about spilling your guts was the thing to do for a while and still is to some degree. But after that there is something else that still has to do with your life but more with how you see things, your world view and how that fits into your art. It is a next step, the step you have to reach for. It isn't just there like your everyday world. That kind of riding is so easy and ultimately too self- concerned.

Hambly: Where do your ideas come from?

Barry: It depends on what is happening and what I have just been doing in the way of strips. I have this kind of corny feeling of trying to figure out what is needed and not necessarily what is needed for me but trying to figure out what people need to hear. I think a lot about what are things women need to hear, how do women feel about life, what do they think about it? And relationships, endlessly, constantly, we think and feel about relationships. I like to think about women. I like to draw women. I like to write about them. What I am trying to do a lot of times is pick out situations that honestly happen even to college-educated, intelligent women, situations that sincerely happen and people would be lying to say that they don't. The same kind of stuff that was going on thirty years ago is going on in many lives, really disgusting, horrible, sexist, violent things that involve the less pleasant, the less in control, the seamier side of life. I think a lot of my peer group, which is white and sort of bohemian, educated and supposedly aware, tries to pretend that such things don't happen. Or if it happens to them one time or one night maybe their boyfriend hits them that is the only time it will happen in their lives and it won't happen to their friends and they can forget about it. I try to work with all the stuff people seem to have amnesia about and that they don't want to admit happens to them. I get a lot of flak for doing those kinds of strips.

Hambly: So you are not merely trying to remind us of another period, like junior high and high school and painful adolescence? That period hasn't necessarily ended.

Barry: That is the idea I was working on unconsciously. I was trying to remember what were the elements in those old situations we like to think we have outgrown. Like I did one cartoon where a guy and a girl were in a garage and he wants her to let him feel her up and she feels ug but thinks if she doesn't give in he will not like her so .... That schematic is present right here and now. It doesn't happen in a garage necessarily. Those kind of chemistries are the things I want to bring up. I was criticized once by a "very intelligent" woman who said that one of the reasons she didn't like my cartoons was 'cause they portray things as they are instead of as they should be. I thought, "Oh, holy cow, how is anybody going to get out of anything without seeing where they are first?" So in my work there is a fluctuation. There is stuff I take real seriously like hard situations people get themselves into and then just off the wall stuff, funny and offbeat to keep me sane. But it is all about how people live and how they are trying to live.

Hambly: The cartoons have a way of looking at the social situation rather than being "political" cartoons in a strict sense.

Barry: It's just what I am good at. I do feel a moral obligation to do something and I would not be good at studying politics. I would fall asleep. I am good at eavesdropping and remembering funny things that happen as I move through the world. You have to keep up with politics to do political cartoons. Social situations are what people think about most of all anyway. Especially relationships. They haunt people. If I could do anything in my work it would be to somehow make all that stuff real and make it so that people didn't have that nagging feeling of why don't things work? Why don't my relationships work? If somehow I could shed some light on what the chemistry really is that would be so wonderful. Just to make them think of what is going on. I did a strip once of this real conversation I heard on a bus. One woman said, "Boy, Wendy is in the hospital." The other one says, "No, you have to be kidding." "No, I guess Freddy got really mad at her and hit her with a frying pan and gave her a concussion. She has a warrant out and if he comes near her she can have him arrested." The other one says, "Wow, Freddy is such a super nice guy and all. But you know he must have got to drinking and you know how he can be." I am hearing them say what a nice guy he is two sentences after saying he hit her with a frying pan. I want them to hear themselves, hear what is being said out of habit and not really believing these situations are real. Somehow in my work I want to point out that we don't listen and watch for these things in ourselves.

Hambly: How do you defend yourself against criticism?

Barry: I just don't go out. I stay at home with a pillow over my head. Really, I'm not real good. People assume I am really strong about that and I just say "ah, shut-up," which I do say but my feelings get hurt. I work hard and I try to do it with an intention or an aim. I really believe that artists of all kinds have an obligation to figure out what is missing and what do people need to hear. That is the only way I feel right about myself. I try to figure out what is next, what do I have to put into the environment. I feel like I should serve the community or the society and I try and figure out how best to do that. When I get criticized for something dumb or minor I really get mad because it is dumb and evading the something that is larger and more important. Everybody comes out the loser for it. The point is that you are sticking your ass out and once it's out, it's out. It's this whole dance of trying to keep myself in balance with all the forces at work in me and outside of me. And one of those is criticism of my work.

