Reading: The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For

[white_hart]

The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For collects most of Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For comic strips. Originally published between 1987 and 2008, the strips chart the ups and downs of life in the lesbian community of a medium-size US city: relationships, breakups, careers, parenthood and much more. Over the course of more than 300 strips we get to know the characters - right-on Mo, fun-loving Lois and many others - as they age from twentysomethings to fortysomethings and the world around them changes. It was fascinating seeing the focus of the LGBT+ rights movement shift and make room for questions of gender (later strips include a trans man, and teenage trans girl, and a gender non-conforming lesbian) as well as just sexuality; it was also fascinating (and possibly a bit depressing) to see just how closely the worries and political frustrations of the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush eras mirror the current concerns of the Trump and Biden presidencies.

(The collection does not, however, include the famous strip that was the origin of the Bechdel test - that dates from an earlier era of the strip, before Bechdel switched to following the same cast of characters, and the collected volume only begins after that change.)

Comments

[lilysea]

Have you read her books Fun Home and Are You My Mother? ?

[white_hart]

I've read Fun Home, but not Are You My Mother yet.

[jinty]

Fun Home is good, but Are You My Mother rubbed me up the wrong way (lots of psychoanalytical talk). I haven't read her latest one, the one about exercising - it sounds interesting and has had good reviews. But really I think that Dykes to Watch Out For (which I read as they were published, at least from about 1990 onwards) is her best work. It just has the most in it...

[cmcmck]

I know what you mean about the world changing around you.

In the seventies, I was a very rare little flower indeed and had to keep well clear of the media.

[white_hart]

It's hard to realise how much things have changed until you look back at something like this.

[oracne]

I read these comics as they came out - you just brought back a blast of college memories!