Linda Barry, artist, author, cartoonist, and playwright, has made a living out of mining her miserable childhood years. "I was not an especially likable kid," she told a contributor for the Onion A. V. Club online. "I was oversensitive and freaked out easily, and I looked like Alfred E. Neuman. And I fell down a lot, so you kind of had to be a certain kind of person to like a kid like that." She was the kind of kid, in fact, who had to wait in the library after school every day so that she wouldn't get beat up by other kids on the way home. Transcending her unfortunate past, Barry has found success turning her childhood memories into a wry comic universe. "Imagine having a job like mine where you sit around all day and think about dirt bombs!" she commented in the San Jose Mercury...