THE ESSENTIAL DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR

Before Alison Bechdel splashed into the national consciousness with her 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home, she drew a weekly comic strip for alternative newspapers called Dykes to Watch Out For. She drew it for 25 years, from 1983 to 2008, and then on May 10, 2008, she discontinued the strip, putting it on indefinite hiatus in order to complete another graphic memoir, Love Life. The roundly applauded Fun Home doubtless suggested that she should devote her creative energies to a form that was more convivial to her talent than a weekly comic strip.

The strip was one of the earliest ongoing popular culture representations of lesbian life. The dust jacket flap of The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (415 8x9-inch pages, b/w; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hardback, $25) reports that it has been collected in award-winning volumes, syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers and translated into many languages. And although Bechdel was adept at the episodic serial narrative form, in the long form Fun Home she could invest her story with nuances and literate allusions that are easily lost from week to week in a serial vehicle, and she undoubtedly discovered that she enjoyed exploring the long form with its great array of possibilities more than weekly comic stripping. Love Life, to the best of my knowledge, isn’t out yet; but while we’re waiting, we can enjoy The Essential Dykes.

Notice that the book is entitled “the essential dykes,” not “the complete dykes.” For 25 complete years of a weekly strip, we’d need a tome of 1,300 pages; this one has just a third of that, but it’s a highly representative third.

The collection begins with strips from 1987, not 1983. In the early years of the strip, its title more accurately reflected its content than it did later on. For at least a few of the first four years, Bechdel produced a sort of guide book. Few of the weekly installments were continued from week to week. Instead, strip titles alerted us to The Unrequited Crush (Lecture No. 3), The Joys of Couplehood, It’s Depression!, Great Romances That Never Were, Guide to the First Sleepover, Are You a Real Jock?, Look Out for Luppies (Lesbian Urban Professionals), Summer Grooming Tips, Straight People to Watch Out For, and so on.

After a few years of this, some of the personages in the strip began coming back for encores on succeeding days, and Bechdel started naming them, and they developed personalities—and lives. And relationships. And with that, Dykes graduated from guide book to novel, “a wittily illustrated soap opera”—or, as Bechdel says, “half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel” about 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.”

The Essential Dykes carries on the soap opera from 1987 to 2008, culling 15-20 one-page strips from each year. We watch Bechdel’s graphic style mature: by the early 1990s, her line is more confident, her anatomy surer, her deployment of solid blacks and shading textures more dramatic and strategic. The strips treat of the sex lives of Bechdel’s counterculture cast with candor and understanding, but in the later years, while the verbal candor remains, the visuals are less explicit. Nudity is mostly avoided, and outright sex is rarely depicted (if at all). But that’s okay: by this time, Bechdel is delving into complexities that deserve attention, and overt on-screen love-making could be a distraction from more important matters.

One of her heroines starts living with a man, and they have a child. Another woman gets breast cancer and endures surgery and post-operative chemotherapy. They all bemoan the dubious politics of the GeeDubya Years. They change jobs, fall in and out of love, cope with aging parents—“in a serial graphic narrative ‘suitable for humanists of all persuasions.’”

The volume is introduced by a 12-page autobiographical comic strip account of how Bechdel became a cartoonist. On the first page, she exclaims, suddenly, “Good God—I forgot to get a job! I’ve been drawing this comic strip for my entire adult life,” she goes on. “How did that happen? Let’s try and retrace our steps, shall we?”

She started drawing as a child, but as she grew up, she thought she might try being a writer. Eventually, after her written work earned numerous rejection slips, she realized: “I wasn’t a writer or an artist. I was a writer and an artist.” In short, a cartoonist. She decided, then, to draw cartoons about lesbians. The first appeared in the 1983 Lesbian Pride issue of the local feminist paper. (And it is reproduced in this introductory autobiography.)

“Readers seemed to like it, and this egged me on,” she reports. And then she finds her mission: “by drawing the everyday lives of women like me, I hope to make lesbians more visible not just to ourselves but to everyone. If people could only see us, how could they help but love us? I mean, seriously! Lesbians are so awesome! Free thinkers! Vegetarians! Pacifists! At the forefront of every social justice movement.”

The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For is an essential lesson in the comic strip narrative arts. Get your own copy. I’m getting mine.

PostScript: Bechdel, by the way, edited, with Jessica Agel and Matt Madden, the currently available Best American Comics 2011, an anthology of the year’s cartoon storytelling from graphic novels, pamphlet comics (that’s comic books, kimo sabe), newspapers, magazines, mini-comics and web comics.