28 September 2021

Ernie Pook's Comeek by Lynda Barry (No. 74)

Ernie Pook's Comeek (1979 to 2008)
by Lynda Barry

REVIEW BY MARSHALL PRYOR:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
Lynda Barry belongs to the tradition of James Thurber and Jules Feiffer: talented humorists for whom comics is one of several media suited to their talents. Barry, along with close friend Matt Groening, stood at the forefront of the least talked-about aspect of the 1980s comics renaissance, the rise of the alternative newspaper strip. Appearing in a number of free weeklies across the United States, particularly the Readers in Los Angeles and Chicago, Barry in some ways has achieved the alternative comics dream. Her work reached adults who might not read any other comics, adults who because of work like Barry's don't question the fact that the art form can produce sophisticated reading matter.

Ernie Pook's Comeek is most remarkable because of its voice: lonely, unremarkable children struggling with everything that is awful and over-whelming about the world. In Ernie Pook's best years, in the late '80s, Barry's strip reads like actual diaries of children. While the writing has become less convincing as the characters have aged, they are such great characters that the reader is willing to forgive the occasional off-kilter week. In an act of developmental shorthand, Barry has created characters that have earned affection it takes most cartoonists decades to build.

The second great strength of Ernie Pook lies in the veracity of Barry's observations. In a time when recognition "humour" has spread across mainstream newspaper strips like a virus, Barry manages to convey common experiences of adolescent existence without ever once crossing over into generalities and cliche. She does this by being very, very specific - even if it's not your experience, it feel authentic - and by doggedly staying in character. Several elements may draw one into a comic strip, but one takes away the characters; there are none better than those in Ernie Pook's Comeek.


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