The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For

For 25 years Bechdel's path-breaking "Dykes to Watch Out For" strip has been collected in award-winning volumes, syndicated in alternative newspapers, and translated into many languages. This collection gathers 60 of the newest strips.

Grin, giggle, and guffaw your way through this celebrated cartoonist's graphic commentary of contemporary lesbian life.

Alison's Bechdel's cartoons are a libidinous commentary on the tsunami of lesbian erotica surging through the culture. The familiar cast of characters will keep readers laughing as their carnal mores are revealed.

The third collection of work from Bechdel's signature comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For.

The New York Times–bestselling graphic memoir about Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home, becoming the artist her mother wanted to be. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood…and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers. A New York Times, USA Today, Time, Slate, and Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year “As complicated, brainy, inventive and satisfying as the finest prose memoirs.”—New York Times Book Review “A work of the most humane kind of genius, bravely going right to the heart of things: why we are who we are. It's also incredibly funny. And visually stunning. And page-turningly addictive. And heartbreaking.”—Jonathan Safran Foer “Many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers. Alison Bechdel has written a graphic novel about this; sort of like a comic book by Virginia Woolf. You won't believe it until you read it—and you must!”—Gloria Steinem

Grin, giggle, and guffaw your way through this celebrated cartoonist

This is the fifth collection of work from Bechdel's signature comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For. In this volume, Toni and Clarice are having a baby and of particular note is the long sequence created just for readers of Spawn--the birth itself. Where babies come from may never look the same again.

A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.

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 twelve 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.

In the tenth book in the best-selling lesbian comic series that has become an international treasure, Mo, Clarice, Lois, Sparrow and Toni square off on questions of idealism, violence, compassion, patriotism and dissent. As they hash out their ideological differences, a black-and-white world takes on surprisingly variegated shades of grey. Syndicated worldwide and in Diva magazine, this newest addition to the series is guaranteed to take the UK lesbian community by storm.