Description: "This is a book of notes, drawings, and syllabi [the author] kept during [her] first three years of teaching in the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The chronology is rough and mixed up in places but all kept by hand on pages of either legal pads or in standard black and white marbled composition notebooks."--Page 3.
Brief description:
Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher and found that they are very much alike. She lives in Wisconsin, where she is an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity at the University of Wisconsin Madison. In 2019, she received the "Genius grant" from the MacArthurs Fellows program.
In addition to What It Is, Barry has written four bestselling and acclaimed creative how-to graphic novels, What It Is; Picture This; Syllabus: Notes From an Accidental Professor; and Making Comics. Her seminal comic strip, Ernie Pook's Comeek, features Marlys, Maybonne, and Freddie and was collected into The! Greatest! of! Marlys!, The Freddie Stories, Come Over Come Over, My Perfect Life, and It's So Magic. Her other books include One! Hundred! Demons!, Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, and The Good Times are Killing Me.Review Quotes:
"In recent years, Lynda Barry - half cartoonist, half guru, and entirely irrepressible - has created her own genre, handcrafting inspirational guidebooks about how and why to be creative... Scrawled out and doodled all over the page, collaged together with snippets of schoolwork, snatches of poetry, and drawings of weird-looking monsters, Barry's notes [in Syllabus] double as dispatches from a fertile unconscious, and testify once more to the unfathomable depths of human invention." --Globe & Mail
"Lynda Barry has spent the last few years blazing new trails in nonfiction cartooning with a series of books dedicated to illuminating the mysteries of the creative process . . . Once you pick [Syllabus] up, it's not easy to put it back down again." --AV Club Best Comics of 2014 "[Syllabus is] a must-read for Barry fans and deep thinkers." --London Free Press "[In Syllabus, Lynda Barry] continues her investigation of what an image is. This book is charming and readable and serves as an excellent guide for those seeking to break out of whatever writing and drawing styles they have been stuck in, allowing them to reopen their brains to the possibility of new creativity. Readers can pore over the exceptionally gorgeous graphic mixture of collage, inking, and watercolor for hours." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)