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Alison Bechdel is awesome. It's fun to read through this book and watch the art style become more definite and certain over time. I started reading Dykes to Watch Out For in, oh, 1991? 1992? And it was available in the local queer newspaper in the town where I went to high school (Out in the Mountains) and at the time it ran in the local queer mags in the Twin Cities (Lavender) and in Seattle when I dropped out and moved there. And I read occasional awesome DTWOF in Funny Times from as early as 1988 or 1990 or so, because my grampa had a Funny Times subscription.
So really, I don't have personal memories of a lot of the political things it references, as I was 10 in 1990, but I have memories about reading about them before when the strips originally aired. I love that she kept adding characters who represented different current threads in queer culture - parents, conservatives, trans, queer-identified people in relationships that could have been non-queer identified. And the series was great for presenting me women who were shown as attractive and interesting but didn't have Barbie-shaped bodies - did a lot for my physical self-perception.
Plus of course I always knew that Ms. Bechdel lived in Vermont - she was local and awesome!
I wish that the Essential Dykes to Watch Out For had a) a few more of the early random plates, and b) one or two of the special long-form stories that closed out the small collections - each published book from Firebrand had an original graphic story in the back. But it was still a great time to read, and I was happy that there was something of DTWOF that was in hardcover from a mainstream press so that more libraries would be likely to pick it up in the wake of the popularity of her memoir Fun Home.
What I notice most re-reading it now is how good hearted all the characters are - there are the occasional lies and infidelities, and all of that, but really they are an amazingly functional family-of-choice in that they all do love each other and try to be there for each other - and that's as wonderful a vision for me now as when I first read them as a kid.
So really, I don't have personal memories of a lot of the political things it references, as I was 10 in 1990, but I have memories about reading about them before when the strips originally aired. I love that she kept adding characters who represented different current threads in queer culture - parents, conservatives, trans, queer-identified people in relationships that could have been non-queer identified. And the series was great for presenting me women who were shown as attractive and interesting but didn't have Barbie-shaped bodies - did a lot for my physical self-perception.
Plus of course I always knew that Ms. Bechdel lived in Vermont - she was local and awesome!
I wish that the Essential Dykes to Watch Out For had a) a few more of the early random plates, and b) one or two of the special long-form stories that closed out the small collections - each published book from Firebrand had an original graphic story in the back. But it was still a great time to read, and I was happy that there was something of DTWOF that was in hardcover from a mainstream press so that more libraries would be likely to pick it up in the wake of the popularity of her memoir Fun Home.
What I notice most re-reading it now is how good hearted all the characters are - there are the occasional lies and infidelities, and all of that, but really they are an amazingly functional family-of-choice in that they all do love each other and try to be there for each other - and that's as wonderful a vision for me now as when I first read them as a kid.
