All eventually end up a little more haggard than they began, but there isn’t one whose Bechdel-illustrated bags under her eyes were not hard fought for and hard won. What cannot be overemphasized is the sheer scope of the collection, which follows these women from idealistic young adulthood to contentedly disillusioned middle age and, for some, parenthood. Late in the collection, when a character receives treatment for cancer, a tiny caret in her cheek is enough to transform her from a fresh-faced mischief-maker into a sallow and frightened chemo patient. Facial expressions are carefully nuanced, and she seems to take great joy in using small details to differentiate emotions.
These characters, flawed but endearing, are brought to life by Bechdel’s quirky artistic sensibility. At its heart are six women: the promiscuous Lois, a feminist bookstore clerk with a penchant for gender-bending her two roommates, the overworked academic Ginger and self-identified “bisexual lesbian” Sparrow their domestically partnered friends Clarice and Toni and Mo, who despite (or perhaps because of) her frequent politically charged outbursts of neurosis is the hub of her circle. Her brilliantly imagined countercultural band of friends - academics, social workers, bookstore clerks - fall in and out of love, negotiate friendships, raise children, switch careers, and cope with aging parents.īechdel fuses high and low culture - from foreign policy to domestic routine, hot sex to postmodern theory - in a serial graphic narrative “suitable for humanists of all persuasions.This ongoing comic strip chronicles the lives of a tight-knit group of lesbian friends over an astounding 21 years of life, work, love, boredom, political activism and countless reversals of fortune. Settle in to this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it “half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel”) of the lives, loves, and politics of a cast of characters, most of them lesbian, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis. Here too are sixty of the newest strips, never before published in book form. Now, at last, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For gathers a “rich, funny, deep and impossible to put down” (Publishers Weekly) selection from all eleven Dykes volumes. The essential dykes to watch out for Alison Bechdel Resource Type: Book (Print/Paper) Publication: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008 Availability Location Call Number Availability Request PN6728.D94 B475 2008 c. From the author of Fun Home - the lives, loves, and politics of cult fav characters Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and othersįor twenty-five years Bechdel’s path-breaking Dykes to Watch Out For strip has been collected in award-winning volumes (with a quarter of a million copies in print), syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers, and translated into many languages.
0 kommentar(er)
