The Greatest of Marlys

by Lynda Barry

Overview

Welcome to the world of Marlys and Maybonne

"Lynda Barry's comics were my YA, before YA really even existed. She's been writing teen stories with an incredibly clear voice since the early 80s. [The Greatest Of Marlys] is raw, ugly, hilarious, and poignant." —Raina Telgemeier, Smile & Drama

Eight-year-old Marlys Mullen is Lynda Barry's most famous character from her long-running and landmark comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek, and for good reason! Given her very own collection of strips, Marlys shines in all her freckled and pig-tailed groovy glory. The trailer park where she and her family live is the grand stage for her dramas big and small. Joining Marlys are her teenaged sister Maybonne, her younger brother Freddie, their mother, and an offbeat array of family members, neighbors, and classmates.

Marlys's enthusiasm for life knows no bounds. Her childhood is one where the neighborhood kids stay out all night playing kickball; the desire to be popular is unending; bullies are unrepentant; and parents make few appearances. The Greatest Of Marlys spotlights Barry's masterful skill of chronicling childhood through adolescence in all of its wonder, awkwardness, humor, and pain.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770462649
Publisher:	Drawn & Quarterly
Publication date:	08/16/2016
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	10 - 18 Years

About the Author

Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher. She is the inimitable creator behind the seminal comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek, and author of The Freddie Stories, One! Hundred! Demons!, The! Greatest! of! Marlys!, Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!, and The Good Times are Killing Me, which was adapted as an off-Broadway play and won the Washington State Governor's Award. Barry has written three bestselling and acclaimed creative how-to graphic novels for D+Q: the Eisner Award-winning What It Is, and Picture This, and Syllabus: Notes from an accidental professor.

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/15/2016
Barry is one of American literature’s great chroniclers of childhood. Her comic strips, drawn in disarmingly and deceptively childlike lines, distill the essence of fried bologna sandwiches and stray dogs, mysterious teenage bedrooms, and kickball at dusk. This luminous hardcover collection centers on Barry’s magnum opus, Marlys, a bright, bossy, awkward grade-schooler cloaked in freckles and bravado. Marlys, her sensitive little brother, Freddy, and their cousins Arna and Arnold navigate a world of angry mothers, absent fathers, schoolyard politics, and trailer park drama, ping-ponging between comedy and tragedy. Some strips are heartbreakingly beautiful, others simply heartbreaking. But most are funny, as the kids present on diverse topics as “How to Groove on Life,” “Fumes of Regret,” and “Don’t Freak It’s Only Nature” (“If you don’t like extra pink dangles of flesh, don’t go staring at the star-nosed mole”). This book will bring groovy love into your life. Pinky swear. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"The Greatest Of Marlys is a collection of [Barry’s] best cartoon work, and as such it's a perfect introduction to her (we're approaching a word not commonly employed when talking of cartoons) oeuvre… How many writers can place us back in third grade without getting vague or wistful? Lynda Barry has no peer." -Dave Eggers, New York Times Book Review

"Lynda Barry is an extraordinary talent, with a real gift for creating utterly believable child characters. Marlys is so well written that you end up feeling like some of these things happened to you, regardless of how different your childhood was."— The Quietus

"Marlys ranks with Charlie Brown as one of the most genuine and poignant adolescent protagonists in serial comics...If you haven't read Barry, let this book be your gateway: she is one of a kind, and with Marlys, she is irresistible."— The Paris Review

"You'll cheer for Marlys and empathize with her embarrassments, just like the supportive adult figure you wished you had when you were her age."— Huffington Post

"Barry's unique genius lies in her capacity to wiggle under your skin and, once there, to wiggle some more until you're gasping and twitching, not sure if it's with laughter or something else. She provokes existential squirminess."— NPR

"The Greatest of Marlys shows some of the earliest iterations of the weird, warm, boundless energy that has characterized [Barry's] career. It also helps preserve a character who was considered by millions of readers (and hopefully now by millions more) a great friend."— Chicago Reader

