WCAX.COM Local Vermont News, Weather and Sports-Drawn Here, Part 7

Drawn Here, Part 7

Bolton, Vermont - May 17, 2007

For many artists, solitary confinement is just another day at the office. Long hours, scratching out a living, alone. Alison Bechdel chuckles, asking, "Do I look like a monk in a monastery? Sometimes that's what I feel like!"

But if isolation is what Bechdel chose for her career, it's also why she chose it. She says, "It's just important to see yourself reflected in the world."

In college, she acknowledged and accepted she was a lesbian. But appreciating it was difficult. She rarely found mass media role models who looked like her, or who shared her experiences. She says, "I wanted to see that."

So Bechdel used her self-taught drawing skills to launch the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. It's an illustrated soap opera with mostly lesbian characters who struggle, laugh, debate the day's issues, and age together. The artist remembers, "People really liked it. I had a small but loyal following for a long time."

Now twenty-five years old, the strip appears in fifty publications nationwide, mostly gay and lesbian newspapers and Burlington's alternative weekly Seven Days. She says, "I prefer the grassroots, do-it-yourself kind of culture."

The Pennsylvania native was "Drawn Here" to Bolton in 1991. She says, "I love living in Vermont because I can live in the country and have a socially progressive atmosphere."

That atmosphere inspires her work. Following the state's landmark civil unions law, some of Bechdel's characters took a trip north for a ceremony. The two-tone drawings addressed issues that, here, were anything but black and white. As the couple drove past "Take Back Vermont" signs, just as the artist did in her daily life, the women were reminded acceptance of civil unions was far from unanimous.

Since then, Bechdel explains, "My audience has gotten broader. A lot of men read it. A lot of politically progressive people read it who aren't necessarily gay or lesbian."

That's driven sales of Dykes to Watch Out For anthologies. More than a quarter-million copies are in print in several languages. Still, Bechdel's success was mostly underground until Fun Home.

Bechdel says, "It's a story I've wanted to tell for a long time. It's a very complex story about growing up with my closeted gay dad."

The illustrated memoir spent two weeks atop the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, earning glowing reviews from mainstream magazines including Time and Entertainment Weekly. It is proof cartoons aren't just for kids.

Bechdel explains, "Because comics have pictures, they've been perceived as low-brow, as anti-intellectual, sort of for children. But there's this great potential to tell really complex, nuanced, new kinds of narratives."

Her drawings don't just illustrate Fun Home, they push it forward. While Alison and her father discuss homosexuality, the reader sees both their strained dialogue and its impact on the Bechdels' faces. Linking text and pictures animates the story's car ride, and the awkward coming-out conversation.

Fun Home made headlines last year when it was yanked from a Missouri library because of its adult themes. Some complained that was censorship, and the book was returned to the shelf this Spring.

Bechdel is now working on another full-length book about her love life. She says, "I like the challenge I have working autobiographically."

It'll mean scaling back Dykes to Watch Out For from a bi-monthly to a monthly. Fun Home took seven years to produce, but this new project is due in 2009. Bechdel says, "I think I can do it. I just have to knuckle down."

It'll mean more long hours in her studio alone. But she no longer feels socially isolated. The cartoonist states, "It's become much more easy to be gay."

In part because of more media representation now than ever. Representation she's helped grow. To the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities, this cartoonist is a superhero.

To visit Alison Bechdel's blog, where you can read some of her comic strips, follow the link above.

Jack Thurston - WCAX News