Fun Home takes on as thematic and narrative filters Albert Camus' A Happy Death (the book Bruce Bechdel was reading when he died), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Henry James's Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady, Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and Colette's Earthly Paradise, among other literary references and allusions. ...the whole story was spawned by a snapshot I found of our old babysitter lying on a hotel bed in his Jockey shorts. ...it expedited matters, because I could draw more quickly, once I had these images. At first I was resistant to the idea to using color at all, because one whole theme of the book is how my dad was such a crazy color freak and how I became a cartoonist because it was a black and white world where I didn't ever have to think about color.