The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For

The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel (Paperback) (ISBN: 9780224087063)

When Alison Bechdel's unflinching graphic memoir, Fun Home, was published in 2006 it was met with universal acclaim and named by many reviewers as the graphic book of the year, bringing her once-underground work to a wider audience.

Since its inception in 1983, Dykes To Watch Out For has become a counterculture institution. The first strips were stand-alone pieces, each offering an eye-opening and acerbically funny insight into the Lesbian society of 1980s America. Here we learnt the terminology of that world ('Luppies', for example, are Lesbian Urban Professionals) and discovered its codes of conducts, like the dos-and-don'ts of a couple's first night together.

Soon, after those first few strips, a compelling and addictive soap opera developed. We met Mo, a neurotic feminist book clerk, and her unforgettably eclectic group of friends. There was Lois, the voracious Lesbian Avenger, Clarice and Tony the Lesbian Moms, and Sparrow, who couldn't kick her self-help habit. We follow their sex lives, their political activism and the minutiae of their lives right up to the Iraq War. On the way, we see a counterculture movement slowly embraced by the mainstream, while Mo and her friends, now in steady relationships and having children, begin uneasily to 'fit in'.

Essential Dykes to Watch Out For brings together for the first time one of the most important and avidly read strips of the last thirty years and confirms Alison Bechdel's reputation as one of the finest cartoonists at work today.

Other books by Alison Bechdel

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ISBN	224087061
ISBN13	9780224087063
Publisher	Jonathan Cape Ltd
Format	Paperback
Publication date	04/12/2008
Pages	416
Weight (grammes)	850
Published in	United Kingdom
Height (mm)	235
Width (mm)	202

Alison Bechdel has been a careful archivist of her own life and kept a journal since she was ten. Since 1983 she has been chronicling the lives of various characters in the fictionalised Dykes To Watch Out For strip, \'one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period\' (Ms). The strip is syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers, translated into multiple languages, and collected into a book series with a quarter of a million copies in print. Four of her books have won Lambda Literary Awards for Humor, and The Indelible Alison Bechdel won a Lambda Literary Award in the biography/autobiography category. Bechdel lives near Burlington, Vermont.