About Barton

My name is Marybeth Barton and I'm a young American liberal with voting power. I am a Taurus, born on April 26, on the very same day as the infamous Chernobyl fiasco. Despite this grim omen, I seem to have pretty good luck in everyday life with small things, like getting to the post office before it closes, guessing the right answer on a multiple choice test, and finding small unmarked bills on the street. I identify as a lesbian, a therianthrope, and an introvert. I don't talk much, at least not out loud. Leftover quips, then, that I don't manage to get out there in the course of a conversation, sometimes end up on this website in a speech bubble. More often, though, they don't.

I am, as of this writing, 19 years old and attending Northland College in Wisconsin. I was born and raised in Maryland about an hour and a half west of Baltimore, and sometimes I miss it immensely, and sometimes I feel more at home here. I enjoy traveling on a tight budget, sleeping, eating, taking long solitary walks at night, and lying around in the sunlight. For hours. Currently I have one tattoo (a black cat on my right arm) and about US$16.00 to my name. What will it be this week: food, gas, laundry, or medicine?

I like to draw comics. A lot. I get an almost perverse kind of pleasure out of it, no matter how innocuous the content. As an artistic format, it is unbeatable. People are receptive to the nutshelled ideas in comics in a nearly subliminal way. Amusement is a backstage pass behind a person's defenses. The only worthy comparison I can think of (at the moment) is Saul Williams' description of hip-hop: it demands the instant affirmative. The beat drops, you start nodding your head to the beat. The yes-motion. And whatever the artist says in the course of the song, you're nodding yes right along with them, right with the beat, and the artist's message instantly becomes yours, if only for that moment. Comics are kind of like that, only much less fun at parties. And they aren't exactly great for picking up chicks.

Too many things have influenced my drawing style(s). I tried not to be influenced by anime, for example, but you don't have to watch much of it before your character's eyes start getting bigger and their mouths smaller, and darn it, Miyazaki's films are so good... I've also been inspired by Keith Haring, the covers of fantasy novels, tattoo art, Ozy and Millie, Daria, Calvin and Hobbes, the Muppets, Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, bathroom stall graffiti, and of course, my good friend, boredom. Visually, "Werechild" currently seems to be a cross between anime and Daria. I think so, anyway. I get my ideas from my own life, things people say, and dumb little notions that float around in my head. If I say something in a conversation and people laugh, I think about using it in a comic. If something ticks me off, I can probably twist it into something vaguely humorous if you give me enough time and enough caffeine.

Other projects I'm working on right now include two other comics for my school paper, Drifts--a single-panel strip about an environmental superhero who tries to save the world in pretty mundane ways, titled, for lack of a better name at the time of its conception, Earth vs. World; and a stream-of-consciousness, experimental sort of rambling called an honest effort (lowercase intentional). People seem to like them, and I get a small pittance for them, and that's good enough for me. I also run the website Werechild.Org, as you probably already know, the main portion of which is devoted to things more serious than comics and sandwiches.