The Freddie Stories: With the Great Marlys! and Sister Maybonne [Paperback]

Lynda Barry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 30, 1999

Here is the first new collection of Lynda Barry's nationally syndicated cartoon strip in more than five years. Lynda Barry, creator of the 'My Life' and 'Ernie Pook's Comeek' comic strips, is syndicated in over 40 alternative weekly newspapers across the country. The Freddie Stories—featuring sisters Marlys and Maybonne, and their spunky little brother Freddie--continues Lynda Barry's brilliant, raw, and completely original exploration of youth, coming of age, friendship, attitude, and being in the world.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Freddie Stories is a collection of strips from Lynda Barry's weekly cartoon, Ernie Pook's Comeek. As the title suggests, all the strips feature Freddie, a gentle misfit and self-described "fag" who goes through a wrenching year. Though Barry's drawing style is whimsical and her protagonists are kids, this is definitely not a book for young children. The haunting--and sometimes downright disturbing--stories cover everything from the fluid nature of friendships to special ed. class to arson. Not only do Freddie's peers misunderstand him, his mother is cold and distant and makes no secret of the fact that she dislikes him. Tough odds, but luckily Freddie has his exuberant sister, Marlys, to help him through. Though the bright spots in The Freddie Stories are few and far between, it's a nearly impossible book to put down once you've started it. Barry's young characters are as painfully real as her drawings are hypnotic. --Ali Davis

From Publishers Weekly

Cartoonist Lynda Barry (It's So Magic) presents a another series of touching stories and drawings in her continuing portrait of the fictional and highly dysfunctional Mullen family. The cast of characters includes the browbeating mother, perpetually bored cousin Arnold, sisters Marlys and Maybonne and their sensitive and ultimately troubled brother, Freddie. Charming, very quirky and deeply introspective, Freddie is a teenage misfit (he's also subject to disturbing visions), a geeky, hypersensitive guy in a world of disdainful, conforming teens who are, in fact, often just as emotionally battered and isolated as he is. And although Freddie can be clever (Marlys praises his hipster lingo and, in "Cooking with Freddy," his "incredible" fried baloney sandwiches), he's more often painfully inappropriate, acting out after a variety of sad incidents and disappointments until he drives people crazy. Barry has created an all-too-real world of adolescence that can be charming and funnyAor despairing, frightening and downright hallucinatory. As always, her b&w drawings are stylishly raw and rendered with a keen eye for mood, character and graphic inventiveness. Like her stories, the drawings capture expertly her teenage characters as they wobble ever closer to becoming adults.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Sasquatch Books (March 30, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1570611068
• ISBN-13: 978-1570611063
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #642,969 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator and teacher and found they are very much alike. She is the inimitable creator behind the seminal comic strip that was syndicated scross North America in alternative weeklies for two decades, Ernie Pook's Comeek featuring the incomparable Marlys and Freddy, as well as the books One! Hundred! Demons!, The! Greatest! of! Marlys!, Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!, The Good Times are Killing Me which was adapted as an off-Broadway play and won the Washington State Governor's Award. Her bestselling and acclaimed creative writing-how to-graphic novel for Drawn & Quarterly, What It Is, won the Eisner Award for Best Reality Based Graphic Novel and R.R. Donnelly Award for highest literary achievement by a Wisconsin author. D+Q plans to publish a multivolume collection of Ernie Pook's Comeek, Barry's next prose novel, and the follow up and creative drawing companion to What It Is, November 2010's Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book.

Born in Wisconsin in 1956, Lynda studied at Evergreen State College.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Move over, Esther Greenwood! Here comes Freddie., March 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Freddie Stories: With the Great Marlys! and Sister Maybonne (Paperback)

Lynda Barry's latest collection of comics is about a character we've met only briefly in her past books. Freddie is a gay (or, in his own words, El Fagatastico) adolescent who lives through a couple of truly unspeakable horrors. He witnesses death and abandonment, surrounded by hateful cousins, controlling friends, his drugged-out sister Maybonne (who, with any luck, will be the star of another book of her own sometime soon) and an unloving mother. His only ally is one of my favorite Lynda Barry characters, his gifted sister Marlys. These stories are as engaging and moving as any I've ever read. It's a cliche, but I have to say it: I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me.

I first picked up a Lynda Barry book back in 1988, when I was a senior in high school. I didn't quite understand the comics, but they fascinated me. As I grew older I started to understand her more and more, and now I can honestly say that nobody else can write characters with whom I can identify quite like Ms. Barry. Keep churning them out, Lynda!

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lynda "why-not-just-call-her-Shakespeare?" Barry, June 15, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Freddie Stories: With the Great Marlys! and Sister Maybonne (Paperback)

Thank you, Lynda, for this whole book just about Freddie. Ever since I read about him in Ernie Pook's Comeek, spazzing out by the monkey bars with Spaz Eyes Gigi, I wished I could read more. As much as I love Marlys and Maybonne, I was glad that Freddie was such a wonderfully different character. The bits of light that appear in his frightening univers only serve to show how awful the rest of everything is. The exception to this--the burning stroke of genius in all of Barry's books about this family--is his relationship with Marlys. When he comes out of his burning-head phase, hers is the first normal face he sees. There's a reason for this: she keeps him not (too) crazy, and alive.

Read this book. Lynda Barry is awesome. No one is better at putting you directly inside a character. She isn't going for quick laughs. She's going for real life. And she hits it, dead on, time and time again.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Marlys sez Hi, Freddie sez Right on!, June 25, 2000

By 

"iheartcrass" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Freddie Stories: With the Great Marlys! and Sister Maybonne (Paperback)

Remember how the tv show 'the wonder years' would always give you that feeling that your heart was about to break into a million pieces and make you die of sadness? This book has that same amazingly beautiful feel to it.

Lynda Barry is my punk rock dream come true, she should have her own national holiday...hmmmm.

Ok, this book makes me think so much of my younger years, as Freddie makes his way thru this confusing world. He's shy and arty, and has a pencant for calling himself 'Fag'.

It makes you wish that he'd burst thru his cartoon world pannel and liberate Peppermint Patty and Velma from their str8 boy dominated confines (and who knows, he may do just that...).

Anyway, this book isn't a book for kids per sey but details how I remember feeling growing up. Freddies only true friend being his sister Marlys, His mother who is a...i cant even think of a nice word...and his older sister Maybonne who is hooked on drugs and depressed...and that only scrapes the trauma that is delt with in this book of genius.

I can't possibly tell you how amazing this book is...You really have to see it for yourself...