Jane Tolmie 
Contagious Imagination 
The Work and Art of Lynda Barry

Contributions by Frederick Luis Aldama, Melissa Burgess, Susan Kirtley, Rachel Luria, Ursula Murray Husted, Mark O’Connor, Allan Pero, Davida Pines, Tara Prescott-Johnson, Jane Tolmie, Rachel Trousdale, Elaine Claire Villacorta, and Glenn Willmott


Lynda Barry (b. 1956) is best known for her distinctive style and unique voice, first popularized in her underground weekly comic
Ernie Pook’s Comeek. Since then, she has published prolifically, including numerous comics, illustrated novels, and nonfiction books exploring the creative process. Barry’s work is genre- and form-bending, often using collage to create what she calls “word with drawing” vignettes. Her art, imaginative and self-reflective, allows her to discuss gender, race, relationships, memory, and her personal, everyday lived experience. It is through this experience that Barry examines the creative process and offers to readers ways to record and examine their own lives.


The essays in
Contagious Imagination: The Work and Art of Lynda Barry, edited by Jane Tolmie, study the pedagogy of Barry’s work and its application academically and practically. Examining Barry’s career and work from the point of view of research-creation,
Contagious Imagination applies Barry’s unique mixture of teaching, art, learning, and creativity to the very form of the volume, exploring Barry’s imaginative praxis and offering readers their own.


With a foreword by Frederick Luis Aldama and an afterword by Glenn Willmott, this volume explores the impact of Barry’s work in and out of the classroom. Divided into four sections—Teaching and Learning, which focuses on critical pedagogy; Comics and Autobiography, which targets various practices of
rememorying; Cruddy, a self-explanatory category that offers two extraordinary critical interventions into Barry criticism around a challenging text; and Research-Creation, which offers two creative, synthetic artistic pieces that embody and enact Barry’s own mixed academic and creative investments—this book offers numerous inroads into Barry’s idiosyncratic imagination and what it can teach us about ourselves.

About the author

Frederick Luis Aldama, also known as Professor Latinx, is Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and affiliate faculty in radio-TV-film at the University of Texas, Austin, as well as adjunct professor and Distinguished University Professor at The Ohio State University. He is author of over forty-eight books and has received the International Latino Book Award and an Eisner Award for Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. He is editor or coeditor of nine academic press book series, including Biographix with University Press of Mississippi. He is creator of the first documentary on the history of Latinx superheroes and founder and director of UT’s Latinx Pop Lab. His Spanish translation and animation film adaptation of his children’s book The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie (2020) will be released in the fall of 2021. He is also editor of Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in the Americas and Australasia and Jeff Smith: Conversations, both published by University Press of Mississippi.