Bechdelian resources

Here's a multimedia roundup of Fun Home information.

First, some stuff to read:

The Wikipedia entry on Alison Bechdel is pretty good. Here you will learn useful things and fun trivia such as Bechdel is a member of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and her baby brother John is now a keyboardist who's played with Ministry, Fear Factory, Prong and Killing Joke among other bands.

Alison Bechdel's blog is a compendium of useful items: an archive of her comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, information about other past and future projects, links to reviews about Fun Home and so on. There you can find things like this, a short bit she wrote for Slate about talking to her mother about Fun Home (you'll find other discussion about her family in just about every interview linked to in this post as well).

Want to see how academics have treated Fun Home? Here are links to three downloadable .pdf's of papers presented at a scholarly conference in France: Double Trajectories: Crossing Lines in Fun Home, by Karim Chabani, Images as Paratext in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, by Agnes Muller and Drag as Metaphor and the Quest for Meaning in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, a Family Tragicomic, by Helene Tison.

In 2006 Time Magazine picked Fun Home as the best book of the year. Not as the best comic book or graphic novel, or fiction or memoir, but best BOOK period.

Here's some interesting reviews: a review from the blog, Sequential Tart, by JoAnne Ruvoli, and A Graphic Review of a Graphic Memoir, by Dinty W. Moore.

Here is a two part interview with Bechdel, Alison Bechdel's Big Kiss.



In Part Two she talks about her drawing process and reflects on the status of "cartoon narratives."



Here's a short YouTube video of Alison Bechdel drawing the wallpaper endpapers of Fun Home:



And here she talks about her process of drawing many of the scenes in the book by acting out and photographing herself in many of the character's roles (adding more to the many uses of photography in Fun Home):



Her short YouTube video, The Memoirist's Lament is not about Fun Home per se, but perhaps you'll find her remarks on memory of interest:



A nice little bit of autobiographical video on the ephemeral status of drawing....




In 2013 Fun Home was adapted as a stage musical. Although Bechdel had no hand in the writing of the script or libretto, she gave her blessing to the project which was extremely well received and is currently playing on Broadway. 

And last March, the South Carolina legislature confiscated $52,000 from the budget of the College of Charleston because Fun Home was included in a summer reading program. This article details how
South Carolina Representative Garry Smith doesn’t believe the memoir introduces themes for scholarly consideration. “It goes beyond the pale of academic debate,” he said. "It graphically shows lesbian acts.”

Of course, Fun Home is not only one of the most critically lauded of recent memoirs, it has been praised in mainstream media and been the subject of academic discussion in scholarly journals and academic conferences world wide for nearly a decade. Probably the best indication of its less than "shocking" status is that it has even been excerpted for use in Freshman Composition textbooks, including the one I've taught from for the last five years.

I met Alison last April at a benefit for the Comics Defense League. Here is a picture of her with Howard Cruse, creator of the first gay comic, "Wendel," and Chip Kidd, graphic artist and book jacket designer par excellence.