Book Review: Here come the girls

Published on Friday 19 December 2008 16:06

THE ESSENTIAL DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR Alison Bechdel Jonathan Cape, £16.99

TWO years ago Alison Bechdel seemed to come out of nowhere with a graphic memoir, Fun Home, that knocked a lot of people, myself included, right over. You didn't have to go quite as far as Time magazine, which called Fun Home the single best book of 2006, to recognise Bechdel's achievement. Her memoir, about coming of age as a lesbian in her secret-filled family's rural Pennsylvania funeral home, was moody, astringent and microscopically observed. Fun Home belongs on that same small, high shelf of comic books where Maus dwells.

Plenty of American readers, however, needed no introduction to Bechdel. For more than 20 years she has been the creator of Dykes To Watch Out For, a weekly comic strip, printed mostly in college-town alternative newspapers, about the fractious lives and loves of an articulate group of lesbians in a city that resembles Minneapolis. The strip is sexy, sometimes in an R-rated way, and it's political, in a feisty, lefty, Greenpeace meets PETA meets MoveOn.org kind of way. Bechdel's lesbians wanted to impeach the first George Bush.

As Bechdel observes in her introduction to this new anthology, The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For, it was not especially easy to be openly lesbian back in 1983 when she published her first cartoon. "We had no L Word," she writes. "We had no lesbian daytime TV hosts. We had no openly lesbian daughters of the creepy vice-president. We had Personal Best and we liked it."

Bechdel adores her characters and gently satirises them at the same time. They sometimes read books with absurd titles like The Wheat-Free Guide To Creative Visualization In Co-Dependent Past-Life Relationships. They develop crushes on women with names like Amethyst. Criticism, Bechdel understands, is a form of love.

The most important thing to know about The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For, however, is how deeply amusing it is. After seeing Brokeback Mountain, one character delivers this sardonic monologue: "Who wouldn't prefer a ruined life with a few pristine moments to a regular, banal, disappointing life? Imagine the cinematography if Ennis and Jack had been able to live together. Sweeping vistas of their couples therapist's office."