Down the Street

this collection of cartoons is amazingly funny. i have read it over and over and am still amused. it offers a hilarious view of childhood from four main characters. buy two- one for yourself, and one for a friend

Lynda Barry's messy, amateurish drawings evoke childhood better than just about anything else I've read. She risks overparticularity in describing the specific time and place when she grew up, but evades it consistently because she has such a great eye and ear for the things that make childhood experience universal. Anyone will find things to recognize and identify with (and laugh at, of course) in this and her other books. Even her flaws -- the crude drawing style, her lapses of grammar and spelling -- help to get her point across. You couldn't call her stuff childlike -- it's too sophisticated for that -- but it is reminiscent of childhood, without ever being condescending or imitative. While most of her work is clearly intended as humor (and much of it is indeed howlingly funny), there is a haunting, sweet sadness of tone about a great deal of it too. Barry's not afraid to tackle serious incidents of loss, parental indifference, failure in school, and getting in trouble, but the kids in her stories seem always to take the bad things that happen to them in stride, with aplomb -- as children so often really do.