Alison Bechdel is an American cartoonist. After more than 20 years of chronicling the lesbian community in her Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip, Alison Bechdel has started her own story. In 2006 Bechdel has written a graphic memoir, Fun Home, about growing up and the relationship she had with her father, a closeted gay man. Bechdel discovered her father’s sexual orientation just as she was coming out herself and right before his death. she became a best-selling and critically acclaimed author with her graphic memoir Fun Home.


Time magazine named Alison Bechdel's Fun Home number one of its "10 Best Books of the Year." Lev Grossman and Richard LeCayo described Fun Home as "the unlikeliest literary success of 2006," and called it "a stunning memoir about a girl growing up in a small town with her cryptic, perfectionist dad and slowly realizing that a) she is gay and b) he is too. ... Bechdel's breathtakingly smart commentary duets with eloquent line drawings. Forget genre and sexual orientation: this is a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other."

Bechdel says she uses the same technique to create her bi-weekly comic strip. She calls it her “barely harnessed obsessive compulsive disorder.”

“Part of what motivates me to draw is this urge to capture a little bit of real life in tiny black and white drawing. It calms me down,” she says. But she has to keep it in check. “If I were to start drawing something that I’m looking at right now, it could take me the rest of my life. There’s that much detail. For me the big challenge is knowing when to stop. If I’m drawing a bookshelf in the background do I draw all the books? Do I include the title from the spine? Do I include logos of the publishers on the spine?”

Bechdel says she uses the same technique to create her bi-weekly comic strip. She calls it her “barely harnessed obsessive compulsive disorder.”

“Part of what motivates me to draw is this urge to capture a little bit of real life in tiny black and white drawing. It calms me down,” she says. But she has to keep it in check. “If I were to start drawing something that I’m looking at right now, it could take me the rest of my life. There’s that much detail. For me the big challenge is knowing when to stop. If I’m drawing a bookshelf in the background do I draw all the books? Do I include the title from the spine? Do I include logos of the publishers on the spine?”

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