Bechdel, Alison. Dykes to Watch Out For.
--. Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. New York: HMH Books, 2008.
Alison Bechdel is an American cartoonist and author. Her weekly strip, Dykes to Watch Out For ran for 25 years, from 1983 through 2006, and was printed in many college-town alternative newspapers, a number of gay and lesbian papers, as well as on the Internet. In The New York Times, Dwight Gardner regarded the comic strip as one of the earliest ongoing representations of lesbians in popular culture and has been called “as important to new generations of lesbians as landmark novels” (2008).
In 2008, Dykes to Watch Out For was compiled as an anthology collection Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. It subsequently won the Ferro-Grumley Award for LBGT fiction in 2009. Bechdel won the MacArthur grant, that gifted her $625,000 paid out over the course of a five-year period. Additionally, Bechdel’s graphic novel memoir Fun Home won the 2006 Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award, a Lambda award, an Eisner, and the Stonewall Book Award-Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award from the American Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table. Fun Home has been adapted into a staged musical that recently opened on Broadway.
Dykes to Watch Out For is an ongoing comic strip that chronicles the lives of a group of lesbian friends over 20-years, as they go through the travails of life, love, work, boredom, political activism, and as they suffer and survive countless reversals of fortune. The six characters are Lois, a gender-bending feminist bookstore clerk and her two roommates, academic Ginger and "bisexual lesbian" Sparrow, their partnered friends Clarice and Toni; and Mo a politically charged neurotic. The series captures the zeitgeist of lesbian culture and expresses lesbian thought over the course of two and a half decades. In this way, Dykes to Watch Out For serves as a type of historical texts for the LBGTQ community. In a review of Dykes to Watch Out For, Breanna Smith describes how Bechdel's seem real “because they are us. Black, Latina, Asian, white, disabled, trans, eco, consumerist, feminist, academic, bisexual, activist--they are as varied as we are” (n.p.).
Dykes to Watch Out For is renowned for its depiction of the everyday lives of lesbians in the United States and is considered a reliable archive of the LBGTQ community since the early 1980s. Bechdel is also the author of the award-winning graphic novel memoir Fun Home, and Are You My Mother?. Dykes To Watch Out For is largely considered a countercultural institution among lesbians, and discerning non-lesbians. Her more recent, darkly humorous graphic memoirs about her family have forged an unlikely intimacy with an even wider range of readers.
In “Women on Women: Lesbian Identity, Lesbian Community, and Lesbian Comics,” Adrienne Shaw suggests that cultural texts connect "imagined communities" that "signify communal potential and even produce (at least fleetingly) the symbolic bonds they appear only to represent" (89). Shaw defines Bechdel and DiMassa's work as creating texts that portray a group rarely made visible; they make lesbians more visible and give visibility to lesbian culture (89-90). Shaw further explains how Bechdel's work confronts the difficulty of defining communities and identities, and as such presents a richly diverse and inclusive community (93). As such, Bechdel's work offers heterogeous visibility and self-conscious reflexivity.
Of her process, Bechdel has stated that it takes her a long tome to draw often taking several days to illustrate a strip (Smith, n.p.). Bechdel explains, “I write the strip in Illustrator, on my computer, so I can map it all out in terms of the panels and the speech balloons, and I have an idea of how the action is going to break down. I might do a little bit of rough sketching if I’m having trouble visualizing something. But I don’t really do any sketching until I’ve got it pretty much written. Then I begin my complicated, anal, many-layered process of sketching and revising and revising and revising. You know, maybe I should do more drawing earlier in the process. Because I keep writing myself into these incredibly complex panels where I have to draw six characters all interacting in a particular way against a complicated backdrop, doing activities that entail a huge amount of visual research” (Smith, n.p.). Bechdel draws in black and white with clean lines and a cartoonish style. She has stated that she does not like color and was reluctant to use the blue wash in Fun Home (Smith, n.p.). Her characters are carefully rendered with a great deal of attention to the small details. Overall, her characters are drawn with expert nuance. Bechdel is excellent at conveying emotion in the faces of her characters.
Bechdel’s work is well suited to both academic and public libraries, as well as in LBGTQ community libraries and collectives, alternative bookstores, and on women’s studies, lesbian studies, and gender studies syllabi.
--. Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. New York: HMH Books, 2008.
Alison Bechdel is an American cartoonist and author. Her weekly strip, Dykes to Watch Out For ran for 25 years, from 1983 through 2006, and was printed in many college-town alternative newspapers, a number of gay and lesbian papers, as well as on the Internet. In The New York Times, Dwight Gardner regarded the comic strip as one of the earliest ongoing representations of lesbians in popular culture and has been called “as important to new generations of lesbians as landmark novels” (2008).
In 2008, Dykes to Watch Out For was compiled as an anthology collection Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. It subsequently won the Ferro-Grumley Award for LBGT fiction in 2009. Bechdel won the MacArthur grant, that gifted her $625,000 paid out over the course of a five-year period. Additionally, Bechdel’s graphic novel memoir Fun Home won the 2006 Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award, a Lambda award, an Eisner, and the Stonewall Book Award-Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award from the American Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table. Fun Home has been adapted into a staged musical that recently opened on Broadway.
Dykes to Watch Out For is an ongoing comic strip that chronicles the lives of a group of lesbian friends over 20-years, as they go through the travails of life, love, work, boredom, political activism, and as they suffer and survive countless reversals of fortune. The six characters are Lois, a gender-bending feminist bookstore clerk and her two roommates, academic Ginger and "bisexual lesbian" Sparrow, their partnered friends Clarice and Toni; and Mo a politically charged neurotic. The series captures the zeitgeist of lesbian culture and expresses lesbian thought over the course of two and a half decades. In this way, Dykes to Watch Out For serves as a type of historical texts for the LBGTQ community. In a review of Dykes to Watch Out For, Breanna Smith describes how Bechdel's seem real “because they are us. Black, Latina, Asian, white, disabled, trans, eco, consumerist, feminist, academic, bisexual, activist--they are as varied as we are” (n.p.).
Dykes to Watch Out For is renowned for its depiction of the everyday lives of lesbians in the United States and is considered a reliable archive of the LBGTQ community since the early 1980s. Bechdel is also the author of the award-winning graphic novel memoir Fun Home, and Are You My Mother?. Dykes To Watch Out For is largely considered a countercultural institution among lesbians, and discerning non-lesbians. Her more recent, darkly humorous graphic memoirs about her family have forged an unlikely intimacy with an even wider range of readers.
In “Women on Women: Lesbian Identity, Lesbian Community, and Lesbian Comics,” Adrienne Shaw suggests that cultural texts connect "imagined communities" that "signify communal potential and even produce (at least fleetingly) the symbolic bonds they appear only to represent" (89). Shaw defines Bechdel and DiMassa's work as creating texts that portray a group rarely made visible; they make lesbians more visible and give visibility to lesbian culture (89-90). Shaw further explains how Bechdel's work confronts the difficulty of defining communities and identities, and as such presents a richly diverse and inclusive community (93). As such, Bechdel's work offers heterogeous visibility and self-conscious reflexivity.
Of her process, Bechdel has stated that it takes her a long tome to draw often taking several days to illustrate a strip (Smith, n.p.). Bechdel explains, “I write the strip in Illustrator, on my computer, so I can map it all out in terms of the panels and the speech balloons, and I have an idea of how the action is going to break down. I might do a little bit of rough sketching if I’m having trouble visualizing something. But I don’t really do any sketching until I’ve got it pretty much written. Then I begin my complicated, anal, many-layered process of sketching and revising and revising and revising. You know, maybe I should do more drawing earlier in the process. Because I keep writing myself into these incredibly complex panels where I have to draw six characters all interacting in a particular way against a complicated backdrop, doing activities that entail a huge amount of visual research” (Smith, n.p.). Bechdel draws in black and white with clean lines and a cartoonish style. She has stated that she does not like color and was reluctant to use the blue wash in Fun Home (Smith, n.p.). Her characters are carefully rendered with a great deal of attention to the small details. Overall, her characters are drawn with expert nuance. Bechdel is excellent at conveying emotion in the faces of her characters.
Bechdel’s work is well suited to both academic and public libraries, as well as in LBGTQ community libraries and collectives, alternative bookstores, and on women’s studies, lesbian studies, and gender studies syllabi.