Alison Bechdel: Conversations

by Rachel R. Martin (Editor)

Overview

Due to the huge success of her graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic in 2006 and its subsequent Tony Award-winning musical adaptation in 2009, Alison Bechdel (b. 1960) has recently become a household name. However, Bechdel, who has won numerous awards including a MacArthur Fellowship, has been writing and drawing comics since the early 1980s. Her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For (DTWOF) stood out as one of the first to depict lesbians in popular culture and is widely hailed as an essential LGBTQ resource.

It is also from this comic strip that the wildly popular Bechdel Test--a test to gauge positive female representation in film--obtained its name. While DTWOF secured Bechdel's role in the comics world and queer community long before her mainstream success, Bechdel now experiences notoriety that few comics artists ever achieve and that women cartoonists have never attained.

Spanning from 1990 to 2017, Alison Bechdel: Conversations collects ten interviews that illustrate how Bechdel uses her own life, relationships, and contemporary events to expose the world to what she has referred to as the "fringes of acceptability"--the comics genre as well as queer culture and identity. These interviews reveal her intentionality in the use of characters, plots, structure, and cartooning to draw her readers toward disrupting the status quo.

Starting with her earliest interviews on public access television and in little-known comics and queer presses, Rachel R. Martin traces Bechdel's career from her days with DTWOF to her popularity with Fun Home and Are You My Mother? This volume includes her "one-off" DTWOF strips from November 2016 and March 2017 (not anthologized anywhere else) and in-depth discussions of her laborious creative process as well as upcoming projects.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496819277
Publisher:	University Press of Mississippi
Publication date:	10/05/2018
Series:	Conversations with Comic Artists Series
Edition description:	Paper
Pages:	162
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.01(d)

About the Author

Rachel R. Martin is assistant professor of English and humanities at Northern Virginia Community College in Alexandria, Virginia. She has published scholarly work in Feminisms in the World of Neil Gaiman: Essays on the Comics, Poetry and Prose and Women's Rights: Reflections in Popular Culture. Her creative writing has appeared in So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Arts.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Chronology xxxii

Interview with Alison Bechdel: Writer and Lesbian Cartoonist Chris Dodge/1990 3

Alison Bechdel Anne Rubhenstein/1995 16

Sing Lesbian Cat, Fly Lesbian Seagull: Interview with Alison Bechdel Wesley Joost/2000 35

An Interview with Alison Bechdel John Zuarino/2007 39

Stuck in Vermont-Alison Bechdel Eva Sollberger/2008 45

A Conversation with Alison Bechdel Roxanne Samer/2010 50

Writers on the Fly: Alison Bechdel Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature/2010 61

The Rumpus Interview with Alison Bechdel-Sections II-X MariNaomi/2012 64

Book News: A Q&A with Alison Bechdel, Cartoonist and MacArthur Winner Annalisa Quinn/2014 72

Lesbian Cartoonist Alison Bechdel Countered Dad's Secrecy by Being Out and Open Terry Gross/2015 75

Stuck in Vermont-Alison Bedchel's Fun Home on Broadway Eva Sollberger/2015 91

Alison Bechdel, Onstage and on Recode Decode Kara Swisher/2017 96

Index 115