This collection includes paper and digital materials. Lynda Barry's digital materials in series 1-33 include meeting minutes, syllabi written and illustrated assignments, student work, comic strips, photographs, PowerPoint presentations, written and illustrated reports, paintings, ink drawings, essays, teaching notes, interviews, and video drawing tutorials. The materials date from Barry's childhood in 1959 to 2024, but the majority of the materials are from 2005-2024.
The bulk of the digital collection documents Barry's teaching career. Barry's files include a variety of written and illustrated assignments from 2018-2024 such as daily diary assignments, drawing from life, and drawing a story using character cards and the word bag. The student work includes final projects, in class assignments such as X page stories, and miscellaneous assignments such as watercolor illustrations. The files also include drawings by the four year old participants in the Drawbridge program. The files also include Barry's notes used for teaching workshops such as the Clarion writers workshop in 2017 and her Images and Making Comics courses. The teaching materials also include syllabi for her courses from 2015 to 2018. The photographs document Barry's childhood and college years, classes in the comics room, the Drawbridge program, the Image Lab, and Barry with fellow cartoonists such as Art Spiegelman. Her PowerPoint presentations include one about her friendship with Matt Groening and another about her chance discovery of paintings created by children in Cyprus in the 1950s and 60s before the Turkish invasion in 1974, and her efforts to return them to their creators.
The digital collection includes various written materials, including essays, reports, meeting minutes, and interviews. The meeting minutes detail the activities of the Art Department Steering Committee in 2017-2018 and the Madison Public Service Commission's Wind Sitting Council in 2010. The reports include text based and illustrated reports to the Chazen Foundation from 2017-2019 by both Barry and 2018 PA Liz Kozik. They detail the history of the Comics Room during that period as well as Barry's other activities, including her Drawbridge program, workshops at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery , and the creation of "Making Comics." The files also include: Barry's interviews with her student and graphic novelist KC Councilor and Mutts creator Patrick McDonnell; some of Barry's advice columns, and an essay about Barry's work at Eagle's Wing preschool.
The digital collection also includes Barry's original art, including comic strips, ink drawings, and paintings. The comic strips include strips from Ernie Pook's Comeek from 2005-2017, and comics on various themes such as "writing and remembering," menopause, and the Bush administration. Other artwork includes copies of the covers of Barry's books, 2015 fliers for the comics club, and ink drawings and paintings sold on Ebay and Esty, including for fundraisers for bail funds in 2020. Much of the work features cats and dogs, Barry's characters such as Marlys and the Near Sighted Monkey, and miscellaneous creatures.
The paper materials include 32-page final projects, 2-page color comics, zines, sketches, and illustrations created by the students in the courses Images, Making Comics 1, and Making Comics 2 taught by Lynda Barry and Jeff Butler at UW-Madison between 2013 and 2022. It also includes original hand-drawn assignments, artwork, event posters, fliers, and lecture notes by Barry created between 1998 to 2022.
The courses revolve around hand-drawn exercises, such as daily attendance cards with illustrations responding to a unique prompt, character jams that involve drawing unique characters in two minutes each, and X-page stories in which students respond to questions about an event or memory and then write about it. While the first two exercises are done on notecards, such as those in box 1 folder 6, most class exercises and daily homework assignments are completed in composition books, such as those in box 1 folder 25, and box 1 folder 59. Barry copies some of these assignments, such as the batman diaries in box 2 folders 2-5, and displays them outside of the Comics Room.
The bulk of the paper materials consist of the 32-page final projects completed by Images and Making Comics 1 students, and the 12-page final projects of Making Comics 2 students. In the first case, the final project is a collection of students' favorite work from the class, such as two-page comics, sketches from their composition books, and watercolor paintings. The Making Comics 1 final project includes specific assignments, such as a map of the student's hometown and character illustrations, as well as other materials from the course. The Making Comics 2 final project is a full-length comic issue about characters of their choosing, such as Geneva Kinzer or Kelpie's autobiographical "True Story Bro" in box 1, folder 85.
Barry's paper materials include hand-drawn assignments that pair with related student work, posters for assignments like drawing with one's eyes closed, a sumi ink illustration entitled "What is Music," and lecture notes from her 2013 class "The Unthinkable Mind" including notes on neuroscience, her calendar, and character sketches. The materials also include numerous hand-drawn posters by Barry promoting workshops on graphic medicine and graphic journalism hosted by the Applied Comics Kitchen, a group of graduate students and faculty who use comics in their teaching and research.
A key including the Comics Names and real names of students is avaliable upon request and lives in the collections folder.
