An Interview with Alison Bechdel

Uma Arengo

Alison Bechdel is a cartoonist and memoirist who rose to prominence with her serial comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which ran from 1983 to 2008. In 2006, she published her first graphic novel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, about her relationship with her late father during her childhood and early adulthood. About her mother, she published a second graphic novel, Are You My Mother?, in 2012. Her third graphic novel, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, was published in 2021. 

This interview took place on November 7th, 2024. 

UA: How did you first get into making comics? 

AB: I wanted to be a cartoonist as a child and always loved making silly drawings and loved reading comics. Unlike most children, I never stopped doing that. I think almost all kids do that when they’re little, and then they start to give up at some point when they feel like they’re not good enough, or they just don’t enjoy it anymore. And I just kept doing it. But, I got kind of talked-out of cartooning as a career as I went through high school and college. It just seemed like that was unrealistic. How many cartoonists were there? Like, five. And they were all in the daily newspaper, and they weren’t going anywhere. So, it didn’t seem like there was a lot of possibility. I decided, OK, I’ll just do something, like be a book designer or graphic designer. That seemed like a good compromise. 

But then, I just started accidentally drawing comics. I graduated from college, moved to New York City–having failed to get into grad school–and started working at a feminist newspaper. I can’t think what exactly prompted this, but one day I just drew a picture of a crazy lesbian. I felt like I didn’t see pictures in the world of people who looked like me and my friends. So, I thought, I’ll just make some–let’s try that. And it got kind of addictive. I started making a series of these crazy women, and then they became a [comic] series. I started publishing it in that newspaper where I was volunteering, this feminist paper. This was great, because then, I had a deadline and had to keep making them, and people were giving me feedback. All of a sudden, before I knew it, I was cartooning. 

UA: It sounds like you were self-taught. 

AB: Yes. It’s so funny, because, I mean, there was no real way to learn cartooning in the old days. But, over the past twenty years, it’s become more of an academic thing. When I was young, you could go to art school–if you could get in, which I couldn’t–but no one was going to teach you comics there. There was painting, or sculpting, or printmaking. So, graphic narrative has become a thing only recently. 

UA: I remember in Fun Home you compare your household growing up to an “artists’ colony,” because everyone was creating in isolation. Did your life as an artist begin then?

AB: Yes, my parents modeled to me artistic dedication and focus. They would just get caught up in their creative projects. My dad was remodeling the house, and he loved poetry and fiction, and so did my mother. She was also a pianist, an actress–she acted in local theater. So, they had these very absorbing practices, and I saw that modeled to me, what it’s like to get caught up in your creative work. 

UA: You also tried your hand at poetry as a child, I remember. 

AB: Yes, I did. I was very quickly cowed by my father’s superior skill. 

UA: And that wasn’t the case with cartooning. 

AB: Well, honestly, I feel like cartooning for me was a way to carve my own path between these pretty powerful figures who had already staked out music, and acting, and design. I think they wanted me to become a writer or an artist. But, I found a way to do that which was off their radar. They didn’t see comics. It was almost like those ring-tones teenagers can hear that adults can’t. I think I found a place where I could express myself on my own turf that they couldn’t critique or judge. And the world couldn’t critique or judge either. It was a very low-stakes scene, making comics. It wasn’t like a literary magazine or an art gallery. No one cared what cartoonists did. It was freeing. 

UA: So is there something about [art] criticism that doesn’t fall into place for you? I know you weren’t sold on the literature and writing courses you took in college. 

AB: Well, I had a sort of traumatic obligatory freshman English class, which I see now is where I really learned to write. The professor was pretty harsh and intense. I would get my papers back from him just smeared with red ink. And I could never follow the conversations in class. It was new for me to talk about literature in this symbolic way. I felt like I didn’t know what people were talking about. Is this really what the author intended? Or are you just reading that into it? I never could understand, although I think I just wasn’t old enough, maybe. I went to college not that early–a year early–but I feel like some part of my brain had not yet matured. So, I got sort of traumatized about English. Even though I ended up doing OK in the class, I was like, not doing that again. 

UA: There’s a lot of allusion in your works. They seem very ripe for criticism. 

AB: That’s the irony of it, especially because [Fun Home] is being taught in English classes, in college English classes. 

UA: How does that make you feel? 

AB: Well, it’s kind of cool, honestly. But I also feel sort of sheepish that anyone is required to read it. I’d rather people read it of their own free will.

