Wimmen In Comics Wednesday: Alison Bechdel

Today, I celebrate my biggest crush and comics idol. If you haven’t heard of this certified genius, she’s certainly an artist to watch out for.

I first encountered Alison Bechdel during my junior year of college. It was a squishy time, full of confused feelings and cheap, toxic lipstick; I was about to turn 21, and, like I always do, I loaded down this milestone with more meaning that it deserved.

My academic life, however, offered small pockets of hope, and I was settling into my Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies more gracefully than I expected (though calling it graceful might be one hell of a gentle stretch). I’d found my people, and in a fucking brilliant course on women’s lives in alternative texts taught by Dr. Rachel Marie-Crane Williams, I found Alison Bechdel. A heightened sense of squishiness ensued.

Reading Fun Home for the first time totally altered my life. I remember cracking it open at a coffee shop in downtown Iowa City around 8 a.m. and skipping all of my classes for the rest of the day so I could read. The book rattled me, and when combined with my raging caffeine addiction, woke me the hell up. I’d always dismissed writing about my relationships with my parents — “too girly,” “inconsequential,” “self-absorbed,” “whiny,” said the voice in my head — but here was someone who had the gall to do what I was afraid of and do it stupid-well.

In short, the graphic autobiography (it’s not a novel, even though I keep wanting to call it a graphic novel) chronicles Bechdel’s relationship with her closeted father and traces how her own queer sexuality bumps against it as she grows up. Just read it, okay?

Fun Home seemed like a divine intervention via syllabus. When I first read it, I was also at a point where my sexuality was foggy, and I kinda entered a deep, dark place of denial. The gal I’d eventually marry had hit on me the summer before, and it surprised the living daylights out of me when I didn’t completely reject her flirtation (again, the keyword here is “squishy,” complete and utter squishiness). I found a comfort in reading Fun Home — not because I was finally seeing my sexuality represented in a book, but because Bechdel allowed herself complications as a human, daughter, partner, and artist that were often messy and mythological in proportion. I dug the sheer size of this narrative and felt inspired to let myself take up more room as creator while using my work to explore sexuality and gender. There’s an unsurprising amount of misogyny in creative writing, one that silences or dismisses the experiences of women and nonbinary folks, so it was YUGE for me to see another writer basically give those ideas the finger.

When I finally began to very sloppily come out — or at least tiptoe at the threshold of the closet—I picked up Bechdel’s older work, Dykes To Watch Out For.

Originally published weekly in small alternative newspapers, Dykes began back during the Reagan era and follows a group of left-of-center queers in real time to the first Obama election. As as series, it’s essentially one of queer history’s most important primary documents.

It offered me even more comfort. As a to-the-left-to-the-left emerging feminist with a sudden sense of pansexual tendencies and a job of the neighborhood food co-op, I found joy in seeing that other people shared my perspectives and that none of the things I was thinking about were new. I spent most of my free time at the Iowa City Public Library with Bechdel, quietly trying to figure out what the heck was going on in my head and heart.

Though I am now at a point where I feel more confident in my place as a writer and artist, I still reread Fun Home every January as a litmus test of sorts—where am I now? Is this still important to me? What do I make of Bechdel now? I always end up with the same reaction.