The Essential Mo, Lois, Ginger, Sparrow, Toni...

Alison Bechdel, one of my all-time favorites, has a new collection out, called The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. I haven't had a chance to pick up a copy yet (maybe it will end up in my stocking, who knows?).

Dwight Garner reviewed the collection in the December 2 New York Times, and I'm heavily excerpting him here (you need a free NYT account to read the whole story), so the rest of this is a quote from Dwight:

[DTWOF is] about the fractious lives and loves of an articulate group of lesbians in a city that resembles Minneapolis. The strip is sexy, sometimes in an R-rated way — imagine “Doonesbury” with regular references to sex toys — and it’s political, in a feisty, lefty, Greenpeace meets PETA meets MoveOn.org kind of way. Ms. Bechdel’s lesbians wanted to impeach the first George Bush...

[The strips] offer the chance to watch a group of very appealing women grow and change (and struggle to have better sex) over the course of more than two decades. Ms. Bechdel calls her strips “half op-ed column and half endlessly serialized Victorian novel,” and that’s not far off...

If you are, with this volume, coming to Ms. Bechdel’s comic strips for the first time, you’ll notice a few things pretty quickly. For one, sex happens. There are a lot of naked cartoon women here — gloriously naked cartoon women: fat, thin, young, old, black, white. They are real women, many with ample armpit hair and zits on their shoulders. These lesbians aren’t Bambi, Betty or Veronica.

For another, you’ll pick up on how literate this strip is. It’s not just the dropped-in references to writers like Camille Paglia, Andrew Sullivan, Katha Pollitt, Judith Butler and Michel Foucault. In the stacks of a library, one character confesses: “I’ve always fantasized about library congress. Let’s do it in the HQ 70s.” What’s more, many of the characters work in a feminist bookstore called Madwimmin Books, always under threat from two chain stores Ms. Bechdel refers to as “Bounders Books and Muzak” and “Bunns and Noodle.” You’ll also come to realize that lesbians have been, over the last 25 years, on the cutting edge of just about every cultural trend in this country. They were among the first foodies, even if most went the vegetarian route. (Ms. Bechdel’s very first strip mentions a “seaweed-avocado pâté.”) And on the environment? Eighteen years ago Ms. Bechdel was writing about compost heaps and the threat posed by nonbiodegradable plastic trash bags. Ms. Bechdel adores her characters and gently satirizes them at the same time. They sometimes read books with absurd titles like “The Wheat-Free Guide to Creative Visualization in Co-Dependent Past-Life Relationships.” They go to workshops called “Parthenogenesis With Gemstones.” They develop crushes on women with names like Amethyst. Criticism, Ms. Bechdel understands, is a form of love...

Ms. Bechdel began her strips all those years ago, she writes here, partly to provide “an antidote” to the culture’s image of gay women as “warped, sick, humorless and undesirable.” Boy, has she succeeded. Her crazy lesbians seem saner than the rest of us, and beyond beautiful.