Herstory lesson

Living across the street from A Prairie Home Companion creator Garrison Keillor in 1987 in St. Paul, Minnesota, may have rubbed off on Alison Bechdel. It was during that year that she took her then–five-year-old, single-panel cartoon Dykes to Watch Out For and turned it into a biweekly comic strip. DTWOF, which by the ’90s was syndicated in dozens of newspapers nationally, chronicles the everyday lives of a handful of everyday Joes (mostly Janes, actually) as they navigate modern problems such as deadbeat jobs and dead-end relationships, while hanging out at the local café or lesbian feminist bookstore. And not unlike the gee-whiz Middle-American folk whom Keillor gently pokes fun at but ultimately adores, Bechdel’s panoply of hand-drawn characters are both abundantly human and full of foibles.

Bechdel, who was 23 and living in New York City when she began drawing the cartoon in 1983, had no intention of becoming a career cartoonist. “It was really just for fun at first,” she says. “I was drawing it for myself and for friends.” But what started as a hobby eventually segued into a full-time job after a single ongoing gig for a local newspaper turned into a nationally syndicated phenomenon that has since included T-shirts, tours and a half-dozen or so books. The recently released The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For (Houghton Mifflin, $25) functions as a greatest hits of sorts and showcases Bechdel’s acumen for chronicling American life and the LGBT movement in America.

It begins in 1987, when DTWOF made the leap from single-panel comic to strip, and continues for an astounding 326 pages, right up to 2008. Along the way, Bechdel touches on hot-button issues like September 11, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Patriot Act, gay marriage and the rise of the neocons, among others.

“Starting out, it was during the Reagan administration,” she says. “I was young and naive and thought, This is the last gasp of conservatism. I was really wrong, but every day I still have the renewed hope.”

The material is mainly queer-focused. In one strip, for example, the term FTM (usually referring to female-to-male transsexuals, but in this instance, freedom to marry) becomes misused to comic effect. Still, Bechdel insists that her characters’ problems are universal ones, even if mainstream audiences have never attended the annual Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

“I’d like to think that anybody can be a dyke,” she says. “I read comic strips like Garfield and Dilbert, and I can identify with them. I felt like, if I can do this, why can’t other people make that same kind of leap? Even though I was writing about lesbians, I wanted everyone to read it.”

Over the years, they have. But if the new book reads like a retrospective, that’s because it is. With print media declining, Bechdel has placed the strip on temporary hiatus and turned her attention instead to graphic memoirs and essays. Most noticeably, Bechdel received critical raves for her 2006 memoir Fun Home, about the strained relationship between Bechdel and her father, a closeted homosexual. The book gave Bechdel the kind of literary cred the comic strip was unable to deliver.

“Certainly Fun Home legitimized me as a cartoonist in a way that I hadn’t been perceived before,” she says. “Now, all of the sudden, I’m grandfathered in as a legitimate American cartoonist. That’s really great. I’ll take credit where I can get it.”

As for the future of DTWOF, it may find a new home on the Internet at DykesToWatchOutFor.com. But don’t think of the new collection as a history book. “That line of thinking makes me a little nervous, because it makes me already feel like I’m under glass,” she says. “I’m not quite ready to be filed away.”

Alison Bechdel reads Thursday 13.