Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdelis an American cartoonist. Originally best known for the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, she came to critical and commercial success in 2006 with her graphic memoir Fun Home, which was subsequently adapted as a musical which won a Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015. She is a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Award. She is also known for the Bechdel test, an indicator of gender bias in film...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCartoonist
Date of Birth10 September 1960
CountryUnited States of America
Yeah, I think some of that is just wish-fulfillment, you know, how little kids fantasize through their drawings. I wanted to be powerful.
One of them is already having some menopausal symptoms. I'm working on that. I'm giving them all little lines under the eyes, trying to sort of make them age gracefully.
My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up.
But mostly, it's a book about my relationship with my father.
That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project.
I get a lot of mail from men who really identify with Stuart, you know, Sparrow's boyfriend. I love that. Even though I used to say I wanted men to read the strip even though there weren't any men in it, so they'd be forced to identify with the women.
Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now.
It's definitely part of it, that the men were having fun and doing the interesting things but also, I don't know, I'm just thinking more about gender and how maybe in some way I am more of a boy than a girl.
When I grew up, I studied karate for years. I got pretty strong, but eventually I had to acknowledge that I really didn't like fighting at all, so I quit.
Bechdel Test, was named for the comic strip it came from, penned by Alison Bechdel - but Bechdel credits a friend named Liz Wallace, so maybe it really should be called the Liz Wallace Test...? Anyway, the test is much simpler than the name. To pass it your movie must have the following: a) there are at least two named female characters, who b) talk to each other about c) something other than a man.
But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu.
I never really read superhero stuff as a kid.
I started to get bored with that stuff about only drawing men and I've taken it out of the slideshow.
Mostly it was Mad magazine. And I did read a lot of - I had a subscription when I was little, but I also had access to some old collections, the little paperbacks of the really good stuff.