Illustrated Wimmin, #4 – The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For

In this occasional series, Illustrated Man, I will explore the intersection of anthropology and comic books, graphic novels, comic strips, animation, and other manner of popular drawn art.

Alison Bechdel crashed the party on American literature’s main stage with Fun Home (2004) a stunning graphic memoir about coming of age, coming out, and discovering her father’s own closeted gay identity. It received rave reviews and was featured at the top of a number of end of the year best book lists and, with the close of the ’00s, reappeared on some best of the decade lists. And rightfully so, there wasn’t a more monumental nonfiction comic book in a decade that will be remembered for an explosion in top notch comic output. There hasn’t been a more significant comic memoir since Maus (1986).

My own encounter with Fun Home began on the Eastern Band Cherokee reservation as I was conducting the ethnographic field research for my dissertation. I was cast in a theatrical production as a soldier in Andrew Jackson’s army and one of my fellow Indian killers was a bohemian epileptic artist named Pat working his way back to Florida from Knoxville. Like Capote’s villain from In Cold Blood he traversed America’s highways with a library in his trunk: Zizek, Baudrillad, and a borrowed copy of Bechdel’s novel.

After I settled in Newport News I discovered Fun Home in the stacks at my public library and got hooked on Bechdel’s beautiful ink lines, hyper-literary self reflection, and slightly neurotic gallows humor. I was anxious to get my hands on more of her work and I soon learned I had a lot of catching up to do. Before achieving celebrity status Bechdel was already a star in the gay and lesbian community for her biweekly strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, first published in 1983. A nearly 400 page retrospective was released in 2008 as The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For.

Our story begins in 1987 and the dykes, a tight knit cast of regulars, are late 20s to early 30s. There’s Mo, a moral hypochondriac who is always in such a tizzy over Republicans, U.S. militarism, the melting ice caps, or capitalism that she hardly has the will to score a date. Lois is a horny free spirit, casually jumping from relationship to relationship and bed to bed. She shares a house with Ginger, a grad student in literature with a persistent fear of commitment, and Sparrow, who staffs a women’s crisis center and is always caught up in therapy-speak. Then there’s Clarice and Toni who are in a serious long term relationship and upwardly mobile, they’re the first to get a house and the first to have kids. But domestic bliss doesn’t last long and soon their relationship is in trouble.

Their lives, always dominated by their politics and their relationships, are frequently hilarious. In a five lesbians in a VW Bug on their way to a march in DC kind of way.

As a non-lesbian, non-woman I found there was a lot for me in Dykes. All the women are smart, engaged, and driven by their passions which makes for really interesting characters by any measure. Frequently academics provides a backdrop to their lives as Clarice completes law school, Ginger graduates and becomes a lecturer, and Mo starts dating Sydney, a Women’s Studies professor. There are the familiar humiliations of romance, dating, cheating, moving in together, young parenthood – as Dykes cycles through these topics they always seemed fresh to me. No doubt because lesbians live these experiences with a degree of political consequence I don’t have to confront. Finally, much of the story plays out in the ‘90s – my salad days – and so I was rewarded by a bit of nostalgia too. I’ll come back to this last point later.

This reading experience was accompanied by a sense that a lot of the subtext was over my head. For one this is a book about lesbians. It is not a book about women. It is not a book about gays. They’re all lesbians and there is a gap between what I can recognize of myself in this other and what it’s intended audience finds. It’s an intentional inversion of what has been known as the Bechdel Test and I’ll fess up that it was disorienting, albeit in a good way.

As one critic pointed out Dykes to Watch Out For is a chronicle of lesbian history in America over the past two decades as trends and debates (not to mention electoral politics and their consequences) have consumed the community. “Alison Bechdel has put her finger squarely on the Dykegeist,” she writes. Do I have to tell you I don’t know what the Dykegeist is? (It sounds awesome though. Dykegeist!)

Taken as a whole the book is rich in its themes and topics. Here I’ll mention just two that resonated with me: the fall of the independent book store and ambivalence over the mainstreaming of queerness.

Since I was a child I have loved bookstores. There was a moment in time, growing up in Austin, that the city was awash in independent and used bookstores. As soon as I had my license I was driving from one to the next, browsing the stacks and drinking coffee. Life for the Dykes revolves around books too, their community is built around Café Topaz and Mad Wimmin Books where Mo and Lois work. Mad Wimmin hosts their poetry readings, it’s their third place.

Things get tight financially in the mid 1990s when cutthroat capitalists like Bunns and Noodles and Bounders Books and Muzak (not to mention Medusa.com) start to cut in on their bottom line. Somewhere along the way Mad Wimmin starts selling vibrators and lube – not sure how that happened, but I’m thinking Lois was involved… not all the strips are in the collected volume, you know. But it’s too little too late and by the early 2000s Mad Wimmin Books is out of business. Just like all those beautiful stores where I wasted my youth. Just like the wasteland of Newport News with its big box stores, one after another.

