The book also contains awesome collages by Lynda between the strips as well as a foreword explaining the origin of the 100 Demons idea and an afterword describing some of the materials and methods Lynda used in creating the strips.

The strips (as you would expect in a work by Ms. Barry) evoke a wide range of emotions, and cover a lot of territory. Who could read "Common Scents" and NOT remember the smells of their grandmother's house or shuffle uncomfortably at the memory of failed attempts to disguise the smell of cat pee with incense?

OK, maybe you never owned a cat, but you still need the book to read about the Aswang! It could save your life!


Touching and umm...Wow?   September 15, 2004
 7 out of 9 found this review helpful

This will take you back there. Childhood. Keep your seat belts fastened.


Gorgeous artwork, heartbreaking stories.   August 27, 2002
 5 out of 6 found this review helpful

Beautiful collages and artwork bookend each of the 20 color featured stories (most of which appear currently on www.salon.com and are recently written) that detail a semi-maybe-autobiographical Lynda's life, memories and emotions in ways that can make you recall, if you were a misfit growing up, exact memories of that experience, and the subtle ways it follows you into adulthood. The honesty and intelligence of her art and writing is, as usual, spot on, and always evolving-- she's not afraid to try a new voice, character, or medium, and this new collection shows that clearly.


Barry brilliant collection of seventeen "demons."   September 16, 2002
 5 out of 12 found this review helpful

I hate to give "One Hundred Demons" four stars, especially in the light of its five-star artwork, but there is simply too much hippie adulation here, to say nothing of very boring drug-use details. I realize that this is autobifictionalography, but there's too much contrast between the drug and hippie stuff and such fascinating, hilarious, and brilliantly observational demons as "Dogs," "The Aswang," and "Common Scents." Ms. Barry's homelife with her Filipino mother and grandmother was a bit out of the ordinary, and all the more interesting because the artist was such a gifted and intelligent child. And no one, but no one, is able to portray childhood as genuinely as she can. She has every thought, every concern, and every feeling down to a cartoon science. Maybe that's why the adolescent demons, with their obsessive, "Cathy"-style details of insecurity, are such a letdown. Do funny ladies always have to portray themselves as unattractive, dopey, confused, etc.? Anyway, Barry's talent for chronicling the mundane (and not-so-mundane) is marvelous and matchless when it works, and yawn-inducing when it doesn't. Today's demon: "Not Giving Lynda Barry Five Stars on Amazon."


A Book that should be a mandatory read - everywhere!   March 18, 2003
 4 out of 5 found this review helpful

As Marlys would say: (and the only decent way I can do this book any justice)

SUPER RIGHT ON!

The best book, hands-down, I have read in the past ten years. When will Lynda get the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature and Cartoons?