Review by Woodrow Phoenix
Come Over, Come Over collects comic strips by Lynda Barry originally serialized as Ernie Pook’s Comeek, appearing in the Chicago Reader and other alternative weekly newspapers published across the USA between 1988–1990. It also includes a longer strip ‘Sneaking Out’, originally published in Raw magazine in 1990. These stories explore the lives of the Mullen family, a group of three children Maybonne, Freddie and Marlys living with their mother in an unnamed North American city in the 1970s. They are all first-person accounts of their lives from the children, with the narrators frequently switching between them so that events are experienced from the perspectives of all of these protagonists. This has the effect of constantly redefining your understanding of who these children are and how they relate to each other at home and at school, in a world where unreliable or absent adults have all the power and they have none.
Earlier collection The! Greatest! of! Marlys! spotlighted Marlys Mullen, a gawky, awkward eight-year-old girl, while The Freddie Stories are episodes from a year in the life of Freddie, Marlys’ ten-year-old brother. Come Over, Come Over is mostly told from the perspective of Maybonne Mullen, a teenaged girl navigating the horrors of junior high school and adolescence, constantly fighting at home with her mother and her younger sister.
Lynda Barry’s drawings have a casual appearance that disguises tremendous expertise. The internal workings of Maybonne’s emotionally-charged, sometimes elated, but frequently desperate world of letters, diary entries, notes to pass around in class, essays and quizzes are laid bare in elaborate handwriting. The simplistic but carefully modulated imagery and intimate writing is designed to reel you in despite yourself. The stories gain an extra layer of depth when the perspective switches from Maybonne to Marlys and we see how immensely powerful the bond is between them despite their constant bickering and sabotaging of each other.
Barry deftly portrays the unpredictable nature of teen friendships, adolescent peer-pressure, the kill or be killed nature of sibling rivalries and middle school peer groups, sometimes funny, sometimes sweet and then desperate, lonely and lost. Come Over, Come Over is incredibly sweet, funny and completely involving. Together with sequel My Perfect Life, it won a 2023 Eisner Award for Best Archival Collection/Project—Strips.
