Lynda Barry (Lynda J Barry) was born on Monday, January 02, 1956 in Seattle and she is a famous cartoonist from United States.

Barry's cartoons often view family life from the perspective of pre-teen girls from the wrong side of the tracks: Arna (the sensitive, freckled observer); pig-tailed Marlys (gifted, exuberant, snarky, and spastic); the older Maybonne (concerned with social justice, music, makeup, hairdos and boys); Arnold (typical tough boy, interested in Playboy magazines, dirt bikes, and bloody things) and Freddie (gay, sweet, bullied, fascinated with bugs and monsters). She often ventures far afield from these main characters, such as in her strips featuring a Beat Poet poodle named Fred Milton. She has also produced novels. She garnered attention with her book, The Good Times are Killing Me, about an interracial friendship between two young girls. The book was made into a play. Her novel "Cruddy" (2000) was well received. "One! Hundred! Demons!" (2002), a graphic novel she terms "Autobiofictionalography," uses collage and a Zen Ink painting exercise to address personal and social topics that have been demonized. "What It Is" (2008) is a graphic novel that is part memoir, part collage and part workbook in which Barry instructs her readers in methods to open up their own creativity. "What It Is" won the 2009 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work.

Born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, Barry moved as a child to Washington. She is one quarter-Filipina,[1] half Irish (each parent is half Irish), and one quarter Norwegian. She attended Kimball Elementary School on Seattle's Beacon Hill and used some of her experiences there as an inspiration for her work.

She went to the same high school as artist Charles Burns. At The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington she met fellow cartoonist Matt Groening, who first published "Ernie Pook's Comeek" in the school paper without her knowledge.

After graduating from Evergreen she moved to Seattle. When she was 23, the Chicago Reader picked up her comic strip, enabling her to make a living from her comics alone.[3] She later moved to Chicago, Illinois. While Barry's work is humorous, the undertones are usually serious. It depicts life as harsh but occasionally joyful. Her work addresses themes of intolerance and psychic pain, and at times includes some starkly left-wing political commentary.[citation needed]

Barry's comics do not strive to depict beauty or demonstrate artistic virtuosity, and in that sense are similar to the works of her peers Matt Groening (like her, a graduate of The Evergreen State College), Lloyd Dangle, and Mark Alan Stamaty. For all their grubbiness, though, these comics are extremely expressive and evocative.

The visual aspect of her work follows the verbal. She has an extreme facility in reproducing the voices of children and adolescents. While some comics purists[who?] complain that her young characters lack elbows,[4] the psychological depth and humanity of those characters calls the reader to take a second look at Barry's drawings. While unconventionally rendered, they carry an undeniable psychic charge legible in the context of her writing.

Barry's early work was rendered with pen and had a distinctly New Wave, '80s look. She later told The Comics Journal that she was forced to give up the pen because it was hurting her wrist, turning to a brush which gave her work a much looser, child-like quality.