What It Is

What It Is
by Lynda Barry

What It Is
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Book Summary Information

Author: Lynda Barry
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-05-13
ISBN: 1897299354
Number of pages: 209
Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly
Product features:
  • ISBN13: 9781897299357
  • Condition: New
  • Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

Book Reviews of What It Is

Book Review: Takes you to the brink of your own wellspring of inspiration
Summary: 5 Stars

This is not just an exciting time to be reading comics and graphic novels. It's also a time when many people want to write and draw them too. With so many options available to share their creations (and several success stories that have come about from self-publishing startups), people who want to do more than read have begun to explore their creative sides. While the results of those efforts have been wildly diverse (for every great breakthrough, there have been more than a few clunkers), the excitement in the industry has created a small but valuable niches: the how-to guide.

Two recent books have set the standard for guides to creating graphic-novels. One, Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, from the team of Jessica Abel and Matt Madden (click here for the Bookreporter interview of Jessica and Matt), gave a thorough, explicit, and delightfully well-rounded look at how to create a graphic story from start to finish. Do we really need another one after that?

The answer: If it's a book as wildly inventive as Lynda Barry's What It Is, then yes indeed. Barry is a respected creator often noted for creating rich subtext and resonating meaning that transcend her dense imagery; read between (and through) her lines and you find a powerful world of haunting memory. Here, though, she's come to show you how it's done. From the most basic--where do those crazy ideas to come from?--to the abstract--when an unexpected memory comes calling, who answers?--she delivers a jarring experience in the art of writing. She goes for the jugular of the whole creative process and lets it all come pouring out.

It's not a quick and easy experiment. But it's hardly long and arduous either. It's, of all things, actually fun. Barry's creative process is childlike, full of wonderment, hard to pin down, and gloriously all over the place. To that end, What It Is works not just as a jumpstart for creating graphic novels but for all writing. (A quick side note: Considering how well What It Is and Drawing Words and Writing Pictures complement each other, it's fitting that the books' three creators have recently teamed up as editors for the upcoming Houghton Mifflin release The Best American Comics 2008).

A cheeky tagline at the bottom of the book's cover promises it's "Dramatically illustrated with more than color pictures." And so it is. Barry throws pictures, images, and words at you at a breakneck pace, challenging you to write and think, relentlessly forcing you to get at the heart of what makes you tick, creatively. So what is it, exactly? Ah, that's the big question. Barry knows she can't answer the question decisively for everyone. But she can take you to the brink of your own wellspring of inspiration and show you how to drink from it in a new and unexpected way.

-- John Hogan

Summary of What It Is

?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.?

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