Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel at a London signing for Fun Home, 2006
Born	(1960-09-10) September 10, 1960 (age 51) Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, United States
Occupation	Cartoonist, author
Nationality	American
Genres	Autobiography, social commentary
Literary movement	Underground
Notable work(s)	Dykes To Watch Out For, Fun Home
Influences R. Crumb, Mad, Charles Addams, Edward Gorey, Hergé, Howard Cruse, Roberta Gregory, Jules Feiffer[1]
Influenced Ellen Forney,[2] Paige Braddock[3]
www.dykestowatchoutfor.com

Alison Bechdel ( /ˈbɛkdəl/ BEK-dəl; born September 10, 1960) is an American cartoonist. Originally best known for the long-running comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, in 2006 she became a best-selling and critically acclaimed author with her graphic memoir Fun Home.

Early life

Alison Bechdel was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania to Roman Catholic parents who were teachers. Bechdel's brother is keyboard player John Bechdel, who has worked with many bands including Ministry. Her family also owned and operated a funeral home. She attended Simon's Rock College and then Oberlin College, graduating in 1981.

Career

Bechdel moved to New York City and applied to many art schools but was rejected and worked in a number of office jobs in the publishing industry.

She began Dykes to Watch Out For as a single drawing labeled "Marianne, dissatisfied with the morning brew: Dykes to Watch Out For, plate no. 27".^[4] An acquaintance recommended she send her work to Womannews, a feminist newspaper, which published her first work in its June 1983 issue. Bechdel gradually moved from her early single-panel drawings to multi-paneled strips.^[5] After a year, other outlets began running the strip.

In the first years, Dykes to Watch Out For consisted of unconnected strips without a regular cast or serialized storyline. However, its structure eventually evolved into a focus on following a set group of lesbian characters. In 1986 Firebrand Books published a collection of the strips to date.^[6] In 1987 Bechdel introduced her regular characters, Mo and her friends, while living in St. Paul, Minnesota. Dykes to Watch Out For is the origin of the so-called "Bechdel test". In 1988, she began a short-lived page-length strip about the staff of a queer newspaper, titled "Servants to the Cause", for The Advocate. Bechdel has also written and drawn autobiographical strips and has done illustrations for magazines and websites. She became a full-time cartoonist in 1990 and later moved near Burlington, Vermont. She currently resides in Bolton, Vermont. Bechdel is the Mellon Residential Fellow for Arts and Practice at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center at the University of Chicago.

Fun Home

In 2006, Bechdel published Fun Home, an autobiographical "tragicomic" chronicling her childhood and the years before and after her father's death. Fun Home has received more widespread mainstream attention than Bechdel's earlier work, with reviews in Entertainment Weekly, People and several features in The New York Times. Fun Home spent two weeks on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction bestseller list.^[7][8]

Fun Home was hailed as one of the best books of 2006 by numerous sources, including The New York Times,^[9] amazon.com,^[10][11] The Times of London,^[12] Publishers Weekly,^[13] salon.com,^[14] New York magazine,^[15] and Entertainment Weekly.^[15]

Time magazine named Alison Bechdel's Fun Home number one of its "10 Best Books of the Year." Lev Grossman and Richard LeCayo described Fun Home as "the unlikeliest literary success of 2006," and called it "a stunning memoir about a girl growing up in a small town with her cryptic, perfectionist dad and slowly realizing that a) she is gay and b) he is too. ... Bechdel's breathtakingly smart commentary duets with eloquent line drawings. Forget genre and sexual orientation: this is a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other."^[16]

Fun Home was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award in the memoir/autobiography category.^[17][18] It also won the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work.^[19] Fun Home was also nominated for the Best Graphic Album award, and Bechdel was nominated for Best Writer/Artist.^[20]

Are You My Mother?

Alison Bechdel's second graphic memoir, Are You My Mother?, was released in May 2012.^[21] It focuses on her relationship with her mother.

Later work

Dykes to Watch Out For was suspended in 2008 so that Bechdel can work on another graphic memoir, with the working title Love Life: A Case Study.^[22] It will focus on Bechdel's relationships. Bechdel describes its themes as "the self, subjectivity, desire, the nature of reality, that sort of thing,"^[23] which is a paraphrase of a quote from Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse.

Personal life

Bechdel came out as a lesbian at age 19.^[24] Bechdel's gender and sexual identity are a large part of the core message of her work "The secret subversive goal of my work is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings."^[25] In February 2004, Bechdel married her partner since 1992, Amy Rubin, in a civil ceremony in San Francisco. However, all same-sex marriage licenses given by the city at that time were subsequently voided by the California Supreme Court. Bechdel and Rubin separated in 2006.^[26]

In November 2006 Bechdel was invited to sit on the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.^{[citation needed]}

Bibliography

Collections

• Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 1986, ISBN 0-932379-17-6)
• More Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 1988, ISBN 0-932379-45-1)
• New, Improved! Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 1990, ISBN 0-932379-79-6)
• Dykes to Watch Out For: The Sequel (Firebrand Books, 1992, ISBN 1-56341-008-7)
• Spawn of Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 1993, ISBN 1-56341-039-7)
• Unnatural Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 1995, ISBN 1-56341-067-2)
• Hot, Throbbing Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 1997, ISBN 1-56341-086-9)
• Split-Level Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 1998, ISBN 1-56341-102-4)
• The Indelible Alison Bechdel: Confessions, Comix, and Miscellaneous Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 1998)
• Post-Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 2000, ISBN 1-56341-122-9)
• Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life-Forms to Watch Out For (Alyson Publications, 2003, ISBN 1-55583-828-6)
• Invasion of the Dykes to Watch Out For (Alyson Publications, 2005, ISBN 1-55583-833-2)
• The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (Houghton Mifflin, 2008, ISBN 0-618-96880-6), a compendium containing the vast majority of the strips in all previous collections as well as all 2005-2008 strips not previously published

Graphic memoirs

• Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton Mifflin, 2006, ISBN 0-618-47794-2)
• Are you my mother?: A Comic Drama (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012, ISBN 0-618-98250-7)

Stories

• "Oppressed Minority Cartoonist" and "The Party" in Juicy Mother edited by Jennifer Camper, Soft Skull Press, 2005 ISBN 1-932360-70-0
• "A Perfect Match" in Juicy Mother 2: How They Met, edited by Jennifer Camper, Manic D Press, 2007, ISBN 978-1-933149-20-2)
• "Vermont" in State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, Ecco, 2008, ISBN 978-0-06-147090-5

Interviews

• Interview with Alison Bechdel by Sassafras Lowrey May, 2012
• Interview with Alison Bechdel by Peter Terzian May, 2012

See also

Novels portal

• Women in comics

Footnotes

External links

• Official website
• "Stuck in Vermont 109: Alison Bechdel" © 2008 Eva Sollberger

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