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Lynda Barry’s What It Is was first published in 2008 by Montreal-based comic book publisher Drawn and Quarterly. The large-format, full-color work was released in hardcover in the first and subsequent printings. A well-known writer and artist of comics for many years, Barry initially established herself as a cartoonist with her comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek, which began in the Chicago Reader in 1979 and ran for nearly thirty years. She published book-length collections of comics and illustrated novels with such companies as Seattle-based Sasquatch Books and Simon and Schuster prior to working with Drawn and Quarterly, also serializing a number of her comics online. Her work, particularly What It Is, is especially noted for crossing genre boundaries.

The Playboy, first titled “Disgust,” is an autobiographical graphic novel that originally appeared in issues 21-23 of Canadian comics creator Chester Brown’s serial (and controversial) comic Yummy Fur. Brown self-published seven issues of Yummy Fur as a minicomic from 1983 to 1986, at which point he began working with publishers; Yummy Fur was published as a full-size comic in 1995. During the nine-year span between 1986 and 1995, Brown published thirty-two issues. For issues 21-23, Brown worked with an independent Canadian publisher, Vortex Comics (founded in 1982, but defunct as of 1994). In 1991, he left Vortex Comics and began publishing with the newly established Drawn and Quarterly. The Playboy was published as a collection in 1992 and, as of 2011, is out of print. Other works from Yummy Fur were also collected as their own publications, including Ed the Happy Clown (1989) and the Eisner Award-nominated I Never Liked You (1994).