Encyclopedia.com has the full text of a paper by Melinda L. de Jesus called "Liminality and mestiza consciousness in Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons" -- a long but fruitful read for anyone interested in tracing the Filipino American themes in Barry's work. Just one small excerpt:

Barry, like many other Asian American women writers such as M. Evelina Galang, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Hisaye Yamamoto, retells and reworks childhood memories and folktales in order to discover her history and thus herself: retelling the stories of her mother and lola (grandmother), and analyzing her very different relationships with them, Barry constructs a hybrid new identity, consciously deciding which aspects she will claim and which she must discard.

The full-color graphics of One Hundred Demons are an integral part of this process of self-creation. Barry's exquisite storytelling power lies in the potent mixture of her narrative and drawings: her comics enable the reader literally to "see" Barry's world as she does and thus enter it even more fully. (8) Moreover, while Barry's narrative compels us to "read" further, the striking visual contrast of Lynda to her Pinoy extended family throughout One Hundred Demons signifies and reinforces the distances she, as a red-haired, fair-skinned mestiza Filipina in America, must travel in order to find herself and to find her way back to her family. (9)

Click here to buy "One Hundred Demons."

Heidi McDonald points us to a brand new sampling of Lynda Barry's work at the D&Q website and notes that Barry's new book, "What It Is," is forthcoming from Drawn & Quarterly.

Meanwhile, at Comixology, Shaenon Garrity expounds on Barry's genius:

... in all honesty, there's only one female American cartoonist I'd consider worthy of joining the admittedly exalted ranks of Eisner, Kirby, Kurtzman, Schulz and Crumb, and that's Lynda Barry. She's that good.