Photo: Matt Emery
The great New Zealand cartoonist Barry Linton died last month.
Funtime Comics asked me to write something about Barry, and here’s what came out:
BARRY LINTON 1947-2018
I’ve been trying to write an obituary for the great New Zealand cartoonist Barry Linton, who died on the afternoon of October 2nd at Auckland Hospital, aged 71. Carefully checked facts about his life, a sober assessment of his life’s work. But I can’t. I apologise if this is rambling and inelegant. But Barry’s comics have been an important part of my mental landscape since I was a schoolboy: shaping the way I draw, the way I think about cartooning and art, the way I see my home town and the islands we live on. I’m not ready to write about him with detachment, and I’m not sure I ever will be.
Barry’s art helped define the look of the New Zealand counter-culture in the ‘70s and ‘80s, through band posters and record covers, cartoons for the alternative press, and his unforgettable, iconic comics for Strips. He did commercial work, too. For a while, he worked as a graphic artist for the Auckland Star newspaper, drawing maps, diagrams of cruise missiles and aeroplanes, and whatever else the daily news required. Later, he drew illustrations for On Film magazine, a handful of books, and even the NZ Woman’s Weekly. But he was never financially secure, and he never stopped making his unique, intensely personal comics – even when no-one was publishing them. Occasionally he’d put out a mini-comic or self-published collection, but for years, his best work was seen only by flatmates, friends, and family.
In recent years, Matt Emery’s Pikitia Press managed to get some of Barry’s work into print, including the first two instalments of his magnum opus: the Aki saga. Barry was allergic to computers, and too poor to buy one anyway. So Matt visited him at home with a borrowed laptop and scanner, to scan hundreds of pages of artwork, which he then painstakingly processed over several years. All of this was supposed to culminate in a glorious collection of Barry’s best work, from the 1970s to the present, with a biographical essay by Tim Bollinger, and a critical foreword by me. But small press comics is a tough grind and Pikitia has sadly, inevitably gone into hiatus, leaving that badly-needed book as yet unpublished. Hopefully, that will change before long, and Barry’s life’s work will get the treatment it deserves.
Yesterday, I stood in front of his desk, where a half-drawn page of Aki sat where he’d left it: careful, meticulous, bright with the clear deep joy of drawing. Beside it were scripts, notes, sketches, for a long-planned epic: at least six volumes, which will now remain incomplete. He used to joke that the real title of the Aki series was “a hundred and one ways of drawing water.” And, like all of Barry’s jokes, it’s pretty accurate. Page after page of rolling swells, towering waves, frothing foam and glittering sunlit oceans. The Aki comics are light on dramatic plot; instead he used this cheerful tale of ancient Pacific exploration to draw into being a profoundly personal utopia. The Neolithic island cultures he imagined probably never existed, but in page after page of lovingly rendered panels, panoramas, maps, and even cardboard models of ocean-going canoes, Barry was slowly bringing them into our reality. That’s the world he wanted to live in, and for much of the past twenty years, he did.
At a memorial event in Herne Bay, one of his many friends mentioned a phrase Barry had used often: “tune out to tune in.” Tune out all the distractions – bills, flatmates, the madness of the world – so you can tune in to the world inside you and the slow, private work of making your art. Throughout his life, Barry did just that: making his art with few compromises but plenty of sacrifices. He left us a body of work unlike anything else in the history of comics – here in New Zealand and around the world. I hope we can do that gift justice.
Photo: Matt Emery
More about Barry:
Barry’s last published comic, a brief autobiography in ten guitars, was in press when he died. It’s in the new issue of Sport, and they’ve generously made it available online (PDF).
This is an article about Barry’s death in The Sunday Star Times.
The Spinoff reposted my comic about Barry (originally drawn for this 2007 book), with an introductory note from Toby Morris.
Audio Culture has a bunch of posts about Barry, including a lovely profile by Barry’s friend Arthur Baysting.
Here’s a moving tribute from writer Martin Edmond.
Tim Bollinger is one of Barry’s great champions. Here’s a bunch of things he’s written about Barry’s work: an essay for a 2017 Bowerbank Ninow auction catalogue; a review of Barry’s Aki series for the NZ Listener; a post about Aki for Werewolf.
There’s a new autobiographical comic by Barry in the latest issue of Sport (along with a short tribute from Tim Bollinger).
You can see more of Barry’s work here, here, and here.
This is a clip featuring Barry from my step-mother Shirley Horrocks’ 2007 documentary about NZ cartoonists, The Comics Show:
