What It Is

By Lynda Barry. Published by Drawn & Quarterly. 

Softcover, 208 pages, Colour, 2024 (originally published 2008)

“Deliciously drawn (with fragments of collage worked into each page), insightful and bubbling with delight in the process of artistic creation. A+” –Salon

How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? For decades, these types of questions have permeated the pages of Lynda Barry’s compositions, with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving. What It Is demonstrates a tried-and-true creative method that is playful, powerful, and accessible to anyone with an inquisitive wish to write or to remember. Composed of completely new material, each page of Barry’s first Drawn & Quarterly book is a full-color collage that is not only a gentle guide to this process but an invigorating example of exactly what it is: “The ordinary is extraordinary.”

"The collages in legendary cartoonist Lynda Barry’s What It Is are a bathysphere-like odyssey through the depths of her funky subconscious." —Vanity Fair

"What It Is is equal parts cartoon memoir, collage album, scrapbook, and Zen roadmap. Written and drawn in a chaotic but riveting style, it offers itself as a guide to creative self-ignition." —The Boston Globe

"What It Is, Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book, and Syllabus— ... weave dense, brightly colored collage, narrative comics, and expressionistic drawing into philosophies of memory, pedagogy, and storytelling ... groundbreaking: Richly graphic, and moving, they invent a hybrid genre that generates from within the comics universe but totally transcends known categories." —Hillary Chute, Artforum

"Reading Barry is an ecstatic experience, and her unique blend of extravagant cartoon and collage serves this memoir-cum-creativity-manual perfectly. This isn’t a craft handbook, but rather an inspirational text: each page will stir something in you, ask you questions about the nature of art and memory and imagination, and you’ll be running to your own work in no time." —Flavorwire