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Comic and Graphic Books. Fiction. HTML:From the author of Fun Home�??the lives, loves, and politics of cult fav characters Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and others For twenty-five years Bechdel's path-breaking Dykes to Watch Out For strip has been collected in award-winning volumes (with a quarter of a million copies in print), syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers, and translated into many languages. Now, at last, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For gathers a "rich, funny, deep and impossible to put down" (Publishers Weekly) selection from all eleven Dykes volumes. Here too are sixty of the newest strips, never before published in book form. Settle in to this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it "half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel") of the lives, loves, and politics of a cast of characters, most of them lesbian, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis. Her brilliantly imagined countercultural band of friends�??academics, social workers, bookstore clerks�??fall in and out of love, negotiate friendships, raise children, switch careers, and cope with aging parents. Bechdel fuses high and low culture�??from foreign policy to domestic routine, hot sex to postmodern theory�??in a serial graphic narrative "suitable for humanists of all… (more)
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Bechdel's portrayal of the east coast, left-wing, lentil eating lesbian community is always funny and often sad as the main characters grow from their politically feisty young selves into adulthood and the opportunities and responsibilities that presents.
I can't believe how much I grew to love these women (and their associated men friends, children, and parents), considering they actually say and think in much fewer words than characters in a novel. Having finished this book this afternoon I feel a bit bereft.
Now I start Digging to America for my RL book club.
I have always liked novels of character that weave in the social and political environment within which the characters interact, and, taken as a whole, "Essential Dykes to Watch Out For" is a graphic novel of character. Plus, it's well-drawn (especially after the first few years), funny, pointed, and poignant. The humour curdles in the strips drawn during 2000-2008 - neither the characters nor their author have much love for the Bush administration. This collection ends shortly before the 2008 US election. The strip is on hiatus at the moment, but if Alison Bechdel starts it up again, it will be interesting to see whether the tone lightens again.
What I find most impressive is DTWOF's appeal outside of the LGBTQ community even though most of the humor is targeted at the lesbian community. Bechdel's characters are funny and joyful companions; their personalities and their critiques can be universally applied. Unlike other comic strips found in newspapers, Bechdel's characters change and grow over time rather than exist for a punchline or two, and this volume makes their growths very clear.
While we
Speaking of growth and change, Essential Dykes (ask for it by that name at the bookstore!) allows the reader to watch Bechdel grow as a writer and an artist. Amazingly, her strengths were there from the beginning -- characterization, compassion, compression -- and over the past 25 years, she has only refined them. Skip The L Word -- or at least just find the naughty bits on YouTube -- and read this book instead.
Enjoyable and thought provoking.
By the way, Alison Bechdel is great.
The introduction is the best part, so even if you're a DTWOF veteran....
Sam asked me what I found so interesting about it. On
She's so f*ck*ng smart. I want to meet her.
I know the references to current events and GLBT issues throughout the strip have been mentioned already by scads of people,
The real pull of the book for me are the DTWOF - the characters and what happens to them. You feel a pretty strong bond with them after twenty or so strips, whether it is a positive bond ornegative, and Bechdel does a fabulous job of keeping the cliffhanger motif in comics going strong.