Bechdel's father, Bruce, was gay (as she puts it: "a manic-depressive, closeted fag"), and "Fun Home" is at its heart a story about a daughter trying to understand her father through the common and unspoken bond of their homosexuality. The artist's work is so absorbing you feel you are living in her world.īechdel is known to readers of the indie press as the author of a long-running comic strip called "Dykes to Watch Out For" - a Sapphic "Doonesbury" serialized in 50 alternative newspapers and collected in multiple volumes, with titles like "Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life Forms to Watch Out For" and "Hot, Throbbing Dykes to Watch Out For." She's a lesbian, and sexuality looms large in her memoir. You can read "Fun Home" in a sitting, or get lost in the pictures within the pictures on its pages. She has obviously spent years getting this memoir right, and it shows.
Big words, too! In 232 pages this memoir sent me to the dictionary five separate times (to look up "bargeboard," "buss," "scutwork," "humectant" and "perseverated").Ī comic book for lovers of words! Bechdel's rich language and precise images combine to create a lush piece of work - a memoir where concision and detail are melded for maximum, obsessive density. But "Fun Home" quietly succeeds in telling a story, not only through well-crafted images but through words that are equally revealing and well chosen. Very few cartoonists can also write - or, if they can, they manage only to hit a few familiar notes. Generally this is where graphic narratives stumble. Crumb with a seriousness, emotional complexity and innovation completely its own. It is a pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics and memoir) in multiple new directions, with panels that combine the detail and technical proficiency of R. If the theoretical value of a picture is still holding steady at a thousand words, then Alison Bechdel's slim yet Proustian graphic memoir, "Fun Home," must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced.
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