Alison Bechdel: Conversations

Alison Bechdel, born in 1960, gained widespread recognition due to the immense success of her graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic in 2006 and its subsequent Tony Award-winning musical adaptation in 2009. Despite this recent popularity, Bechdel has been a prominent figure in the world of comics since the early 1980s, winning several awards including a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.

Her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For (DTWOF) was groundbreaking for its portrayal of lesbians in popular culture, establishing Bechdel as a trailblazer in LGBTQ representation. It was from this strip that the Bechdel Test, a measure of female representation in film, gained its name.

Bechdel's influence in the comics world and queer community was well established long before her mainstream success, and she now enjoys a level of fame rarely achieved by comics artists, particularly women.

The book Alison Bechdel: Conversations, spanning from 1990 to 2017, compiles twelve interviews that showcase how Bechdel incorporates her own life, relationships, and current events to shine a light on marginalized topics within the comics genre and queer culture. These interviews demonstrate her deliberate use of characters, plots, structure, and art to challenge societal norms.

Rachel R. Martin traces Bechdel's career from her early interviews on public access television and in lesser-known publications to her rise to fame with DTWOF, Fun Home, and Are You My Mother? The book includes never-before-anthologized DTWOF strips from November 2016 and March 2017, as well as detailed discussions of her creative process and future projects.

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