Of Monsters and Mothers: Filipina American Identity and Maternal Legacies in Lynda J. Barry's One Hundred Demons

The late Filipino American author and cultural critic N. V. M. Gonzalez described the Filipino imagination as a slow yet tenacious "rhizomatous" growth working toward the "Filipinization of America" (Gonzalez and Campomanes 1987, 63).¹ Gonzalez's optimism aside, "Filipinization" thus far has amounted to Filipinas magazine, words such as "boondocks" and "yo-yo," and hip hop icons DJ Q-Bert and the Invisibl Skratch Piklz. However, unnoticed by most, one Filipino American artist has contributed greatly to this process, single-handedly redefining and influencing American popular culture for over twenty years. Lynda J. Barry, born in 1956, is best known for her syndicated alternative newspaper comic strip, Ernie Pook's Comeek, and its high-spirited "gifted child" Marlys Mullen, and for her disturbing first novel, Cruddy (1999). Praised by The Village Voice as "one of the greatest cartoonists in the world," Barry is heralded for developing both the alternative and the "wimmin's" comics traditions (qtd. in Hempel 27 November 1988). Many of her fans are unaware, however, that Barry's earliest cartoons include stories of her growing up a working-class, mixed-race Filipina in Seattle in the 1960s.² One Hundred Demons, a series of twenty-panel full-color comic strips published semimonthly online at <Salon.com> from 7 April 2000 to 15 January 2001, is Barry's return to a more personal, autobiographical art form.³

The comics in One Hundred Demons are Barry's explorations of incidents and memories that trouble or haunt her—namely, her childhood and its manifold tragedies, large and small. Each cartoon showcases the hallmarks of her powerful storytelling aesthetic: Barry's deliberately "naive" graphic style complements the searingly candid musings of its young narrator and the often harsh subjects of the strips themselves. These darkly humorous and exquisitely rendered memories of coming of age meld family history and Filipino folktales and superstitions to adolescent angst and American popular culture; thematically, One Hundred Demons explores racial identity, and maternal and cultural legacies.

This essay discusses Lynda Barry's substantial but overlooked contributions to the growing body of "peminist"—Filipina American feminist—writings and to contemporary Filipino American cultural production in general.⁴ But first I will contextualize Barry's work within contemporary cartoon history and criticism as well as within the genre of Asian American mother/daughter writing.

"New" and "Wimmin's" Comix⁵

One of very few syndicated American female cartoonists, Lynda Barry is lauded for her signature storytelling and bold graphic style—what critic Bob Callahan deems her "brilliant narrative skills" (1991, 12-13). Stylistically Barry's work is seen as embodying the spirit of "New Comics" as well as "wimmin's," or feminist, comics. "New Comics" describes comic art oppositional to the corporate-produced and syndicated comic strips such as Spiderman and Garfield, created by independent artists such as Art Spiegelman (Maus I and II), Los Bros Hernandez (Love and Rockets), and Roberta Gregory (Naughty Bits).⁶ Indeed, Spiegelman insists on the term "comix" to emphasize the "co-mixture" of text and graphics in this art form; he maintains that comix are twenty-first-century art—"graphic literature"—rather than just amusing cartoons about "funny animals" (1992). Callahan, in his introduction to The New Comics Anthology (which includes work by Barry), maintains that New Comics signal the shift from "entertainment to new pop art form"; furthermore, he notes the important contributions of women artists such as Barry to the genre of New Comics as a whole: strong autobiographical storytelling and an overtly feminist stance (1991, 12). Interestingly, Callahan maintains that the autobiographical writings in The New Comics Anthology best demonstrate comics as a "vital new branch of contemporary literature" (12).⁷

Barry is also regarded as a vanguard feminist or "wimmin's" cartoonist for...