Personally, I get a thrill seeing Alison Bechdel's work lauded in the  
mainstream press. Despite the reviewer's naivete about our realities,  
this review has a rather interesting (dare I say empowering?) take on  
Bechdel's representations of lesbian culture and politics...

December 3, 2008
Books of The Times

The Days of Their Lives: Lesbians Star in Funny Pages
By DWIGHT GARNER

THE ESSENTIAL DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR
By Alison Bechdel
392 pages. Illustrated. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $25.

Two years ago Alison Bechdel seemed to come out of nowhere with a  
graphic memoir, “Fun Home,” that knocked a lot of people, myself  
included, right over. You didn’t have to go quite as far as Time  
magazine, which called “Fun Home” the single best book of 2006, to  
recognize Ms. Bechdel’s achievement. Her memoir, about coming of age  
as a lesbian in her secret-filled family’s rural Pennsylvania funeral  
home, was moody, astringent, microscopically observed. “Fun Home”  
belongs on that same small, high shelf of comic books where “Maus”  
dwells.

Plenty of readers, however, needed no introduction to Ms. Bechdel. For  
more than 20 years she has been the creator of “Dykes to Watch Out  
For,” a weekly comic strip, printed mostly in college-town alternative  
newspapers, about the fractious lives and loves of an articulate group  
of lesbians in a city that resembles Minneapolis. The strip is sexy,  
sometimes in an R-rated way — imagine “Doonesbury” with regular  
references to sex toys — and it’s political, in a feisty, lefty,  
Greenpeace meets PETA meets MoveOn.org kind of way. Ms. Bechdel’s  
lesbians wanted to impeach the first George Bush.

Taken together, these comic strips don’t have the tightly coiled  
impact of “Fun Home,” but in some ways they offer greater consolations  
— they’re looser, more funny, and they offer the chance to watch a  
group of very appealing women grow and change (and struggle to have  
better sex) over the course of more than two decades. Ms. Bechdel  
calls her strips “half op-ed column and half endlessly serialized  
Victorian novel,” and that’s not far off. I suspect that, over the  
years, “Dykes to Watch Out For” has been as important to new  
generations of lesbians as landmark novels like Rita Mae Brown’s  
“Rubyfruit Jungle” (1973) and Lisa Alther’s “Kinflicks” (1976) were to  
an earlier one.

As Ms. Bechdel observes in her introduction to this new anthology,  
“The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For,” it was not especially easy to  
be openly lesbian back in 1983, when she published her first cartoon.  
“We had no ‘L Word,’ ” she writes. “We had no lesbian daytime TV  
hosts. We had no openly lesbian daughters of the creepy vice  
president. We had ‘Personal Best,’ and we liked it.”

If you are, with this volume, coming to Ms. Bechdel’s comic strips for  
the first time, you’ll notice a few things pretty quickly. For one,  
sex happens. There are a lot of naked cartoon women here — gloriously  
naked cartoon women: fat, thin, young, old, black, white. They are  
real women, many with ample armpit hair and zits on their shoulders.  
These lesbians aren’t Bambi, Betty or Veronica.

For another, you’ll pick up on how literate this strip is. It’s not  
just the dropped-in references to writers like Camille Paglia, Andrew  
Sullivan, Katha Pollitt, Judith Butler and Michel Foucault. In the  
stacks of a library, one character confesses: “I’ve always fantasized  
about library congress. Let’s do it in the HQ 70s.” What’s more, many  
of the characters work in a feminist bookstore called Madwimmin Books,  
always under threat from two chain stores Ms. Bechdel refers to as  
“Bounders Books and Muzak” and “Bunns and Noodle.” You’ll also come to  
realize that lesbians have been, over the last 25 years, on the  
cutting edge of just about every cultural trend in this country. They  
were among the first foodies, even if most went the vegetarian route.  
(Ms. Bechdel’s very first strip mentions a “seaweed-avocado pâté.”)  
And on the environment? Eighteen years ago Ms. Bechdel was writing  
about compost heaps and the threat posed by nonbiodegradable plastic  
trash bags. Ms. Bechdel adores her characters and gently satirizes  
them at the same time. They sometimes read books with absurd titles  
like “The Wheat-Free Guide to Creative Visualization in Co-Dependent  
Past-Life Relationships.” They go to workshops called “Parthenogenesis  
With Gemstones.” They develop crushes on women with names like  
Amethyst. Criticism, Ms. Bechdel understands, is a form of love.

The most important thing to know about “The Essential Dykes to Watch  
Out For,” however, is how deeply amusing it is. It crackles with one- 
liners. Log Cabin Republicans, one character intones, dream about  
“skinny-dipping at the Bohemian Grove with George Will.” During sex  
play, one woman says: “I’ll be the Lexus lesbian with a flat tire, and  
you be the surly biker who stops to help.” When a boy with two mommies  
leaves the house for a soccer game, one says to him, “No kicking.” His  
reply: “Not even the ball?”

After seeing “Brokeback Mountain,” one character delivers this  
sardonic monologue: “Who wouldn’t prefer a ruined life with a few  
pristine moments to a regular, banal, disappointing life? Imagine the  
cinematography if Ennis and Jack had been able to live together.  
Sweeping vistas of their couples therapist’s office.”

And here’s Ms. Bechdel’s characters’ running patter after seeing  
“Thelma and Louise”:

“What was the real message? The only way for women to be free in this  
culture is to be dead?”

“Yeah. Why couldn’t they have escaped into Mexico?”

“Where they would consummate their love for one another, open a  
guerrilla training camp for women and start fomenting armed resistance  
against rapists.” These characters fret about the insignificance of  
their “little counterculture lives,” especially when terrible things  
are happening in the world, and Republicans are in the White House.  
But Ms. Bechdel makes their lives resonate in ways that do not seem  
insignificant at all. Real things happen here: births, deaths,  
adoptions, affairs, breakups, commitment ceremonies, civil unions.

Ms. Bechdel began her strips all those years ago, she writes here,  
partly to provide “an antidote” to the culture’s image of gay women as  
“warped, sick, humorless and undesirable.” Boy, has she succeeded. Her  
crazy lesbians seem saner than the rest of us, and beyond beautiful.