Review: The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (2008)
I don’t like picking favorites. But if you put me in a contrived situation of extreme duress (I’m stuck on a desert island! I can only have one comic!), I might reach for Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For. Her more popular and well-known graphic memoir Fun Home justifiably gets a lot of attention; it might even be the “better” work by most measures, and I love it dearly. But something about the messy beautiful sprawl of DTWOF — a biweekly comic strip that Bechdel spent twenty-five years of her life drawing — is more compelling to me.
DTWOF has an incredible vitality to it. In part, that’s because the characters Bechdel renders are so rich and complex. Her original goal was to represent, with humor and pathos, what her own little slice of lesbian culture looked and felt like, and all the women (and eventually the men) she depicts on the page are flawed and interesting subjects. But there’s also something thrilling about seeing Bechdel’s aesthetic shift over the literal decades she poured into the comic.
The comic also strikes a remarkable balance between serialized romance and political commentary that I’ve never seen replicated elsewhere. (Famously, Bechdel herself called the strip “half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel.”) The feminist and queer politics of Bechdel’s characters are interesting precisely because they are woven into those characters’ daily lives.
DTWOF as a whole also functions as a very live documentation of the way radical gay and lesbian countercultures of the twentieth century became more mainstream (or, as some of her characters would argue, were co-opted by the mainstream). Bechdel captured these changes as they happened, week by week from the Reagan administration up until the 2008 election, rather than looking back on them as history.
That said, I do have one longstanding complaint about DTWOF, though it has nothing to do with the series itself and everything to do with how it has been packaged for readers. There is still no single complete collection of every strip. The closest thing we have is the Essential anthology, which leaves out dozens of comics. Bechdel published other collections throughout the years, but most or all are out of print and some are difficult to find.
I’m slowly building up my own library, but copies of her early books are extremely expensive (not to mention rare) and not a good option for casual readers. I still recommend the Essential collection because it’s an amazing read even with the gaps. But I still hope that one day we’ll get a reprinting of the entire 500+ strip run!
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