"When I grew up, I studied karate for years. I got pretty strong, but eventually I had to acknowledge that I really didn't like fighting at all, so I quit." -- 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 graphic memoir Fun Home.
"And partly, the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me.""Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.""But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu.""But mostly, it's a book about my relationship with my father.""Even drawing gray hair at all is difficult to render in black and white.""For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me.""I don't know, maybe it's because I was raised Catholic. Confession has always held a great appeal for me.""I get a lot of mail from men who really identify with Stuart, you know, Sparrow's boyfriend. I love that. Even though I used to say I wanted men to read the strip even though there weren't any men in it, so they'd be forced to identify with the women.""I hope that I can get people to read it without having to change it. Especially now that the strip has more different kinds of characters. It's really not all lesbians any more.""I just have this sort of entrepreneurial spirit and I work really hard at promoting myself.""I just met someone who read Gone With the Wind 62 times for exactly that same reason. She couldn't bear that it wasn't real. She wanted to live in it.""I love Jules Feiffer. I didn't discover him until I was a little older.""I never really read superhero stuff as a kid.""I probably read Harriet the Spy about 70,000 times.""I started to get bored with that stuff about only drawing men and I've taken it out of the slideshow.""I'm pretty illiterate when it comes to comics history.""It's a hard thing to age a character because you can't really suddenly give someone gray hair.""It's definitely part of it, that the men were having fun and doing the interesting things but also, I don't know, I'm just thinking more about gender and how maybe in some way I am more of a boy than a girl.""Mostly it was Mad magazine. And I did read a lot of - I had a subscription when I was little, but I also had access to some old collections, the little paperbacks of the really good stuff.""My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up.""Nancy Drew was always changing her outfits. I despised girls' clothing, I couldn't wait to get home from school and get out of it. The last thing I wanted to read was minute descriptions of Nancy's frocks.""One of them is already having some menopausal symptoms. I'm working on that. I'm giving them all little lines under the eyes, trying to sort of make them age gracefully.""Partly I resented being perceived as weak because I was a girl.""People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.""Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.""That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project.""The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence.""Watching everyone root through their psyche, it just delights me. Especially R. Crumb's stuff.""Well, I'm always working on my comic strip and trying to, you know, keep cranking that out.""When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults.""Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now.""Yeah, I read Judy Blume. My mother didn't like that, but I read it anyhow."
Alison Bechdel was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania to Roman Catholic parents who were teachers. Her family also owned and operated a funeral home. She attended Simon's Rock College and then Oberlin College, graduating in 1981. She 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". An acquaintance recommended she send her work to Womannews, a 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. She currently resides in Bolton, Vermont.
Dykes to Watch Out For is the origin of the Bechdel test.
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.
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 was 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 "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."
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.
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. It will focus on Bechdel's relationships. Bechdel describes its themes as "the self, subjectivity, desire, the nature of reality, that sort of thing".
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)
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (Houghton Mifflin, 2008, ISBN 0-61896-880-6), a compendium containing the vast majority of the strips in all previous collections as well as all 2005-2008 strips not previously published
Graphic memoir
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)
"Vermont" in State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, Ecco, 2008, ISBN 978-0061470905
