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As a reference while narrating her own sexual quest towards fulfillment and understanding. There, the group toured a construction site where Alison saw a calendar tacked to the wall featuring a photo of a nude woman, causing her to then request to be called “Albert” instead of Alison by her brothers. Later, Alison discovers a photograph from this trip that Bruce had clearly taken of Roy, shirtless, lying in bed, which she examines closely. Draw your own comic with Amy Podmore, professor of art. Join Justin Adkins, director of gender, sexuality and activism, and Mercedea Shriver, reference and web development librarian, for a discussion about the role of gender expression in Fun Home.
Later, in a similar incident, Alison was drawing in a coloring book when Bruce got upset that she was using the wrong color, causing him to take over and shade it in for her. Lived in the same building as the funeral home, and Alison and her brothers would often stay over and force Grandma to tell the same story over and over, about a toddler-aged Bruce getting stuck in the mud and being rescued by a mailman. Later, while standing over Bruce’s grave, Alison has trouble believing her father is really down there, though she knows deep down that he’s “stuck in the mud…” permanently. Alison then reveals that Bruce killed himself while she was in college, and though he lived through most of her childhood, she and the rest of the family felt his absence long before he was physically gone.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic PDF:
Join us for a discussion about the difference between sexual acts and identity in the real lives of people who engage in non-heterosexual acts. Excellent art and vocabulary that mirror the family. Portrait of a family that has artifice and bubbling underneath is tragedy waiting to happen and a discovery to be made. Upload icon An illustration of a horizontal line over an up pointing arrow. Upload User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest.
The same thirds layout appears again and again . She eschews texture, and almost exclusively uses a light-grey tone out of the range of black and white. Her compositions similarly fail to employ white or negative space, and the final product feels impossibly bland. It was emotionally engaging without being maudlin. It shared an experience with me that I never would have gained anywhere else.
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The Secret to Superman Strength is her third graphic memoir. 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 fictionalized Dykes to Watch Out For strip, "one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period" (Ms.). The strip is syndicated in 50 alternative newspapers, translated into multiple languages, and collected into a book series with a quarter of a million copies in print. Utne magazine has listed DTWOF as "one of the greatest hits of the twentieth century."
And then that the only panel that isn't infected with shadows is the middle one with the girl Tohru. Tohru of course knows nothing of this past event, instead she looks only to the right, because she is only privy to the present. She interrupts the composition of the page as possible savior, a third party who can interrupt Yuki's descent into the past.
2012: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
The coldness of her family home was palpable and mirrored that of the funeral home where her father worked. Other than being indentured servants to their father’s fastidious home decor projects, there were no signs of outright abuse, but the lack of affection would be enough to cause any child psychological problems. It would have been easy for Bechdel to paint her father as the patriarchal tyrant, but she manages to make him somewhat sympathetic. Her ability to find humor in an otherwise grim story and her wonderful artwork kept me wanting to read more. Bechdel has been named a MacArthur Fellow and Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont, among many other honors.
You see, I'm not really a fan of graphic novels, but it worked here to illustrate her points. However, this whole book felt more like a project of self-analysis than a commercial product. It was extremely personal, yet cold and detached--like Alison's parents, which I think is the entire point. My rating and review are thus reprehensibly subjective.
Books by Alison Bechdel
In the end, I was compelled to pick up Fun Home completely on a whim. Though I flew through it, a lot of the literary references went shamefully over my head. And considering that it was such a big focus here, I was left out of the loop a lot, which ended up lowering my enjoyment while reading. Unlike Bruce Bechdel who grappled with the stark contradiction between his public reality and private urges all his life, my father didn't particularly have any skeletons in his closet. And even if he did I have no way of unraveling that mystery now.
She clearly thinks quite deeply about culture and literature and whatnot, and this might actually be how her brain works. But as a reader, it feels like a long way to go to tie two things together that don't need to be tied together in the first place. And while the book is very reflective, it doesn't feel self-aware in a way of "I know it sounds ridiculous, but here's what I thought of..." Or, "Cut me some slack. I was in college." One's eye is immediately drawn to the dark corner in the middle of the page, in which a child cowers. This is the convergance of lines of the corner itself , the simple negative space, and the eyeline of the character on the far right . This is a fearful image, full of crossing lines, and dark shodows.
When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive. This is a great book that presents family dynamics. Each and everybody of them has their own little bubble to enjoy whenever they see that it's not going well. If you get the chance to read this, I also recommend reading " Are you my mother" wrote by the same author. The way in which Bechdel retells, in each chapter of the book, with continually increasing detail, shifting themes, and changing perspectives, the story of her relationship with her father, and the way in which she learned more about the events preceding his death. I'm not going to say that I think Bechdel is being disingenuous.
When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive. I almost never read graphic novels, and I did not expect the psychological tour de force of Fun Home at all. Through detailed and impressive graphics Bechdel delineates her coming of age, a journey filled with uncomfortable experiences and nuanced life lessons. The amount of retrieval and introspection this work must have required of her amazes me.
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