Las Vegas Weekly

Book review: Lynda Barry’s ‘Blabber Blabber Blabber’

The Details

Blabber Blabber Blabber

By Lynda Barry, $25

It might have seemed like Lynda Barry became one of comics’ most prominent thinker/creators all of a sudden with 2008’s What It Is and 2010’s Picture This, a pair of extraordinary—and extraordinarily well-received—works that blended aesthetics, how-to and autobiography. But there’s nothing all of a sudden about Barry’s career. She’s been making comics for over 30 years, and publisher Drawn and Quarterly is capitalizing on her history and the new wider embrace of her work with Blabber Blabber Blabber, the first book in an ambitious series intended to collect most everything Barry has done. This volume focuses on her work from ’78-’81, and it offers a rare opportunity to see the young Barry’s style shift, settle and evolve. Barry provides new collage introduction segments, contextualizing and easing the contents into a format that makes Blabber the next integral installment of Drawn and Quarterly’s growing Lynda Barry library.