Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

I'm a big fan of what you might call literary comics or graphic novels. No, I don't mean superhero stories. I'm talking about modern comics that are more related to the underground comics of the 60s and 70s than the DC or Marvel books of our childhood.

In time, I plan to discuss many of my personal favorites, like Dan Clowes' Ghost World, Art Spiegelman's Maus, and Paul Hornschemeier's Mother Come Home. But today I want to talk about a fine book I have just finished reading.

Alison Bechdel is a 49 year old Pennsylvania cartoonist best known for the long-running strip Dykes To Watch Out For. In her 2006 memoir Fun Home, Bechdel describes her teenage discovery that she is a lesbian and that her father was a closeted homosexual. Fun Home is brutally honest, funny, confessional, heartbreaking. A great introduction to the art of telling an adult story with words and pictures. I checked the book out of CALS, but it's available for $10 from Amazon. You can read a few pages at the link above.

Click this image to enlarge:



Here's a little video of Bechdel at work:



If you haven't read a literary comic, I beg you to give this genre a try. It's hard to explain, but the experience of reading a really good one is a profound discovery, like the first time you saw a really good movie and realized they could be more than Adam Sandler and Sly Stallone. Finding one or more of the books mentioned above at your local library would be a good place to start.