Lynda Jean Barry was born on January 2, 1956 in Richland Center, WI. Her mother was a housekeeper of Filipino and Irish ancestry and her father was a meat cutter of Irish and Norwegian ancestry. She spent most of her childhood in a working-class racially diverse neighborhood in Seattle, where her Mother's Filipino relatives lived. Barry graduated from Evergreen State College in 1978, where her work was first published in the University of Washington Daily newspaper and she first took courses with her lifelong mentor Marilyn Frasca. The next year she began publishing Ernie Pook's Comeek in the Chicago Reader. It was syndicated in alternative newspapers until 2008. Her book-length publications include: comic collections such as The Greatest of Marlys, The Freddy Stories, and Blabber, Blabber, Blabber; the illustrated novel The Good Times are Killing Me, which Barry adapted into an award-winning Off-Broadway play; the "autobifictionalography" comic collection One! Hundred! Demons!; and award-winning graphic novels focused on the creative process of making comics including What It Is, Picture This, Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor, and Making Comics.
In the spring term of 2012, Barry served as an artist in residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arts Institute. In 2013 she became the Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity. Her courses explore the transformative impact of drawing on self-expression, communication, and transdisciplinary research, particularly for students who do not consider themselves artists. From 2013-2018 Barry was in residence at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, where she ran exhibitions and held events and workshops at the Image Lab. In 2014, she founded the Drawbridge program, which paired graduate students with four-year-old co-researchers in order to help them explain and understand their work by drawing. In 2016 she was chosen as the first recipient of the Chazen Family Distinguished Chair in Art. The endowment allowed Barry to hire teaching assistants and buy tools such as a scanner and copier. In 2017 she taught at the Clarion writers workshop.
Jeff Butler was born on February 26, 1958 in Madison, Wisconsin. He is an illustrator, cartoonist, and 3-D artist known for his work illustrating products for role-playing games including Dungeons and Dragons, and comics including The Green Hornet. Butler took Barry's course as a student in 2018, and the next year he began teaching comics courses at UW-Madison.
The Comics Room in the George L. Mosse Humanities Building is a popular community workspace used by students, alumni, and workshop attendees equipped with art supplies, a color copier, and a comics library funded by the Chazen Family Endowment. Barry hosts open studio hours on Sundays. The community recently founded an online Discord group, where students and alumni share their art and complete drawing prompts. Comics students refer to themselves using "comics names", or nicknames based on favorite characters. Barry takes on a new alias each year, such as Professor Ratfink. As a group, comics students and alumni are referred to as "comics cousins."