Hambly: Do you think it's possible to work beyond concern for the public reaction?

Barry: I sure hope so. There are people like James Joyce who are blessed. Or Gertrude Stein or Charlie Parker or Diane Arbus. They have a vision that is so strong. There are no questions for them. My vision isn't that strong. I am a pretty straight, normal, domestic, average person and that can't give me the armor that is sometimes necessary. I think that sometimes that jump happens through devotion to your work, to have your work just hook you. I think about the rare times in my life when work has hooked me and it was just wonderful, a miracle. I knew all I had to do was be there, eat right, get enough sleep and be in my studio because the work was a lot more important and stronger than I am ever going to be. All I had to do was be with it and execute it. That is the highest. That is what life is for. Everything comes real and Oh, the sensation. This is a crazy story but one time I was working on a painting and I had this electric feeling like this was strong, real strong. I looked over and my bottle of turpentine was moving. I thought I was moving the bottle and the plants were wiggling and I just knew this was it. I looked out the window and a train was going by. It was the train that was making the vibration but I had such faith, I was so into it. I laughed so hard at myself. At such moments humor is such a wonderful thing helping you realize what a fool you are but how beautiful that is at the same time. I was thinking I was so cool that I could wiggle things. Seeing the train and just having to laugh. In life there are always these things happening if you can just get the joke.

Hambly: So being funny is your salvation.

Barry: The point of so much in American society and business and government is to make you so scared that you won't do anything but buy Langendorf bread or go get a job. It starts real early. The big terror, the big scare starts and you start fitting in. It wasn't that I was so advanced and made this choice to be a really creative soul or to be the way I am and be funny and odd. I mean there is a way in which I had no choice. I can't be the girl in the magazine ads though I wanted to so badly once. Now I have this idea that if people were as devoted to anything as they are to getting to Jack in the Box on time and getting to work on time, well, just think. People have a job and the boss says get there at eight and they stay for eight hours and go home and wonder why they can't seem to get time for anything else or can't seem to get things together. If you set up that same schedule for yourself and if you gave that much effort and devotion to anything . . . making goblets out of beer bottles, you would be successful at it and probably have a lot more fun.

Hambly: Do you define yourself as a feminist?

Barry: I don't know what the goal is or the definition right now so it's hard to say. But in terms of being a woman I'd say my work is almost exclusively about being female in a real average way, a way that isn't more or less enlightened than the going norm. I'm interested in looking at it that way because those are the people I want to talk to, the regular women who have made almost every decision in their life based on a man. So I would want to say, "Yes, I am a feminist," but I think The Feminists would say I was out of my mind, that my work is always about men and women and that none of my women are strong, good role models. There is a reason behind that. I think about women and their relationships and how women don't even give a thought to how they feel or what they want. So much energy is spent attaching to a man, how to fix the hair, what to wear, how to act. I am interested in how that works and rules entire lives. I really want to point out that this is going on with everybody. I don't care if you are the President of NOW ... it just goes on. If you identify weakness, confusion, pain and not knowing who you are with one man once and you are fool enough to think that it is a one-time occurrence or that this kind of thing takes place in only one area of your life, you're crazy. There is a whole way of looking at things and if it is leaking out in one area you can bet it is coming out in a lot of other ways too. Sometimes it takes something really dramatic for you to notice that there is a mindset going on. The best way I have of understanding it is the way they explain DNA and the structure we have in every cell. There is genetic information in the cells and the messages are replicated over and over and I see that as true in living too. How you relate to your boyfriend takes place in everything you do. You can't just say it's one isolated problem. It's a whole attitude. It's all of you.

Hambly: These are strong ideas, strongly felt, and yet there is the wacky, crazy LB of Girls and Boys.

Barry: I feel like people make comic strips to make people laugh, to give them a chuckle and brighten up their day. Man, there are just not a whole lot of jokes left in the world and I am happy that I am using this medium as a way to talk about things in people's lives that maybe they have amnesia about. I am really thankful that I am able to do that and people will publish me. It's a media and it's cheap. People can get the message quickly and then put the strip down. They are talking pictures and people just expect that and then throw them away and still in a way I ask them to think a little. Sneaky! Lynda Barry is sneaky!