Lynda Barry’s “Two Questions”
| December 4, 2009 | Filled under Blog |
Wednesday was the last meeting of the creative writing workshop class I took this semester. The professor handed out this comic strip by Lynda Barry as a kind of parting gesture. I’ve never read Lynda Barry (having only recently discovered the wonder of the graphic novel) but she’s on my list now.
I guess it’s because I have a thing for octopi. Barry uses the octopus as her muse image. The strip “Two Questions” is about creative innocence and how we lose it as we grow older and self-doubt takes over.
The final panel, where the octopus wraps its arms around Barry, is such a comforting image, the kind I’d like to store in a permanent place in my mind. Read the whole strip here.
[...] Lynda Barry uses an octopus. A lot. It is cuddly, maybe, when she draws it. In her pictures it seems to stand for the “I don’t know” that is the un-heart of creative activity. The octopus does not know, but that is okay. Is it an octopus because it changes shape, because it lives in the murky dark, because it has so many arms? I don’t know. It seems the right kind of mysterious. [...]