Author and comic-strip artist Alison Bechdel was at Women and Children First, 5233 N. Clark, on Nov. 13 promoting The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For as part of a book tour. Over 150 fans packed the store to capacity while she took them through a brief slide show of familiar moments in the series, with their collective and interlinked sex lives forming the connective thread. This year, Houghton Mifflin, the publisher of Bechdel’s wildly successful graphic novel Fun Home—perhaps sensing the possibility of another breakthrough success—has released Essential, a compendium of excerpts from the last 25 years. (Bechdel’s immensely popular Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip has been running since 1983.)
Afterwards, Bechdel took questions about her future work (she’s working on another memoir), the graphic artists who’ve inspired here (Edward Gorey, among others), and and how she keeps up with news in order to make her strip constantly relevant (she reads a lot). Bechdel also explained that, for her, ‘the comic strip is a way of making sense of bigger issues.’ Photo and text by Yasmin Nair