How does Lynda Barry's text One Hundred Demons (pages 98–106) employ media and/or modes? What do you find particularly challenging? What tensions, ambiguities, or uncertainties may an intermediality or modality scholar encounter when dealing with the text? How does the literary text test the limits of theories of intermediality and/or multimodality? Lynda Barry, One Hundred Demons (2002), pp. 98-106

This section of the text deals with the themes of transformation, betrayal, and memory. Barry’s art has always seemed like a mask to me: her stylized, intentionally inelegant and ugly drawings of herself seem as much an attempt to hide behind the drawing as an attempt at honest representation. In One Hundred Demons, Barry is coming as close as she can to autobiography. She is doing her best, I think, to tell the “truth,” although what the “truth” might be behind how she feels about Ev is difficult to explain.
This is why the inclusion of the snapshot of the real Barry and Ev, as children, is so important. In terms of intermediality, it represents a moment when Barry steps out from behind the mask of her art and and asserts the reality of her experience. In this chapter, Barry remembers the summer she spent watching her younger brothers while her parents both had affairs and the moment the ”magic” of childhood disappeared. That passage into adolescence is what separates Barry from Ev; the empathetic bond that Ev and Barry shared is replaced by listening to moody pop music in dark rooms. At the time, Barry did not fully understand what was going on inside her or why it was suddenly inappropriate to have an eleven-year-old friend. The photo, on the other hand, makes things very clear: there is Ev in the foreground, hamming it up, and behind her, with a guilty smile, is Barry. It explains their relationship in a way the drawings cannot. It also represents a tremendous personal risk for Barry, in that it is a window into her real life unmediated by her art.