UA: And does knowing that your work might end up in a syllabus affect your process? Or is that not relevant at all? 

AB: I don’t think about that. It’s pretty much a long-shot that anyone’s book will end up on a syllabus. 

UA: Have you ever thought about how a different introduction to your craft– for example, not drawing as a child first, in a self-directed way–would have changed the art you do? Did you ever wish you had a more formal art education instead, like going to an art school? 

AB: That’s a good question. I did consider going to an art college. But, I was talked out of that. People said, you’re academically strong–you should just go to a liberal arts school. And I did. And I’m glad I did, because I got so much other great material that I wouldn’t have learned at an art school. Maybe I’m just making the best of a bad situation, but I do feel I am better off not having gone to grad school and further training. I actually applied to the School of Art here, in the graphic design program. I got as far as the interview process, but I didn’t get in. I feel like if I had, my life would have been, probably, pretty different. Instead of going to New York and starting to do comics, I would have been here trying to do, I don’t know, high-end graphic design. I probably would have gone into advertising or something dreadful. So who knows. 

UA: Well, you’re teaching two classes here now. About your course The Craft of Graphic Narrative, you write: “This class will introduce you to things I wish someone had taught me about making comics, so that I didn’t have to flounder around for years figuring them out for myself.” What are those things? 

AB: Well, there are some really simple tips, as it happens. There are tools. There’s something called an AMES Lettering Guide that makes nice, neat, little ruled lines for your lettering. I was cartooning for years before I learned about that. It would have made things much neater and simpler, if I had had that. I mean, there are simple things that I did end up learning on my own. But, when I give students these tools and tips early on, I can then see what they can do. 

UA: But this floundering must have done something for you and your craft, right? 

AB: I think so. I started to hear about these various comics programs around the country–there are a couple of MFA programs now where you can get a degree in comics. At first, I was like, you don’t need to go to school to learn comics–I learned from just reading other people’s work. Which is legitimate. But actually, nowadays, comics has, in the digital world, a lot that you need to learn in a teaching situation. Photoshop, and all that stuff. It’s sort of different now, because so much of it happens on the computer. 

UA: I believe in your classes you have everyone use pen and paper.

AB: That was the idea, and mostly we are. But, I haven’t been really strict about that, especially now that they’re getting into making their final projects. No one’s drawing digitally, but we’ll be scanning stuff. 

UA: Can one skip over this floundering you went through? 

AB: I think, probably, everyone has to flounder a bit in the artistic practice they take up. It’s part of figuring it out. For me, it was pretty productive. That’s a good question–I think floundering should be embraced. 

UA: And you mentioned earlier that when you were starting out, graphic narrative was not taught in art schools. A lot of the cartoonists who are well-established nowadays would have had to do a lot of floundering. 

AB: When I was in my twenties, I was starting to see the world of comics evolve. That’s when Art Spiegelman’s Maus came out. A lot of artists started doing much more sophisticated comics than what you’d see at the comic shop. Really pioneering new, alternative kinds of comics with beautiful artwork. And that was very exciting and cool, just to be exposed to all that when I was young and have it shape what I was doing. 

UA: What is a sophisticated comic? 

AB: Well, yes–why did I pick that word? Just looking here at this magazine Raw–this was pretty pivotal in the history of comics, because it was people doing experimental, artsy stuff that was very different from, you know, superhero comics, which was how most people understood comics for a long time. This was all really smart stuff. Here’s an actual insert. This is how Maus began, as inserts in this magazine. So, they were taking the form of comics, from children’s comics and superhero comics and starting to find new uses for it, ways to tell more sophisticated stories. More complex, more adult, more challenging stories, because it’s an amazing way to communicate. And this art is just gorgeous. I mean, many superhero artists are very skilled drawers, but this is a little more experimental. 

UA: What does your own process of making comics look like? Do you write first, or do you draw first? 

AB: That is the question. I have evolved my own process of writing in a drawing program. So, I write on the computer in Adobe InDesign, which is actually a book layout program. But, you can–I’ll just show you. Would you like me to show you? 

UA: Yes, of course. 

AB: I’ll show you a page from a book I’m working on. This is a little misleading, because I don’t really draw first. I only write. Look at all this stray text and stuff–I’m going to get rid of this page, so you can see–I put the art in afterwards. But, when I’m writing, it just looks like that.

