One! Hundred! Demons!

AUTHOR: Barry, Lynda

ARTIST: Lynda Barry (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Sasquatch Books

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 2000-2001

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2002

Publication History

While working on the illustrated novel Cruddy in the late 1990’s, Lynda Barry began to experiment with sumi brush painting. As she began playing with the technique, often inspired by a single word or phrase, she began exploring the demons that had haunted her throughout her life, turning them into comic sketches such as “Girlness,” “Hate,” and “Head Lice and My Worst Boyfriend.” The demons eventually took a more formal shape as seventeen comic strips (each with twenty panels) that appeared from April 7, 2000, to January 15, 2001, on the popular online magazine Salon.com.

Following the success of the online publication of One! Hundred! Demons!, the anthologized print version of the comic strips was published by Seattle-based Sasquatch Books in 2002. The anthology featured strips that were pared down to eighteen panels, presented with two large panels per page. Barry further polished each of the strips and developed additional features for the printed collection. Working with Tom Greensfelder and Amie Z. Gleed, Barry designed an “Intro,” a do-it-yourself tutorial for the “Outro,” and elaborate collages for the front and ending pages, as well as detailed, multimedia collages featured between each of the strips. The book was published in paperback by Sasquatch Books in 2004.

Plot

When Barry turned her focus to exploring her own girlhood, she created a new comic form and structure offering the neologism “autobifictionalography” as the term to describe her approach to rendering the self in comic form. In One! Hundred! Demons! Barry creates intimate snapshots of her multiple selves, with the girl “Lynda” at the center. Barry frames and constructs her own life story, and in particular her own girlhood, revealing her idea of a dark, disturbing childhood that the narrator ultimately survives by utilizing her own creative impulses to emerge victorious over the demons.

Each strip addresses one of the demons from her life. For example, in “Common Scents” a young Lynda realizes that her Filipino household is different from her neighbors’, and though once ashamed of this difference, an older Lynda longs for the smell of home. The book addresses many of these sorts of personal demons, from sexual abuse to the difficulties of fitting in to depression following the 2000 presidential election.

In One! Hundred! Demons! Barry shows multiple selves conversing with one another across boundaries of time, space, place, text, and image. Her representations of self–child, teen, and adult–challenge notions of femininity and beauty, of race and passing, and of class and social dictates, exploring how the figure of “Lynda Barry” was both constructed by and in opposition to these discourse communities.

Characters

•Lynda Barry appears at various ages throughout the book. Barry as creator is depicted within the strips as a middle-aged woman with red hair, glasses, and a bandanna, drawing her demons and creating the book in the “Intro.” Another version of her as the creator of the book is also seen in photographs in the concluding “Outro,” in which she demonstrates the process of painting and writing and encourages others to follow her technique for drawing demons. Over the course of the compilation, she is pictured as a young girl, a teenager, a young woman, and an adult. While she is part Filipina, she is generally depicted as pale, with unruly red hair, glasses, and freckles. Her appearance allows her to pass as white in strips such as “Common Scents” and “The Visitor.” She is ungainly and full of self-doubt.

•Kevin Kawula, Barry’s husband, is drawn with glasses, dark hair, and a beard. He functions as a supportive and kindly presence. He appears lying happily in bed with Lynda in “Dogs,” and in “The Election.” He tries to pull Lynda out of a deep depression after the 2000 presidential election.

•Lynda’s Mother is a particularly unsympathetic character and something of a villain, berating Lynda and continually putting her down. She was born in the Philippines and suffered hardship during World War II (1939-1945). She scolds her daughter for being ugly in the strip “Girlness.” She is depicted with dark skin and dark hair tied back into a severe bun. Her mother is feminine in appearance with long nails and dresses, a striking contrast to her daughter. She frequently smokes and shouts.

•Lynda’s Grandmother is one of the few sympathetic adults in the book, and she serves as the voice of reason as well as a kindly presence in strips such as “Common Scents” and “The Aswang.” She looks after Lynda yet challenges her own daughter, Lynda’s mother. She is shown with dark skin and grey hair, rather like an older version of Lynda’s mother. She, too, frequently smokes cigarettes.

•Norabelle is depicted as a hybrid tomboy/girly girl in the strip “Girlness.” She wears her longish hair in a high ponytail and favors sporty striped t-shirts along with her feminine bracelets and earrings. The adult Lynda takes her shopping, showering her with the girly items she once desired. When she tries to persuade Lynda to buy herself some especially feminine “Super Monkeyhead” stationery, Lynda balks; however, she assures Lynda that she can still enjoy “girly things.”

Artistic Style

Barry is well known for her rough, unstudied drawing style reminiscent of childhood from her cult weekly comic Ernie Pook’s Comeek. Although a study of her earliest comics indicates her skill in a more representational style, over time Barry’s work has come to take on a rough, unstudied style. This childlike approach underscores her attention to youthful concerns. The project One! Hundred! Demons! arose when Barry began experimenting with sumi brush painting, and the soft lines of the brush are in evidence in the artistic rendering.

