Last month, the great cartoonist Lynda Barry hosted a two-hour Graphic Medicine "Drawing Together" workshop on Zoom! You can enjoy the replay anytime. The session is based on exercises from Barry's book Making Comics. "Come for the drawing, stay for the music!" — Read the rest

I've been a fan of cartoonist, novelist and memoirist Lynda Barry for decades, long before she was declared a certified genius; Barry's latest book, Making Comics is an intensely practical, incredibly inspiring curriculum for finding, honing and realizing your creativity through drawing and writing.

Underground comics artist Lynda Barry (previously) is one of this year's class of $625,000 Macarthur Foundation "genius grant" recipients, and it's so deserved.

TIL: the fabulous Lynda Barry teaches at the University of Wisconsin! In this lesson, called "Writing the Unthinkable," she shares a neat method to get started on a new piece. It begins by drawing a tight spiral as a meditation. — Read the rest

Drawn & Quarterly has a new edition of Lynda Barry's coming-of-age novella, The Good Times are Killing Me

Young Edna Arkins lives in a neighborhood that is rapidly changing, thanks to white flight from urban Seattle in the late 1960s. As the world changes around her, Edna is exposed to the callous racism of adults―sometimes subtle and other times blatant, but always stinging.

Lynda Barry blogs about the amazing feels she got when she discovered that she'd been given a guest-appearance in The Family Circus by Jeff Keane, Bill Keane's son and successor.

The instructors for this summer's Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy writers' workshop are Dan Chaon, Lynda Barry, Nalo Hopkinson, Andrea Hairston, Cory Doctorow, C.C. Finlay and Rae Carson: the workshop runs from Jun 25-Aug 5 at UCSD in La Jolla, California.

I started reading Lynda Barry's "Ernie Pook's Comeek" in the back pages of NOW Magazine as a teenager, and it is forever linked in my mind with Matt Groening's Life in Hell, which ran on the next page over. Today, Drawn and Quarterly publishes The Greatest of Marlys, the expanded and updated version of the giant collection that, 16 years ago, was the definitive record of one of the most extraordinary comics ever to grace newsprint.

Professor Lynda Barry has been on a roll of late. First, she published her astonishing and inspired writing-workshop-in-a-book, What It Is. She followed that up with Picture This: The Near-sighted Monkey Book, which covered drawing in much the same way that What It Is approached writing. — Read the rest

Any fan of Seattle's music and pop culture scene from the 70s through the 90s will find a treasure trove of articles, info, ads, reviews, and photos in the back issues of "The Rocket," Seattle's music and entertainment magazine. More than 300 issues, all lovingly scanned and searchable, can now be found on the Office of the Secretary of State, Washington Library website. — Read the rest

Lucy Knisley is one of my favorite cartoonists (here are past posts about Lucy). She's written a number of excellent autobiographical comix, and her newest work is a graphic novel memoir for young adults called Stepping Stones. Cory Doctorow reviewed it on his blog, Pluralistic:

Graphic novelist Lucy Knisley's memoirs are classics of the field – drawn with the straightforward lines and character designs of Raina Telgemeier, told with the wrenching pathos, nuance, comedy and complexity of Lynda Barry.

Here's 28 of our favorites from the last year – not all of them published in the last year, mind you – from fairy-tales to furious politics and everything in between, including the furious fairy-tale politics getting between everything. The links here include Amazon Affiliate codes; this helps us make ends meet at Boing Boing, the world's greatest neurozine. — Read the rest

Here's this year's complete Boing Boing Gift Guide: more than a hundred great ideas for prezzies: technology, toys, books and more. Scroll down and buy things, mutants! Many of the items use Amazon Affiliate links that help us make ends meet at Boing Boing, the world's greatest neurozine. — Read the rest

When we got to rounding up our favorite books for our annual Gift Guide, we found that there were simply too many this time to throw in the Christmas/Kwanzaa/Hanukah/Yule/Solstice/Nonspecific Winter Celebration/New Year/Chalica hopper along with the tech and toys.

It's almost as if 2016 made the traditional way of learning more about our world — and of sharing dreams of other worlds — somehow more enticing. — Read the rest

I'm pretty bad at keeping up with new cartoonists. I'm stuck in the world of artists who emerged in the 80s and 90s: Daniel Clowes, Mary Fleener, Julie Doucet, Carol Tyler, Lynda Barry, Los Bros Hernandez, Jim Woodring, Roberta Gregory, Peter Bagge, Chris Ware, Dori Seda. — Read the rest

It's hard to imagine what contemporary culture would be like without the existence of the comic, graphic novel, and low-brow art publishers Last Gasp, Fantagraphics, and Canada's small press darling, Drawn & Quarterly. In Drawn & Quarterly: Twenty-five Years, D&Q are given their due. — Read the rest

At my house, we've fallen in love with Recipe, a 2013 picture book about a little girl who tells her good-sport mom that it's time she learned to cook, and hands over a set of ingredients for Mom to buy, including a new puppy, a Cleveland Browns sweatshirt, a helmet, a water squirter, and 20 bags of marshmallows.

If you're like me, you are always on the lookout for a novel that speaks to the homicidal teenage girl on acid inside of you. Well, today you are in luck, unless you've already read this 1999 masterpiece by artist/writer/teacher/goddess Lynda Barry. — Read the rest

David Letterman sometimes says, of certain eccentric (usually brilliant) people: "She (or he) ain't hooked up right." He means it as a compliment. Lynda Barry definitely ain't hooked up right – and we're all more enriched for the strange wiring.

So, it's no surprise that when the well-known comic artist sat down to write a book about the craft of writing (based on her popular writing workshops), she'd end up with something utterly unlike any previous writing guide. — Read the rest

Anya Ulinich's 2008 debut novel Petropolis, marked her out as a master of tragicomic romance; now she's back with a huge, hilarious, bitter graphic novel about sex, immigration, the Russian soul, and heartbreak. Cory Doctorow reviews Lena Finkle's Magic Barrel: A Graphic Novel.