And of course I bought this book from Medusa.com which is, ironically, making Bechdel’s characters accessible to a wider audience (like straight, male anthropologists living in military towns in the south) not to mention preserving them for future generations of lesbians to rediscover. From the very beginning of the series the author demonstrates a keen awareness of how the mainstream cuts both ways for gays and lesbians. Like in a 1987 strip when at a Gay Pride parade Mo frets over its undercurrents of conservatism as the freaks are joined by Catholics, a men’s choir singing Yankee Doodle, and one group proudly waving a banner that reads “Le$bian Investment Bankers.”

Bechdel writes in her introduction to the Essential Dykes that her goal was always to speak the unspeakable, to depict the undepicted for a community that was starved for representations of itself. “Once you speak the unspeakable… it becomes spoken! Conventional. Boring! Have I churned out episodes of this comic strip every two weeks for decades merely to prove that we’re the same as everyone else?”

By my reading what is revealed in the changing position of queer folk in contemporary American society is the great diversity of this group. Their lack of political consensus is matched by the lack of consensus among racial groups or along class lines. This all comes to a head for the Dykes in a most interesting way as Ginger must confront an outspoken conservative in the classroom, Cynthia, who then comes out to her. This is after George W. Bush’s reelection and just as frequently the two are feuding over ideologies as the elder woman is taking the younger woman under her wing, inviting her over for Christmas dinner when her parents excommunicate her, and writing her letters of recommendation when she wants to join the CIA.

A word about the art. It begins as, shall we say, competent. Some characters and panels simply fall flat. Yet even at this early date Bechdel’s greatest strength is the ability to convincingly create a racially diverse cast and make it look easy. But the emotional depth is limited and some of the characters just look kind of dumb. Gradually the style becomes more confident until sometime in the early 1990s when everything clicks and the strip takes on beautiful sophistication. By the middle of the decade Bechdel’s art is nothing short of sublime. This is the style she would use in Fun Home, but the memoir adds ink wash for shading whereas for the strip everything is accomplished with pure black and cross hatching.

Comparisons worth making: Like Doonesbury or For Better or For Worse, Dykes follows a large cast through time as they age and mature. Time flows in this strip and often enough it is marked by popular culture and presidential politics. Unlike Doonesbury, which I read as more satirical, the political editorializing is closer to the surface in Dykes. Politics for Bechdel is a tragedy (played for laughs – black humor), for Gary Trudeau it is a farce. If there is a true political ancestor to Dykes it would be Sylvia, which is unabashedly feminist and pretty damn funny too. Unlike For Better or For Worse, which follows the foibles of a family and their extended social network, Dykes is full of hot sex. Plus foibles and family.

Late in the book Lois and Mo see each other in the supermarket. Mo is trying to chose between fair trade raw cane sugar and organic raw cane sugar. “Eat pesticides? Or exploit workers?” she thinks when Lois appears and says, “Hey, you look kind of like a very good friend of mine, only older.” Time passes and the artist marks it with lines under their eyes. With parents that die. With cancer. With babies that become teenagers. But to reverse the flow of time one need only turn the pages from left to right and all your friends are young again. There’s a great seduction in that.

The curious can view this video where Bechdel clicks through some slides, most of which are featured in the book, for about 20 minutes. Superfans can stick around for the next 20 minutes or so as she takes questions from the audience.

Matt Thompson

Matt Thompson is Project Cataloger at The Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, and currently working on a CLIR ‘hidden collections’ grant to describe the museum’s collection of early 20th Century photography. He has a doctorate in anthropology from the University of North Carolina and a Masters in information science from the University of Tennessee.

4 thoughts on “Illustrated Wimmin, #4 – The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For

  1. “Fun Home” is simply magnificent and it comes with my highest recommendations. It’s a great work of literature and will appeal to anyone who likes to read good books.

    Aside from the obvious relevance “The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For” will have for a lesbian readership, it will be of great interest to anthropologists and gender studies people because it is social history of the American present from a point of view that is frequently ignored.

    “Fun Home” is a profoundly personal memoir powered by a serious intellect that sees her own life through a lens of irony and black humor. Its more a make-’em-laugh-make-’em-cry sort of story.

    “Dykes” is a comic strip that brings the gags one after another. They don’t all work, but there’s enough of them that something is going to stick. Here the archetype is that of a soap opera, or, in Bechdel’s own words, a Victorian serialized novel. Everybody is hopping in and out of bed with each other while making wise cracks about the Republicans.

  2. Sniffle, DtwOF defined my early college years- sitting in people’s rooms, listening to Ani Di Franco and reading those books. I own them all, and after 1997 all were purchased when they came out. Was delighted when I heard she’d written a memoir.

  3. Going to college was for me a profound discovery of women, not in a romantic sense but in a political one. DtwoF was not so much a fixture of my college days, but in reading the strip, especially those set in the ’90s, I was transported back – so strong was the affinity of these characters for the women I knew then.

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