Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel

Many years ago, I read Bechdel's Fun Home, and now I've finally gotten around to picking up the follow-up, Are You My Mother? Fun Home was about Bechdel's father, a closeted gay man who committed suicide; this volume is (obviously) about her mother, a woman Bechdel has never quite figured out nor gotten beyond.

Published: 2012
Read: August 2021

Though I found this effectively composed, I also found it somewhat diffuse. It tries to weave together a number of different elements (Bechdel's childhood, Bechdel in therapy, discussions of the history of psychology, Bechdel writing the book itself), with the effect that I felt Bechdel's relationship with her mother got kind of lost, to the extent that it wasn't actually clear to me what Bechdel's beef with her mother was. What had she done that cast such a long shadow? The mother is an interesting character, but I also felt like she was not quite seen in this book. Which is appropriate, one supposes, as one of this book's points is that Bechdel doesn't really know her mother... but makes for frustrating reading. I guess I would say Bechdel is a skilled graphic memoirist, but I didn't really feel like this made the best use of those skills. Glad I read it, but nowhere near as strong as Fun Home, and it doesn't make me want to seek out her most recent effort, which is apparently about fitness fads?

Review: The New American Splendor Anthology by Harvey Pekar

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 1991 (content: 1974-91)
Borrowed from the library
Read January 2014

The New American Splendor Anthology
by Harvey Pekar
art by Robert Armstrong, Alison Bechdel, Chester Brown, Kevin Brown, Gregory Budgett, R. Crumb, Gary Dumm with Laura Darnell Dumm, William Fogg, Drew Friedman, Rebecca Huntington, Bill Knapp, Paul Mavrides, Val Mayerik, Alan Moore, Willy Murphy, Spain Rodriguez, Gerry Shamray, Carole Sobocinksi, Frank Stack, J. R. Stats, Colin Upton, Ed Wesolowski, Jim Woodring, Joe Zabel, and Mark Zingarelli

The short story, I think, is Pekar's element-- aside from The Quitter, his long-form work has failed to interest me as much his shorts. The New American Splendor Anthology collects a wide range of his material, from his earliest comics work to his then-latest, though mostly it collects issues of American Splendor that came out after More American Splendor, I think. There's perhaps some stuff here that's not great, but that's okay, 'cause it's always over with right away, and Pekar is spinning you a new yarn in his distinctive voice: buying food at West Side Market, going to comic book signings (including a cameo by Ed Brubaker!), being obsessive about losing something or forgetting something, picking his wife up from the airport, or driving from Washington, D.C., to Cleveland overnight. I empathize with his small obsessions that he tries to clamp under control, and his occasional irrational inflexibility.

This collection also includes writeups of many of Pekar's appearances on Letterman's Late Night. I don't think Pekar is as clever as he thinks he is, but I think he knows that. (I love the one where he tries to get free stuff off the Late Night producer and ends up with a couple crackers.)

Alison Bechdel and Alan Moore draw stories in this one. Seriously: Alan Moore! For some reason Bechdel is one of five artists whose name is left off the cover, and distressingly, there is no credit to the artists on the title page, just Pekar. (Also no good publication data.) By this point, Pekar has gotten good as selecting artists who work well with his style of writing: I imagine that drawing normalcy is more difficult than it looks, and these guys do a great job on the whole, especially Joe Zabel & Gary Dumm and Bill Knapp.

Why Does Every "Literary" Graphic Novel Have a Subtitle That Clearly Indicates It's a Comic, Anyway?

Comic trade paperback, 232 pages
Published 2007 (originally 2006)
Acquired January 2012
Read March 2012

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

by Alison Bechdel

Here's the fourth "literary" graphic novel I've reviewed in a row here (I am catching up on my class reading), and though I liked it as much as any of the others, I don't have much to say about its form.  Bechdel doesn't do anything groundbreaking with word/image interplay-- indeed, this is a very word-driven comic, with at least one narrative caption overlaid on almost every panel. 

But its content got right to me.  This is the story of a woman recounting her girlhood in a family where no one ever quite emotionally connected, so much so that she did not know her father was gay until it was too late for that information to ever influence her relationship with him.  They're a strange unusual family, and it's one of those books where you can't help thinking of your family the whole time through, and drawing connections, and feeling something as a result. (This may indicate more about me than the book.) Bechdel reminds me of Jeanette Winterson, though not entirely for the most obvious reason.

Likable all the way through, painful when it needs to be, occasionally funny, and the only missed note is really the ending, because it is just obviously false, but I guess that's memoir for you.