Alison Bechdel

For twenty-five years Bechdel’s pathbreaking Dykes to Watch Out For strip has been collected in award-winning volumes, syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers, and translated into many languages. Now, at last, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For gathers a “rich, funny, deep, and impossible to put down” (Publishers Weekly) selection from all eleven Dykes volumes. Here too are sixty of the newest strips, never before published in book form.

Settle in to this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it “half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel”) of the lives, loves, and politics of a cast of characters, most of them lesbian, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis.

Her brilliantly imagined countercultural band of friends — academics, social workers, bookstore clerks — fall in and out of love, negotiate friendships, raise children, switch careers, and cope with aging parents. The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For fuses high and low culture — from foreign policy to domestic routine, postmodern theory to hot sex — in a serial graphic narrative “suitable for humanists of all persuasions.”

Alison Bechdel is the author of the best-selling Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Time’s number one Best Book of 2006 and a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. Since 1983 Bechdel has been chronicling the lives of various characters in the fictionalized Dykes to Watch Out For strip, named by the Utne Reader as “one of the greatest hits of the twentieth century.” She lives and draws in Vermont.

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