Alison Bechdel

In honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the ground-breaking comic strip series, Dykes to Watch Out For brings together a new collection of cartoons recounting the lives and loves of a diverse group of lesbian friends, in a volume that features selections from eleven previous volumes, as well as sixty strips never before published in book form.

A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.

"There's definitely an invasion afoot in the latest installment in Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out for series, but just who's invading whom is unclear. Are Mo and her friends having an impact on the world or merely splattering on its windshield? Mo is forced to work her way through library school by slinging best sellers at Bounders Books-N-Muzak. Sparrow is ambivalent about new motherhood. Clarice and Toni discover 10-year-old Raffi jacking ears and picking up prostitutes on his best friend's computer. And Sydney's first mammogram yields some very bad news. If this isn't enough to turn your hair gray, it all unfolds against the grim rainbow-colored backdrop of the Homeland Security Advisory System. Join our conflicted friends as they struggle to save this fragile, fearful planet with attachment-parenting, patriotic dissent, good sex, library cards, and a dedicated resistance to the forces of order and decency wherever they rear their ugly heads."--Publisher's description.

Change is afoot as the best-selling Dykes to Watch Out For series moves to Alyson. Alison Bechdel continues to illuminate the way we live through the comic strip serial that has become a national treasure. In the tenth book in the series, Mo, the curmudgeonly women’s bookstore clerk, blithely rants about Dr. Laura, Donald Rumsfeld, gay Enron execs, and the pernicious effects of Frogger, while her cozy counterculture community is shifting beneath her feet. Her job is in jeopardy as Madwimmin Books’s customer base defects to the chains. Her ex, Clarice, is displaying symptoms of soccer mom-itis. Her best friend, Lois, has announced her new name is Louis. And her old pal Sparrow considers whether having a baby with her boyfriend will compromise her identity as a radical lesbian feminist. Meanwhile, Toni doesn’t know what do when Clarice’s George W. Bush-induced depression lasts long after the inauguration and, in the wake of 9-11, her friends square off on questions of idealism, violence, compassion, patriotism, and dissent. As they hash out their ideological differences, a black-and-white world takes on surprisingly variegated shades of gray.

Go behind the pen and into the psyche of dyke to watch out for Alison Bechdel--cartoon chronicler extraordinaire--as the inner workings of lesbiania's most quick-witted, longest-running social commentator are revealed.

The seventh collection of Bechdel's comic lampoons of lesbian life finds Mo, the feminist bookseller, both attracted to and antagonized by a young visiting lesbian-deconstructionist professor, while Madwimmin Books endures an erotica-oriented fundraiser.

The sixth collection of Bechdel's comic lampoons of lesbian life revisits Ginger, Mo, Lois, and Toni's early lives.

Toni and Clarice are having a baby, and Alison Bechdel -- the lesbian community's premier visual archivist -- is right there to record the blessed event Her fifth cartoon collection gives new meaning to rituals like baby showers, teething rings and the Mammo Pump!

A collection of cartoons recounting the lives and loves of Mo and Harriet and their diverse group of lesbian friends is accompanied by an autobiographical account of the difficulty of finding a permanent relationship

Another installment in the ever-popular cartoonist's foray into the soap opera of lesbian life.

Second collection from one of dykedom's national treasures, zeroing in on slices of everyday lesbian life.

From the best-selling author of Fun Home, Time magazine’s No. 1 Book of the Year, a brilliantly told graphic memoir of Alison Bechdel becoming the artist her mother wanted to be. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood . . . and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.

"From the author of Fun Home, a profoundly affecting graphic memoir of Bechdel's lifelong love affair with exercise, set against a hilarious chronicle of fitness fads in our times"--