Page 33 taken from Lynda Barry’s book “What It Is.”

Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips define formstorming along the lines of being used as a tool to infuse a concept with creativity and originality to produce several new results. With this in mind, it seems as though Lynda Barry thought about this while putting together her graphic novel, What It Is. In fact, this book could have certainly been written with the prime intention to demonstrate this idea of formstorming.

Through at least the first fifty pages of her book, Barry repeats certain images and messages throughout in unconventional and crafty ways. Things such as memory, time and space, the mere idea of images, birds, memory, books, reading, writing, sea creatures, and imagination. The entirety of the book stands as an excellent model of formstorming, just as well as each page individually. Page 33, for example, asks the question, “What is a memory?” Barry uses memory in various ways, asking this question and simply stating the word. Seen in this page is memory through the chosen images, both possibly representing a memories of their own along with representing the meaning of memory. The image of the cluster of people in what looks like a school gives an aura of a dark time that might have taken place, and the picture of Donald Duck adds to this through reminding of adolescence. Giving life to memories with words and images.

Barry successfully does this with every page, tying a great deal of images and quotes to the notion of memories, the processes of remembering, recalling, and forgetting. She weaves the same themes in creative and interesting ways that is not seen the exact same way anywhere else, letting it all stand on its own, and demonstrating formstorming superbly.