Art & Creativity Quote by Lynda Barry

Agency is the first thing Lynda Barry quietly refuses. "It happened behind my back" is funny in the way a good cartoon is funny: deadpan, a little eerie, and completely accurate to how creative lives actually form. Careers, especially in low-status, high-output forms like comics, rarely arrive as destiny. They sneak in through repetition, through necessity, through whatever you can keep doing when nobody is watching.

Barry’s line also performs a sly status flip. By insisting "I was always a painter and drawer", she plants herself in the older, more culturally sanctified lineage of fine art. Cartoonist, in this telling, is not a downgrade but an accident of medium and audience. The subtext is a defense against the gatekeeping that treats comics as lesser: she didn’t abandon "real art" to make cartoons; cartoons happened because drawing happened. The identity flows from the verb, not the label.

There’s autobiography in the timing, too. Starting at 21 suggests that adulthood didn’t bring clarity so much as momentum. For a woman coming up in a field long coded male, "never thought I would be a cartoonist" also reads as historical reality: you don’t picture yourself in a job you’re rarely shown you can have. Barry turns that absence into a creative principle. If the world won’t hand you a script, you work "behind your back" anyway - and then you look up and realize you’ve built a practice, a voice, a genre around the simplest thing: making marks.