"Youll wonder how anything can be so sad and so funny at the same time." Lev Grossman, Time Inspired by a sixteenth-century Zen monks painting of a hundred demons chasing each other across a long scroll, acclaimed cartoonist Lynda Barry confronts various demons from her life in seventeen full-color vignettes. In Barrys hand, demons are the life moments that haunt you, form you, and stay with you: your worst boyfriend; kickball games on a warm summer night; watching your baby brother dance; the smell of various houses in the neighborhood you grew up in; or the day you realize your childhood is long behind you and you are officially a teenager. As a cartoonist, Lynda Barry has the innate ability to zero in on the essence of truth, a magical quality that has made her book One! Hundred! Demons! an enduring classic of the early twenty-first century. In the books intro, however, Barry throws the idea of truth out of the window by asking the reader to decide if fiction can have truth and if autobiography can have a fiction, a hybrid that Barry coins " autobiofictionalography. " As readers get to know Barrys demons, they realize that the actual truth no longer matters because the universality of Barrys comics, true or untrue, reigns supreme.

Welcome to the world of Marlys and Maybonne Lynda Barry's comics were my YA, before YA really even existed. She's been writing teen stories with an incredibly clear voice since the early 80s. [ The Greatest Of Marlys ] is raw, ugly, hilarious, and poignant. - Raina Telgemeier, Smile & Drama Eight-year-old Marlys Mullen is Lynda Barry's most famous character from her long-running and landmark comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek, and for good reason! Given her very own collection of strips, Marlys shines in all her freckled and pig-tailed groovy glory. The trailer park where she and her family live is the grand stage for her dramas big and small. Joining Marlys are her teenaged sister Maybonne, her younger brother Freddie, their mother, and an offbeat array of family members, neighbors, and classmates. Marlys's enthusiasm for life knows no bounds. Her childhood is one where the neighborhood kids stay out all night playing kickball; the desire to be popular is unending; bullies are unrepentant; and parents make few appearances. The Greatest Of Marlys spotlights Barry's masterful skill of chronicling childhood through adolescence in all of its wonder, awkwardness, humor, and pain.