Alison Bechdel

I don't remember exactly when I became a fan of Alison Bechdel's comic Dykes to Watch Out For -- I started reading it when it ran in the Minneapolis-based gay and lesbian paper Equal Time, then after that folded it continued on to a lengthy stint in Boston's Sojourner (until that folded) and now I read it in Washington's Off Our Backs (which often talks about folding but has managed to hang on so far).

The strip follows a cast of characters -- Mo, Lois, Ginger, Toni, Sparrow and Clarice, among a number of others -- through relationships, children, jobs, and politics. There are lots of jokes about academia, too, which I've particularly appreciated at certain points in my life. I've been following them around for about 20 year now, I guess, so in honor of that long history, I decided today to add Alison to my all-time favorites list.

If you didn't see it, her graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is well worth reading. (She grew up in a funeral home, hence the name.) While we all tend to think we've got dysfunctional families (what family, after all, is fully functional?) the book is likely to make you realize how functional your family is! Fun Home is an exemplar of why graphic long-form books are not comics, but are instead a new type of literature that fully integrates words and pictures.

The reason I thought to write about Alison this week is that she just had a four-page, autobiographical comic in the books section of Entertainment Weekly, which you can see online here. (Hope they paid her well!)

Like Alison, I also read those "childhood of famous Americans" books, and even collect a few of them now. (I think I read the Eli Whitney book, too, but my particular favorites were about the Girl Scouts' founder Juliet Lowe, the Ringling Brothers, and Henry Ford.)

I played the card game Authors, too, although I don't think we were quite as into it as Alison and her crowd were.

I have a strong affinity with the adolescent Alison's aversion to reading anything recommended by someone else. I did the same thing, refusing to read books because my sisters or teachers recommended them. Weird. I paid for this later -- I'm still catching up on Jane Austen, although I finally read all of the Anne of Green Gables books, and I haven't ever gotten to the Brontes.

Anyway, here's to Alison Bechdel!