Sarah Carracher
News Editor
Renowned cartoonist Alison Bechdel, the artist behind the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, is set to visit the College on Oct. 17 and give a lecture entitled “Drawing Lessons: The Comics of Everyday Life.”
Bechdel, openly gay since the age of 19, kicked off her career with Dykes, which ran from 1987 to 2008 and was one of the first ongoing comic strips that focused on lesbians. Bechdel told The Rumpus last year, “There were definitely some episodes that my life did work into it, and that was kind of a breakthrough for me when I started doing that because I felt like the tone of the strip changed and … the writing got more complex.”
Dykes is also the accidental creator of the Bechdel test, which asks whether a film (or any other media) portrays two named women talking about something besides a man.
She fully ventured into autobiographical writing with her 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home, which is based on her childhood and centers on Bechdel’s complicated relationship with her father. It received wide critical acclaim, earning the number one spot on Time magazine’s “10 Best Books of the Year.” Fun Home, according to the list’s authors, is 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.”
“With my comic strip…I know what I want to say before I say it, and then I just have to figure out how to get it all in under ten panels. But with Fun Home it was the opposite,” she told Bookslut of her writing process. For Bechdel, writing became a path to understanding her own life and relationships.
“It was like discovering what I wanted to say as I went along. It was a very elusive process,” she continued. “It was actually seven years altogether that I worked on it, and it was probably not until halfway through that time that I really had a sense of the shape and structure of the book.”
Her second graphic memoir, entitled Are You My Mother? and released in May 2012, focuses on her relationship with her mother. “As I learned during the research for Are You My Mother?, and also instinctively from my experience being a human, mothers are just more difficult than fathers,” Bechdel told the Barnes & Noble Review. “It’s a much more fraught and complex relationship for everyone whether you’re male or female because this is someone who you’re physically a part of.”
Bechdel’s lecture, brought to students by the Center for Diversity and Global Engagement and the English department, will be at 7 p.m. on Oct. 17 in Ebert 223.