At Salon.com each strip comprised twenty panels, but these were edited down to eighteen for the book form. This expanded length allowed Barry to indulge her penchant for extended written narration and afforded additional room for illustration, but it still managed to constrain the artist/author’s tendency to indulge in unstructured digressions.

Barry’s drawing style in One! Hundred! Demons! bears a strong resemblance to her work in Ernie Pook’s Comeek, but the use of the sumi brush results in a looser approach that appears more painterly and less constrained. While still far from representational, Barry’s conceptual method appears more polished and composed in One! Hundred! Demons! than in the weekly strip. The soft lines and washes of color suggest a calling up and rendering of self from memory, the ambiguity of recollection reinforced in the sinuous lines. This format also made it possible for Barry to work in color, and each panel is awash with bright, brilliant tones and soft strokes in vivid hues.

Barry is well known for being a particularly wordy comics artist, with text taking up a good half or more of each panel, and this project is no exception. The narrative text generally occupies a large portion of each panel, similar to Barry’s work in Ernie Pook’s Comeek, and the writing is most often inked in straightforward capital lettering. Occasionally the font shifts with one word or phrase lettered in a flowery cursive, adding emphasis to particular phrases; this technique slows readers’ comprehension, as they must account for the differing fonts while reading. Based on the content, the narrative text further suggests the narrator is an older, wiser Lynda (as pictured in the opening “Introduction”) reflecting back on her childhood. The collages interspersed throughout the book add another dimension, bringing in scraps and fragments of a life story–buttons, ribbons, cloth, and paperwork–that reflect the comics within. These collages add yet another element of interpretation and depth.

Themes

One! Hundred! Demons! returns to Barry’s childhood, allowing the author to revisit the pain of girlhood and adolescence. Barry touches on struggles with incest and abuse, race and death, gender and femininity, poverty and social class, and becoming an adult. The children shown in the strips, particularly Lynda, grow up quickly and are exposed to sex and violence from an early age.

In the strip “Resilience,” Barry explores the resilience of children who try to forget or ignore the pain of sexual abuse but are unable to move past the horror. Strips such as “Common Scents” and “The Visitor” discuss the difficulties of race and ethnicity, particularly for a girl who passes as white. The Lynda figure negotiates shame over her home and background with the desire to fit in with classmates. Barry also has a strong interest in remembering and celebrating the smallest details of youth, a theme she explores in pieces such as “Lost Worlds” and “Magic Lanterns.”

Barry further argues for reader participation, particularly in the “Intro” and “Outro,” in which she outlines her creative process and encourages the audience to draw and paint their own demons. The strips themselves, such as “Lost and Found,” suggest that the way to happiness is through creative pursuits, and once Lynda embraces creativity as a character, she is able to find a measure of happiness.

Impact

One! Hundred! Demons! is notable for several reasons. The book exposed Barry to new audiences through Salon.com and proved to be a turning point in her career. She gained more mainstream acceptance and critical claim, as evidenced by an Eisner Award and an Alex Award. One! Hundred! Demons! also marked a turn to the autobiographical for Barry; although the comics were labeled as “autobifictionalographic,” the strips were about the life of the author, rather than the characters she created, as in her strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek.

One! Hundred! Demons! is also significant in that it marks a point where Barry began to experiment with and explore her comics art style, utilizing the sumi brush and incorporating more color. Furthermore, the collage pieces foreshadow Barry’s later artistic projects, What It Is and Picture This (published by Drawn and Quarterly in 2008 and 2010, respectively), which showcase Barry’s interest in collage and expand on her excitement over her creative process, inviting others to pursue their own creative projects.

Further Reading

Bechdel, Alison. The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (2008).

Gloeckner, Phoebe. The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures (2002).

Lasko-Gross, Miss. Escape from “Special” (2008).

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis (2003).

Schrag, Ariel. Awkward and Definition: The High School Comic Chronicles of Ariel Schrag (2008).

Bibliography

Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women. New York: Columbia, 2010.

De Jesús, Melinda. “Liminality and Mestiza Consciousness in Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons.” MELUS 29, no. 1 (Spring, 2004): 219-252.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Of Monsters and Mothers: Filipina American Identity and Maternal Legacies in Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 5, no. 1 (2004): 1-26.

Harris, Miriam. “Cartoonists as Matchmakers: The Vibrant Relationship of Text and Image in the Work of Lynda Barry.” In Elective Affinities: Testing Word and Image Relationships, edited by C. MacLeod and V. Plesch, eds. New York: Rodopi Press, 2009.

Tensuan, Theresa. “Comic Visions and Revisions in the Work of Lynda Barry and Marjane Satrapi.” Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 4 (Winter, 2006): 947-964.