Alison Bechdel (United States, 1960)
Alison Bechdel is an American cartoonist. She is best known for the long-running comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, which ran from 1983 to 2008 and was one of the earliest ongoing representations of lesbians in popular culture. Bechdel moved to Manhattan during the summer of 1981 and applied to many art schools but was rejected and worked in a number of office jobs in the publishing industry, during which she started drawing one panel comics that would eventually evolve into Dykes To Watch Out For. In 2006, she became a best-selling and critically acclaimed author with her graphic memoir Fun Home.
Bechdel is also known for the "Bechdel test", which asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The test is used as an indicator for the active presence of women in films and other fiction, and to call attention to gender inequality in fiction.
“Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief.”
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For
Settle in to this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it “half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel”) of the lives, loves, and politics of a cast of characters, most of them lesbian, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the Fun Home. It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.
Are You My Mother?
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood...