Lynda Barry on how she writes comic strip characters

POWERS: Once you started doing more strips about childhood, were you able to put yourself into that mode and recall experiences more easily?
BARRY: It's funny, because when the characters came -- when Marlys and Arna and Arnold and Freddie made their appearance and let me know that they were staying -- it was a whole other thing. Then it became fiction, because now I have these characters and their personalities, how they respond to a situation. For example, one of the strips I was trying to write last week was Marlys finds a baby bird, one that can't fly yet. Now, her attitude about it is that she loves animals so much she loves them more than anybody, because it doesn't matter to her if they die in order for her to have them. And Freddie, who loves nature -- all he can do is try to think of a way to get this bird away from his sister because it's going to die. And Arna's kind of torn. And they all have a whole a different response to this one event. So I have these four characters and any event that I come up with - automatically I have four different stories for it. It really got further and further away from my personal past because know these characters; I'm more and more familiar with how they would respond to anything. That's the stuff that gets a little bit mysterious and funny, and you could start to go real flaky thinking about it. It's like they're living. They're living, staring people. They don't see me necessarily, but I know exactly how they'd respond to things.