Welcome to Madinkbeard. If you enjoy this post you could subscribe to the RSS feed to receive upcoming posts or browse the archives to see past posts. I also create webcomics.
June 5th, 2006
My review of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) is up at The Quarterly Conversation.
Here’s last para if you want to skip to the recommendation part:
Although Bechdel’s name is familiar to me, I must admit that this is the first work of hers I’ve seen. I’ll further admit that Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic makes it glaringly obvious that she is an artist I should have been paying attention to. This is a graphic novel autobiography that easily rivals the best works in the field.
Related Posts
One Response to “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic”
Leave a Reply
Bechdel is indeed terrific. (I just finished the book, have a half-review on my computer I’m not sure if I’ll finish or not.)
But the rest of her work is a bit uneven. The short version is that her comics strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, gets better and better as time goes on. The early versions have neither the narrative nor (especially) the artistic sophistication of her later work (which, in my view, equals the extraordinary Fun Home). The question of where to start depends, basically, on how low down you’re willing to follow her. Her serial narrative (going for more than twenty years now) began in the second collection, More Dykes to Watch Out For; if you want to begin at the beginning, that’s a good place to start. (The first volume is miscellaneous individual strips.) But if the simple art/story turns you off, then skip to a later book — the latter the better, really, although the last few books are all equally wonderful IMHO.