English Journal 5

English Journal 5

28 February 2012

                I have just finished reading Lynda Barry’s comic “Common Scents”. At first, I found it to be a little boring and I didn’t really get the point right away. But as I kept reading, I began to understand what she was trying to get across to her readers. She uses how people smell as a way to judge people. In her comic, a boy comes across different people who have unique smells, some good and some bad. Lynda shows how shallow people can be by judging them on how they smell. If people smell differently from you, then we can judge them as a bad person. The boy in the comic is confused by the way we judge people, and he seems to believe that if we can see how smells bind and separate us then we can make more educated decisions about other people. From what I have read, she is trying to instill that classic thought into her reader’s minds. “Don’t judge a book by its cover”. By the end of her comic, I found myself thinking if this is how I act in real life. Lynda Barry really challenges you to think of others first and their situation before you judge them.