And I create my panel outlines. I can make them any size I want. And then, this is my narrative voice floating over the panel. See, all these things get drawn by hand, the balloon outlines. But, when I’m writing on the computer, I can just use these prefab ones–like this is a speech balloon. So, it’s a way to plan out what I’m doing before I actually start drawing, because it’s so much hard work to draw. I don’t want to do drawings that’ll have to be redone. So, I spend a lot of time writing like this, composing on the page. As I make these panels and write the dialogue or narration, I’m imagining what’s going into the panels. It’s great, and I can go through the pages like this. This is misleading, as I said, because the art isn’t usually already there. It’s just empty panels. And this is a font I have made from my own handwriting. It looks like my handwriting, but it’s sort of cheating. 

UA: You must have changed your process a lot with the advent of computers. 

AB: I’ve changed a lot, and I’ve become very dependent on my computer. Not just for this, but for my whole drawing process. I use digital photography a lot to pose for my sketches. I pose myself for many of these drawings. 

UA: Is your dependence on the computer regrettable to you? Would you prefer to go back to drawing by hand? 

AB: I did draw by hand until quite recently. I was just forced by circumstances to start drawing digitally on a tablet, because it’s–who knew–way faster when you don’t have to grapple with ink and friction and gravity. Digital drawing is easier and seductive for that reason. I have switched over, but I don’t get quite the same line quality that I did with a real pen. So, I think I’m going to go back, at least for my final inking stage. The internet has also completely changed how I think visually, because you didn’t even used to be able to get images called up like that. Anything you wanted–to find a reference image, you had to go look it up in the encyclopedia. It’s almost unthinkable now. Or go to a library’s picture file, where some poor person sat in a room cutting things out of magazines and putting them into envelopes, like elephants, people with hats. I even had these funny books–you used to be able to buy books of people doing things with their hands, like lighting a cigarette or drinking a cup of coffee, so you could see what the hand position was like. It was a shortcut for illustrators. Now you don’t need that. You just take your own quick picture. So, that’s really changed, and I’m very dependent on Google Image search. 

UA: Care to talk more about this new book you’re working on? 

AB: It’s all finished, almost. I’ll show you what it looks like. I’ve never done a full–I have done color before–but this is a different kind of color. Do you know about Tintin? 

UA: Yes. 

AB: I just love those books, and I’ve always admired that style. I felt like, I’m going to do a Tintin adventure for adults. So, that’s what this book is. It’s a funny sort of mashup between my characters from my comic strip I did for many years, Dykes to Watch Out For, and me as a sort-of memoirist trying to write a book. My friends are the dyke characters who now are in their sixties like me. It’s been really funny to age them and see what they’re up to. Now, they have a kid in college. It’s been fun to explore that time of life, these older characters. It’s about me living on my imaginary pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont. I live in a regular house in Vermont, but I somehow got caught up in this fantasy of having goats. So, this is what the book is about, which is a fun release from the memoirs I have written that have striven to be very, very accurate and honest about my life. So, now I’m just making shit up.

UA: But what’s interesting is that [in your memoirs] you say, for example, that your parents seem more real to you in fictional terms. 

AB: Yes, good one. Well, I grew up in a very book-ish household, where people’s libidinal energy was going into the books they were reading and not into each other. So, that’s how I learned to process the world. I think that’s why I have the stamina for this–this is a crazy, labor-intensive pursuit. People who draw comics are often a little nuts. You have to be able to sit and spend endless hours drawing.

UA: I know you go long periods of time without making comics. But then, something compels you to start creating again. I’m thinking how, after the 2016 election, you brought back Dykes to Watch Out For. 

AB: I just did a few episodes at that point. I didn’t really bring it back. In that abysmal moment, I realized I missed the characters and the way that they talked about the world and politics. It was sort of self-soothing for me to bring them back and explore them a little. I didn’t think I wanted to do it permanently, but now that I am working with them again, I’m psyched to be doing it. 

UA: Is it always a far-reaching, maybe political, moment that has you reaching back to these characters? 

AB: No, I was very happy to let go of them when I stopped writing. I wrote this strip for twenty-five years until 2008, when I very misguidedly thought the country was moving in a good direction, and I could go do other things. It was so demanding keeping up a regular comic strip. It just took over my life, and I wanted to do other stuff. Right now, finishing this book that I’ve been up to my ears in for the past two-and-a-half years, I’m like, I don’t want to do this again. I’m sure I will, but right now, I’m not ready. 

UA: You wouldn’t say, then, you’re writing this book because you’re in one of these times. 

AB: No, this just evolved not out of any particular crisis. This is just the next project I wanted to do after my last book.