‘What It Is’ Review: Harnessing Images for Creativity
The Harvard Crimson | Claire C. Swadling | June 3, 2024
Lynda Barry in the Harvard Crimson
Lynda Barry’s “What It Is” is not just a creative scrapbook but an experience: full of thought-provoking questions, charismatic doodles, and insightful writing exercises. In dissecting innovative concepts with critical questions, telling her own personal stories through comics, and providing writing activities with the help of recurring characters like the Magic Cephalopod and Sea-ma, Barry uses images to realize creative potential.
What first strikes readers about “What It Is” is the book’s structure. Each page is a collage full of animal doodlings, hand drawn cartoons, text snippets, newspaper cut-outs, and other miscellaneous materials. Text is woven in and around objects on the page, sometimes appearing sideways or upside down and present in fragments, typeset or in cursive.
This unconventional format invites readers to let their eyes wander freely across the nooks and crannies of Barry’s collages, exploring the treasure trove that’s uncovered with each new collage. This myriad of scrawlings and textures adds many physical and metaphorical layers to her musings. Each page explores a similar concept from many different angles through the snippets of paper present.
The variety of visual resources used urges readers to think critically about creativity-oriented questions. For example, one page is dedicated to the question: “What is movement?” The page includes a drawn silhouette of a soldier, a clock with Roman numerals, and textured paper cutouts, along with marker and ink drawings of birds. It also sports relevant thoughts and fragments in calligraphy and cursive: “to go on being a being in motion,” “I don’t go walking any more,” and “I will dissipate drab discord,” to name a few.
The rest of the review can be found here!
What first strikes readers about “What It Is” is the book’s structure. Each page is a collage full of animal doodlings, hand drawn cartoons, text snippets, newspaper cut-outs, and other miscellaneous materials. Text is woven in and around objects on the page, sometimes appearing sideways or upside down and present in fragments, typeset or in cursive.
This unconventional format invites readers to let their eyes wander freely across the nooks and crannies of Barry’s collages, exploring the treasure trove that’s uncovered with each new collage. This myriad of scrawlings and textures adds many physical and metaphorical layers to her musings. Each page explores a similar concept from many different angles through the snippets of paper present.
The variety of visual resources used urges readers to think critically about creativity-oriented questions. For example, one page is dedicated to the question: “What is movement?” The page includes a drawn silhouette of a soldier, a clock with Roman numerals, and textured paper cutouts, along with marker and ink drawings of birds. It also sports relevant thoughts and fragments in calligraphy and cursive: “to go on being a being in motion,” “I don’t go walking any more,” and “I will dissipate drab discord,” to name a few.
The rest of the review can be found here!