Staff Pick
Before Fun Home and Are You My Mother?, this brilliant creator brought us the long-running, hilarious, insightful, and heartbreaking comic strip, "Dykes to Watch Out For." My all-time favorite soap opera in cartoon form. Recommended By Doug C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
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 Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and the rest of the cast of cult-fav characters. Most of them are lesbians, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis. Bechdel's brilliantly imagined countercultural band of friends — academics, social workers, bookstore clerks — fall in and out of love, negotiate friendships, raise children, switch careers, and cope with aging parents. Bechdel fuses high and low culture — from foreign policy to domestic routine, hot sex to postmodern theory — in a serial graphic narrative "suitable for humanists of all persuasions."
Review
"One of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period." Ms.
About the Author
Alison Bechdel's cult following for her early comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For expanded wildly for her family memoirs, the best-selling graphic memoir Fun Home, adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical, and Are You My Mother? Bechdel has been named a MacArthur Fellow and Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont, among many other honors.