Comic Relief Grossman, Lev
Time,
05/2012, Letnik:
179, Številka:
18
Book Review, Magazine Article
Grossman features American cartoonist Alison Bechdel. In Bechdel's work that distance stands in for the gap between reality and appearance, meaning and symbol, what people think and what they say and ...do. In her family, that gap was alarmingly wide.
With Fun Home (2006), the cartoonist of the long-running strip Dykes to Watch Out For gave readers a compelling narrative of how she was both formed and misinformed by literature, feminist politics, ...family dynamics, and her father's visual legacy. She goes well beyond this in her new graphic memoir.
This annual collection embraces the subjectivity that is bound to tint any "best" list by inviting a new guest editor each year to winnow down the final picks from a pool curated by the perennial ...helmsmen Jessica Abel and Matt Madden.
The greatest lesbian soap opera - 527 episodes and, though suspended at the moment, counting - is Alison Bechdel's miraculously well-sustained chronicling of a circle of friends over the course of 20 ...years, Dykes to Watch Out For. Like its only possible peer among current comic strips, Lynn Johnston's For Better orWorse, and its great forebear, Frank King's Gasoline Alley, Dykes plays out in real time.
The twelve interviewees-Scott McCloud, Charles Burns, Lynda Barry, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Phoebe Gloeckner, Joe Sacco, Alison Bechdel, Françoise Mouly, Adrian Tomine, Art Spiegelman, ...and Chris Ware-represent a particular kind of contemporary cartoonist who acts as both writer and artist, a fact that Chute readily acknowledges in the introduction. The wide-ranging interview with Bechdel covers both Fun Home and Are You My Mother? (just out at the time of the interview), delving into not only her processes in creating both texts, but also issues such as archival research, confidentiality, representation in photography and drawing, the physicality of the drawn image, and the blurring of the public and private in autobiography.
Alison Bechdel Comes of Age Booth, Rosemary
The Gay & lesbian review worldwide,
01/2018, Letnik:
25, Številka:
1
Magazine Article
"Medium Alison," a student at Oberlin College, adds anxious worries about her sexual identity to the mix of volatility and confusion surrounding her father, who has kept his gay self secret while ...living the life of a high school English teacher, part-time mortician, husband to Helen, and parent of Alison and her two younger brothers. The musical, on the other hand, displays not thoughts or images but behavior: it uses actors to tell the story. ...while detailed drawings are largely missing from the show, the musical exploits selected images from the original as metaphors. ...there are many captivating numbers, including the family's wry song of introduction that's reprised at the end, "Welcome to Our House on Maple Avenue"; Helen's despairing lament when she realizes her marriage is coming apart, "Days and Days"; the poignant lullaby "Pony Girl" that Bruce sings to Alison before he goes off cruising during a trip to New York; the full company's fantastic "Raincoat of Love"-which is sung with disco lights streaming across stage back; and collegiate Alison's declarative solo, after she and Joan make love for the first time, that she is a real lesbian after all: "I'm Changing My Major to Joan!" After winding up its tour of twenty U.S. cities in 2017, the Fun Home cast is scheduled for engagements in Barcelona, Tokyo, and London in the coming months.