"Barry is one of American literature's great chroniclers of childhood. Her comic strips, drawn in disarmingly and deceptively childlike lines, distill the essence of fried bologna sandwiches and stray dogs, mysterious teenage bedrooms, and kickball at dusk."— Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

Charmingly illustrated and written in the voices of fictional preadolescents, Barry's comics (The Freddie Stories) alternate between delightful comedy and un-self-conscious poetry. Her comics catalogue the incremental maturation of the smart but unpopular preteen Marlys; her painfully sensitive little brother, Freddie; her big sister, Maybonne; her cousins Arna and Arnold; and occasionally the various adults in their lives. The book collects more than 200 of her syndicated four-panel strip Ernie Pook's Comeek, in which Barry deftly maps the emotional terrain of Marlys and the inevitable social traumas inherent in growing up. Alternating among the voices of the family, Barry offers stories on difficult teachers (Mr. Valotto has sideburns, wears turtleneck dickeys and "thinks he's hip"); boys (Marlys goes broke "buying Twinkies to split with Kevin Turner"); Marlys's difficult mother ("five guys asked her to marry them before she picked my father, the worst mistake of her life") and much more. While Barry can be funny presenting the silly escapades and fantasies of Marlys, Arna, Freddie and Arnold, her real talent is the very nearly poetic invocation of moments of pubescent joy and humiliation as well as of the wonder at the fast-approaching, mysterious state of being a teenager. Her black-and-white drawings are crudely drawn, yet lyrical and emotionally complex. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Lynda Barry is a writer, a very often brilliant one, and she's as good a chronicler of adolescence as we've had. Also: she draws. . . . Her ear for how kids talk . . . is flawless; and her artwork, crude as she chooses it to be, serves her agenda well . . .
—New York Times Book Review

Dave Eggers

[A] poignantly funny collection of her comic strips about the wildly imaginative Marlys...The book, like Marlys' life, is a small triumph.
—Entertainment Weekly Editor's Choice

Tucker

Barry's recent novel (Cruddy, p. 1999) proved what her comics admirers already knew: she's a splendid writer with a phenomenal ear for everyday speech. And her comics work, syndicated in dozens of newspapers, has grown with her. After collecting stories featuring her character Freddie (The Freddie Stories), Barry celebrates another of her wonderful creations, Freddie's sister Marlys. There are over two hundred Marlys-centered pieces here, some dating back to 1986, making it possible to chart Barry's growth as writer and artist. Though she still relies on a scratchy, wobbly messiness to echo her subject, Barry's lines calmed down a bit, and her frames became less busy. Barry likes to play with the borders to her mostly one-page stories, and she eventually broke out of her strict four-frame format. A number of the earlier pieces are told by Marlys cousin Maybonne, who hates her guts, partly because Marlys doesn't hesitate to remind everyone that she's a gifted child. But their childhood together is recalled with bittersweetness: their marginal social status, the absence of fathers, their tough-talking matriarchs. As the girls remember it, though, it's mostly about gross food, nasty neighborhood dogs, plastic toys, and goofy haircuts. Beneath the joyful flotsam of their youth, Barry peeks in on their desperation. She also knows the junk well: the bikes, the batons, the turtles, the caps, the candy cigarettes—she's a visual archaeologist of American childhood. The best stories are in Marlys own voice: her riff on the word "groovy"; her little lessons addressed to readers on drawing, school reports, and local news; and her hilarious "guides" to mud, Band-Aids, bugs,and"poodle poetry." Barry has a genius for remembering the odd things kids and grownups do, especially during those times that linger between meanness and joyful innocence. Beyond nostalgia, her deceptively simple art, in all its spareness, breaks your heart and makes you laugh, often at the same time. Giardino, Vittorio NO PASARÁN! Trans. by Stefano Gaudiano NBM(555 8th Ave. Ste. 1202, New York, NY 10018) (64 pp.) paperback original Nov. 2000

Kirkus Reviews