Dani Gagnon
A&E Editor
Last Thursday evening, the packed audience in an Ebert Art Center classroom was shocked as the prominent identity politics cartoonist Alison Bechdel began her lecture with a series of her past rejection letters. Bechdel prefaced her lecture by reminding the audience that much of her early career was spent on the cultural sidelines, writing and drawing for her cartoon strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, which depicted images from the daily lives of lesbian feminists. Bechdel then rerouted the audience’s edge-of-their-seat attention to describe how she first became a graphic memoirist.
She explained that, as a child, she often mussed over the many family secrets that permeated her household. With the aid of an image from her first graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Bechdel explained how much of her childhood was spent finding an appropriate way to depict her family when the images of family in books she read did not align with the reality of her family life. She reflected on how as a child it was very important to her for these images to match up, yet they never did. So, Bechdel began to draw what she saw herself. Her choice to become a cartoonist was influenced by her belief that comics are the most accessible art form.
Bechdel joked that she turned to cartooning because it was the medium that neither of her parents could care or criticize because they didn’t know anything about it.
Bechdel found tremendous success in Dykes to Watch Out For, which regularly ran in over 50 LGBT publications around the country. Bechdel told her audience that the strip was not about defending her sexuality, but normalizing it. Within her strip she uncovered and worked through her belief that the personal is political and that politics are personal — a theme that has fused itself into both her later graphic memoirs about her parents.
In Fun Home, she examined her father’s personal experience before the gay liberation movement and in her second work, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, she explored her mother’s personal life before the women’s and feminist liberation movement. Bechdel discussed her parents personal repression and examined how it compared and contrasted to her overlapping experiences with sexuality.
Bechdel then continued to treat the audience by walking them through how she illustrates a page in her memoirs. She broke down how she uses a digital template, enters in the text and structures the page to however she wants it before entering a rough sketch, only after these steps does Bechdel enter the complete images. Although she deconstructed the process for the audience, not an ounce of magic was removed from the graphic memoir’s work. Every step of Bechdel’s labor was highlighted for her audience to appreciate.
Bechdel closed with a reflection on her compulsion to write and keep track of life. The lecture ended with a reading from her second memoir Are You My Mother?, in which her mother helps her write in her journal, “She composed me and now I compose her.”