Alison_Bechdel

Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel (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 autobiographical graphic memoir Fun Home.

Biography

Alison Bechdel was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania to Roman Catholic parents who were teachers; her family also owned and operated a funeral home. In 1981 she graduated from Oberlin College, having transferred from Simon's Rock College, and moved to New York City. She applied to many art schools but was rejected and worked in a number of office jobs in the publishing industry.

According to The Indelible Alison Bechdel (see "Books", below), 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". An acquaintance recommended she send her work to Womannews newspaper, which began to publish the strip regularly beginning with the July—August 1983 issue. 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. Bechdel introduced her regular characters, Mo and her friends, in 1987 while living in St. Paul, Minnesota. She became a full-time cartoonist in 1990 and later moved near Burlington, Vermont.

In addition to Dykes to Watch Out For, Bechdel has also written and drawn autobiographical strips and has done illustrations for magazines and websites. 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.

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.

In November 2006 Bechdel was invited to sit on the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.

Bechdel's brother is keyboard player John Bechdel, who has worked with many bands including Ministry.

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.

Fun Home has been hailed as one of the best books of 2006 by numerous sources, including The New York Times, amazon.com, The Times of London, Publishers Weekly,, salon.com, New York magazine, and Entertainment Weekly.

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 "[t]he 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.

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

Future

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. This will focus on Bechdel's relationships; Bechdel describes its themes as "the self, subjectivity, desire, the nature of reality, that sort of thing".

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)
Split-Level Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 1998, ISBN 1-56341-102-4)
Hot, Throbbing Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books, 1997, ISBN 1-56341-086-9)
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)

Graphic Memoir

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton Mifflin, 2006, ISBN 0-618-47794-2)

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)