Education and Community Programs

We’re really excited to be reading and discussing Alison Bechdel’s new graphic novel FUN HOME (at our next gathering of The Artist’s Bookshelf on Thursday, Oct. 5th). Lately this book has been getting a lot of publishing industry buzz, including rave reviews in such luminary publications as the New York Times. We’re happy to report that we made our selection before this phenomenal explosion of praise, and even happier that Ms. Bechdel complied with our request for an interview.

ME:

Here at THE ARTIST’S BOOKSHELF, we’re interested in creative process. FUN HOME works exceptionally well on a number of levels. Could you tell us a bit about its conception and how you got started on the project?

ALISON:

I had no preconceived idea of this project before I began, no concept of what shape it would take at all. I just knew I wanted to tell the story of my father and me in the most accurate way I could. I began by writing down some core memories, things I knew were part of the story even though I had no idea where or how they’d fit, or how they’d work graphically. I worked like that for a long time before I had a conception of the book as a unified whole.

ME:

Your ability to create succinct, yet complex, multi-layered individual panels is striking. In addition to a drawn image, you might include dialogue, found text, and authorial commentary. How do you go about putting all of that together? What comes first, the image or the words?

ALISON:

It’s very hard to say what comes first. And it changes constantly. Some scenes begin as words, others as images. If you were looking over my shoulder, it would probably appear that most of the time I start with text. But often, I can see in my head what the image is going to be as I’m writing the words.

It’s difficult to explain the process. In a way, everything happens at once, and I just keep adjusting the text to fit with the picture, adjusting the picture to fit with the text, and to fit with the other images on the page. It’s sort of like a big, complicated carpentry project, where things never square up perfectly so you’re constantly shimming and shoring.

I guess writing with words is a lot like that, too. But when you add images to the mix, there are more pieces to contend with. That makes it more complicated, but it also creates more possibility, more potential neural pathways to connect ideas. In some ways I feel like I was learning a whole new kind of syntax as I wrote this book.

ME:

How does cartooning for your long-standing strip, “Dykes To Watch Out For” differ from creating a graphic novel like FUN HOME?

ALISON:

My comic strip is pretty much a known quantity. I have certain elements of the plot I have to advance in each episode, and certain current events I need to cover. So writing the strip is in some ways just a process of elimination–pruning away everything that won’t fit into my ten or twelve allotted panels.

With FUN HOME, on the other hand, the writing was completely a process of discovery. I had no idea where I was going or what I was trying to do until I’d gotten there and done it.

Also, obviously, the strip is episodic. It’s an ongoing story that never ends, and can’t really be revised–it’s never complete. FUN HOME, on the other hand, is finite–it has a beginning, a middle, and an end that form an integrated whole, an aesthetic unity. That felt like a big risk, after working for so long in the open-ended serial format of the strip. But I feel like I pulled it off, and that’s deeply satisfying.

ME:

How long have you been cartooning? Did you partake in any formal training?

ALISON:

I’ve drawn silly drawings my whole life, and as a kid I wanted to be a cartoonist. But I gave that up as I went through high school and college because it seemed like a somewhat unlikely career to end up with. But then I just sort of happened into it after college. I was drawing these one-panel cartoons of crazy lesbians for myself and my friends, and one of them suggested that I submit them to the feminist newspaper we all volunteered at. So I did, in 1983, and I just never stopped. Gradually I self-syndicated the strip and got people to pay me for it. And eventually that’s how I made my living.

I didn’t have any formal cartooning training per se. I did major in art in college, so I’ve studied drawing. But I learned how to cartoon just by looking at other peoples’ work.

ME:

The subject matter of FUN HOME is intensely personal, revelatory, and emotionally-charged, yet you are able to maintain a surprising sense of objectivity. Was that difficult?

ALISON:

I think I have some kind of intimacy disorder. Although I’m a pretty shy person, for some reason I have no qualms about revealing the most intimate details of my private life to the general public. Maybe it’s not so much that I’m objective as that I’m oddly disengaged.

Someone was interviewing me recently, and asked about a scene in the book where I talk about my “ attempt to access emotion vicariously.” The narration in this scene reads, “ For years after my father’s death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation I would relate the information in a flat matter-of-fact tone, eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me.” In the image accompanying this, I’m sitting in a restaurant saying to someone, “ My dad’s dead. He jumped in front of a truck.”

So this interviewer asked me, “ is that what you’re doing with the whole book? Trying to access your grief through other peoples’ responses to your story?” And that had never occurred to me, but I think she was exactly right.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, it might be less objectivity on my part than a kind of disengagement. Yet it’s a disengagement that’s longing for engagement.

ME:

What do you see as the future of the graphic novel? Please speculate on how it might continue to evolve and permutate.

ALISON:

If you could travel back in time to 1956 and bring along an Old Navy commercial, or a music video, or practically any sequence from a recent action movie, a person from 1956 would be dumbfounded. Cinematic language has evolved so extensively since then that it just wouldn’t make sense to someone 50 years ago.

I think we’re maybe up to about 1956 in terms of exploiting the potential of graphic narrative. As a canon of graphic novels starts to build up, and more and more people start experimenting with the format, we’ll see the same kind of evolution that film language has undergone.

I think a lot of it will be a process of condensation and abbreviation–learning how to remove dead weight. You know, like how an old movie might take ten minutes to deliver some exposition that a new movie could do in three seconds.

ME:

Some literary snobs (not us!) frown upon the graphic novel as “comic book lit.” How would you respond to their assertion that graphic novels cannot be taken seriously as literature?

ALISON:

My first answer to that is, I don’t care what those people think.But my second, more considered reaction, is to agree with them–up to a point. Comics as a genre is underrated because the field has been dominated for so long by work that doesn’t explore the full potential of the medium. I mean, the bulk of stuff on the graphic novel shelf is NOT literature. Exceptions are rapidly piling up, but it’ll take a while for the superhero stigma to wear off.

It’s a cycle. As more critical attention is paid to graphic narratives, more aesthetic criteria will emerge for them. The bar will be raised, work will get stronger, and that will convince more people that comics can indeed perform some of the higher literary functions.

I look forward to the day when graphic narratives don’t have to be pointed out as such. When we can talk about their content without commenting on how surprising it is that this is a comic book. Kind of like the way I would like to be identified not as a lesbian cartoonist, but just a cartoonist.

ME:

For those of us familiar only with Harvey Pekar, Joe Sacco, and Marjane Satrapi, any other interesting graphic novelists you could recommend?

Alison:

Chris Ware, of course. Jessica Abel. Seth. Chester Brown.

This is a shameless plug for my publisher, but it’s also true: Get a copy of “ The Best American Comics” anthology edited by Harvey Pekar and Anne Elizabeth Moore to get an excellent overview of recent work by a lot of great cartoonists.

ME:

What are you reading these days?

ALISON:

I’m reading a bunch of memoirs, none of them graphic. Sean Wilsey’s “ Oh the Glory of it All,” which makes my family seem like the Brady Bunch. Ken Foster’s “ The Dogs Who Found Me.” And my friend Lucy Bledsoe’s book “ The Ice Cave,” about her wilderness experiences. I’m really interested in how people transform the random grist of their lives into contained, meaningful stories.

ME:

What’s next for you?

ALISON:

More memoir. I’m starting work on another autobiographical project. As well as continuing to crank out my comic strip.

ME:

Thanks, Alison.

Alison:

Thanks a lot for doing this.