Lynda’s scratchy, vibrant, simple, rough drawings opened up possibilities for me as a cartoonist. I couldn’t draw with the slick finish of my then-hero Daniel Clowes, who made Ghost World—I tried, and I got fairly good at imitating his polished style, which was lauded in comics scenes. That way of working culminated with my 2011/2012 comic that adapted “Araby,” a short story by James Joyce. Near the end of making Drawing James Joyce, a comic book of a couple short adaptations of his stories, I realized with sadness that I had given so much of my creative time to shitty, canonized, mostly straight white-dude authors.
The story “Araby,” which I’d spent so much time translating into comics, now seemed like such a classic male fuckboy story—a young boy crushes on his friend’s older sister, and he realizes that he’ll never have a shot at being with her. The controlled, “classic” drawing style that I employed started to feel deeply connected to straight maleness. Male-dominated comics scenes revere a clean, classic inking look with a strong technical finish. I certainly bought into this during art school and after, and I had a hard time breaking out of it, into looser ways of drawing (at least in my comics work—my sketchbooks often told a fresher story).
Looking at Lynda’s work, I thought about what I’d heard and read so many people say about the Ramones and other punk bands: that it looked like I could do it, and it looked like fun.