Skyrocket Your Creativity
Journal with comics
This year I dove into the deep-end of education writing. I wanted to create something for teachers, something they could use in and out of the classroom. I took on a nonfiction graphic novel, The Dyslexia Book, (due out later this year), but I had a problem.
The book in my mind didn’t match any books I found on the market. I found the prospect terrifying. What was I thinking? What made me want to write a graphic educational book? Am I insane?
There had to be someone else who tackled educational comics. I set out to find some and immediately came up empty-handed. Sure, graphic novels pack our digital shelves, but the genre lent itself more to fiction, true crime, other forms of entertainment. All great, but not what I needed.
Then I found my savior
Enter Lynda Barry, a unique comic artist who understood from a young age the imagined boundary between artists and non-artists was a construct. She saw drawing as a wonderful means of stretching her creativity muscles, not something reserved for the higher echelon of society known as ARTISTS.
Barry’s drawings are not beautiful. They are not realistic or proportional. One art professor described her work as “faux naïve,” whatever that means.
