Photo: Jeanette Spicer By the time Alison Bechdel sat down in earnest to draw her third book, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, she was drinking less and had stopped going to therapy. She felt — dare she say it? — happy. The cartoonist, whose comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For” was a serial fixture in queer newspapers from 1983 to 2008, is best known for her graphic memoirs Fun Home , which became a hit Broadway musical , and Are You My Mother? .
You also mention admiring the bodybuilder Charles Atlas as a kid and wanting to emulate his muscularity. Did you ever have an aesthetic desire with regard to exercise? Fun Home and Are You My Mother? are both narratives about your parents in which you’re very much a character. Are you creating a persona or do you see them as direct renderings of yourself?
Part of the meta quality of Are You My Mother? is how your mother gives you feedback on the book itself. Fun Home and Are You My Mother? both had very specific color palettes. They are done in black-and-white with a wash in one color — blue for the first and red for the second. Superhuman Strength, meanwhile, embraces the entire color spectrum. How did you decide on that?
You don’t really pass judgment on his desires, but did you feel the need to soften or sanitize what might have been going on? My understanding is that you didn’t want Fun Home to become a film, but did you harbor any hesitations around it being a musical? That, incidentally, will also now be a movie. Do you feel like gay and lesbian people were at a certain inflection point politically or culturally then?
In the introduction of the 2020 compilation of The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, you pose a question to the reader about whether lesbians are essentially the same as everyone else or essentially different. Where do you land on that? Sure. But that demonstrates the futility of thinking about political progress as representational. For instance, I’m thinking about how one of the conflicts between Mo and her friend Clarice occured when the latter decided to become a lawyer as a way to affect change.
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