At the end of the week in 1986, on a journey in a rented cabin with her lover, who will be soon, Alison Beshdel, a cartoonist almost unknown in her twenties in twin cities, was attacked. The next batch of “Dykes to Watch out”, a comic strip of the life of lesbians published by Bechdel for three years in alternative newspapers, was worthy, and her mind was empty as the white page spread in front of her.
“Dykes” has started as an automatic creation. Becchdel, who writes a letter to a friend, found itself suitable for margins. It was pleased with the result – a picture of a naked woman waving in a coffee bowl – she had an illustrative designation: “Dykes to see, Painb No. 27.” (The twenty -sixth of the twenty -sixth has not been invented yet. WomenewsIn the summer of 1983.
The series flow easily. Each batch was an opportunity for a new joke, a new observation – fashion, dating, public toilets, artistic excuses, and error for a man – in an era in which the popular photography of the lesbian experience was rare. (The famous Becchdel test now appears, which asks whether the film shows at least two women talking to each other about something other than a man, in a tape of 1985.) But at the end of this week in the cabin, she remembers in her experimental book “The Indelison ALison Bechdel”, she was stunned for the first time.
Bechdel soon overcame her collection and began to draw “Dykes” again, this time for more purpose. A fixed collection of characters and continuous story lines developed. She added more political comments, after women outperformed nuclear spread, eliminating the environment, and the small prospects for the liberation of the stranger in a country dominated by Republicans. Her career crossed a certain threshold of seriousness. However, it lost the innocence that did not reach the caffeine -based lesbians of the appearance of semi -conscious strokes. “I was not able at all to restore that” beginners’ mind, “Becchdel wrote,” This condition is amazing ignorance before I realized exactly how difficult I was doing. “
The work will get more difficult. As the recognition of Becchdel’s talents, its methods have become more arduous, and their theme is more painful. In 1995, “Fantasia” was presented to the readers “Factory’s Tour” showing how “Dykes” is made, and the cartoonist herself is wearing breach and chains to the painting plate, living in water and rats -covered bread. For her famous graphics notes “Fun house“From 2006, who examined her relationship with her father, a gay man who killed himself at the age of forty -four, she used an accurate action to appear (such as her father, mother, and every other character in the book) before she was a trilogy installed camera, embodying every gesture that she wanted to overcome in her towns. some Four thousand reference pictures. Form, draw, place, drawing. “It is my personal crazy,” I was told GuardianIn 2017. “I don’t feel worthy of existence unless I am working.”
“The Family Tagicomic” is an amazing intimate achievement of strange kinship between a farewell gay and his gay daughter. It is also an affirmation of highly modern principles. With precision accuracy, Becchdel Joyce, Proust, COLETTE, FAULKNER, Fitzgerrald and other authors whose father loved her, shed light on the troubled interior. When doing this, she plays herself not only from Bruce Picca, but rather an entire artistic tradition.
“Are you my mother?” It is, if possible, more intimate and more brain. Becchdel shares dreams, treatment sessions and photographs because they are a child interspersed with blocks of the text by analytical theorists such as Donald Winkot and Jack Lacan, with a highlight of related clips. (From Winnicott: “What does the mother release her to be almost perfect is an infant’s understanding.”) The self -examination of Bechdel is so naked that he provokes in the reader a painful mixture of sadness and embarrassment. In one scene, Bechdel informed her mother on the phone that she signed a contract for cartoons. “Do you mean your lesitary cartoons?” She asks her mother. With many panels of equal size, bechdel maintains the visual focus on its face because it hardens into a large group indicating that it hinders tears. Her mother continues, “I am not comfortable with her. You know that I am not.”
After “Are you my mother?” Becchdel decided to write something less torture and more optimistic. She would have done “light and enjoyable notes about my sporting life that I could take out quickly,” as you remember in the resulting book, “The Secret to Super power.” By the time when the “superpower” appeared, in 2021, he became emotional contemplation of deaths, nature and transgression, while sending Emerson, Werzworth and Margaret Fuller. One questionIn this magazine, if Bechdel “is constitutionally unable to write” light and enjoyable notes “, indicating the concrete anxiety that prompted the cartoonist to continue the details” until the entire human condition is calculated. “
With her new graphic novel, “Spent((Mariner), Becchdel seems to try again to try a fun and fun book to write. This time, I have ever approached to pull it. ” He was spent, “The IUD, with a sprayed spray, in order to be absent from the early partner of Bechdel. The best of Alison’s friends are characters from” Dykes “: Giner, Lois, Sparrow, and Stuart, now on the other side of the middle age, and they still live together in the same family that the fans of the tape left in the two shelters.
“SEND” narrated in the third person, the first sign of the reader that the novel, unlike Becchdel, creates a world of self -scene, not self -detection. “Alison Bingal wakes up from a turbulent dream,” Betchel writes near the beginning; Despite the resonance of “Kafka’s transformation”, the novel appears to be a world in which dreams leave dreams. “Alison Behendel” is concerned about its consumer elegance, its loss of youth idealism, and the cost of Shantleli mushrooms in local work. She and her partner Holly operate a goat dwarf, and there are a lot of broadcast mouths to feed. She fears her tense relationship with her sister Sheila, who has become a passionate supporter Trump. (When you call Sheila, we see the ropes cut from the “psychological” shower scene suspended in the air: “Sheila’s private tone.”) Above all, it revolves around her work. With success, alienation came.
Alison’s penetration was the work that pushes home, accountability, and feed goats-graphic notes of her father called “death and embalming” that was adapted to a ridiculous TV program that includes Dragons, Alia Al-Banima, and Benedict Combrush. (Excerpts from the notes produce a bleak tone and blue wash for “Home Home”, but here the drama focuses on sexual confidentiality but on vegetarianism.) Now you need to write a follow -up. I signed a book contract with a group called Megalopub. (“Isn’t it owned by the conservative media singer who destroyed American democracy?” Alison asks her agent. “I would like to see you at least five platforms, including Tiktok, and publish several times a week,” Chloe recommends. “There is no way,” Alison is scrambling, “notes by an activist in the care of lesbian goats will sell one million copies.”
