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One! Hundred! Demons!

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Plot Summary

One! Hundred! Demons!

Lynda Barry

Nonfiction | Graphic Novel/Book | Adult | Published in 2002

Plot Summary
One! Hundred! Demons! is a 2002 semi-autobiographical graphic novella by American author, teacher, and cartoonist Lynda Barry. A genre-defying work, it borrows the topics, imagery, and literary forms of genres ranging from sixteenth-century Zen art to comic strips, to the vignette, or brief impressionistic sketch, which first appeared in nineteenth-century French literature. The title refers to a painting created by a monk, depicting one hundred demons running after each other along a wide scroll. Mirroring this image, the work depicts Barry’s attempt to confront her own demons, from her most haunting anxieties about adulthood to her bad relationship memories. Testing the limits of the forms of the novella and comic book, One! Hundred! Demons received praise for its expansive conception of what constitutes a literary work in the twenty-first century. Barry has called the work her “autobiofictionalography.”

The novella is structured as a series of seventeen illustrated vignettes. Each vignette fixates on a recurring moment or impression in Barry’s life, a “demon” which she seeks to dispel just as the monk Hakuin Ekaku did in his art. Laid out horizontally, the stories are simplistic and two dimensional; the demons are stylized so as to look both alien and uncannily human. Barry begins with her first fear, lice, recalling how it plagued her elementary school. Lice were imprinted in her imagination as a monstrosity always lurking somewhere unseen, waiting to latch onto her scalp. Accompanying images give a visual form to this demonic vision of lice, constructing a narrative that is both truthful and fantastical.

Many of Barry’s vignettes depict her childhood as a time of wandering, expressiveness, and skepticism about the appearances of things. A precocious child, she stands out as observant and nervous. For example, one vignette fixates on her anxiety about “girlishness” versus “tomboyishness,” conveying how the two stereotypical categories push and pull at Barry as she strives to fit in somewhere. Here, the demons break the fourth wall, acknowledging the reader’s own insecurities about adolescent transformation.



The book features two recurring characters, which stand in for Barry’s mother and grandmother. The mother is a control freak who still deals with her own lingering demons. She levies critiques against Barry’s thoughts and behaviors, which are sometimes projections of her unresolved insecurities. The grandmother, portrayed as a wise and compassionate teacher, is a character foil to Barry’s mother. Both of these characters hint at Barry’s Filipino heritage; for example, her mother swears in their native tongue Tagalog. Some of the vignettes also describe the Filipino neighborhood where Barry grew up.

One! Hundred! Demons! interrogates the trope of resilience, and shows that neither children nor adults are exempt from any part of the human condition. Barry suggests that if contriving demons is an unavoidable part of rationalizing difficult emotions such as fear and anxiety, putting them down in images and words might slow their pursuit.

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