Alison Bechdel

It sounds like an easy enough job: Just fill in a little box with some scratchy pictures and a handful of words that will make people laugh. For even the best comic strip artists (i.e. Gary Larson, Bill Watterson, and, most recently, Aaron McGruder), however, it’s apparently hard work with a serious burnout risk. Yet for more than twenty years Alison Bechdel has managed to keep her Dykes to Watch Out For strip funny, moving, and relevant by engaging her characters in a world that has changed and grown in step with our own. In Fun Home, Bechdel tells the story of her own deeply sad childhood in a graphic novel that casts a family drama in literary and wryly funny fashion.