Margaret Drabble
British novelist, biographer, and critic
Alison Bechdel is an American cartoonist. Originally known for the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, she came to critical and commercial success in 2006 with her graphic memoir Fun Home, which was subsequently adapted as a musical that won a Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015.
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Alison Bechdelis an American cartoonist. Originally known for the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, she came to critical and commercial success in 2006 with her graphic memoir Fun Home, which was subsequently adapted as a musical that won a Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015. In 2012, she released her second graphic memoir Are You My Mother? She was a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Award. She is also known for originating the Bechdel test.
Well, I’m always working on my comic strip and trying to, you know, keep cranking that out.
American cartoonist, author
Yeah, I read Judy Blume. My mother didn’t like that, but I read it anyhow.
American cartoonist, author
My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up.
American cartoonist, author
I don’t know, maybe it’s because I was raised Catholic. Confession has always held a great appeal for me.
American cartoonist, author
Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.
American cartoonist, author
I’m pretty illiterate when it comes to comics history.
American cartoonist, author
But mostly, it’s a book about my relationship with my father.
American cartoonist, author
But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu.
American cartoonist, author
I probably read Harriet the Spy about 70,000 times.
American cartoonist, author
I never really read superhero stuff as a kid.
American cartoonist, author
Even drawing gray hair at all is difficult to render in black and white.
American cartoonist, author
It’s definitely part of it, that the men were having fun and doing the interesting things but also, I don’t know, I’m just thinking more about gender and how maybe in some way I am more of a boy than a girl.
American cartoonist, author
Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.
American cartoonist, author
I get a lot of mail from men who really identify with Stuart, you know, Sparrow’s boyfriend. I love that. Even though I used to say I wanted men to read the strip even though there weren’t any men in it, so they’d be forced to identify with the women.
American cartoonist, author
It’s a hard thing to age a character because you can’t really suddenly give someone gray hair.
American cartoonist, author
When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults.
American cartoonist, author
One of them is already having some menopausal symptoms. I’m working on that. I’m giving them all little lines under the eyes, trying to sort of make them age gracefully.
American cartoonist, author
When I grew up, I studied karate for years. I got pretty strong, but eventually I had to acknowledge that I really didn’t like fighting at all, so I quit.
American cartoonist, author
Mostly it was Mad magazine. And I did read a lot of – I had a subscription when I was little, but I also had access to some old collections, the little paperbacks of the really good stuff.
American cartoonist, author
I hope that I can get people to read it without having to change it. Especially now that the strip has more different kinds of characters. It’s really not all lesbians any more.
American cartoonist, author
People really want to think that these things really happened. I don’t know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.
American cartoonist, author
And partly, the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me.
American cartoonist, author
I just met someone who read Gone With the Wind 62 times for exactly that same reason. She couldn’t bear that it wasn’t real. She wanted to live in it.
American cartoonist, author
Nancy Drew was always changing her outfits. I despised girls’ clothing, I couldn’t wait to get home from school and get out of it. The last thing I wanted to read was minute descriptions of Nancy’s frocks.
American cartoonist, author
I started to get bored with that stuff about only drawing men and I’ve taken it out of the slideshow.
American cartoonist, author
I love Jules Feiffer. I didn’t discover him until I was a little older.
American cartoonist, author
Partly I resented being perceived as weak because I was a girl.
American cartoonist, author
I just have this sort of entrepreneurial spirit and I work really hard at promoting myself.
American cartoonist, author
Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it’s about real life. I feel like I’m using a part of my brain that’s been dormant until now.
American cartoonist, author
The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence.
American cartoonist, author
That’s all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven’t figured out yet. And that’s one of the things I’m hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project.
American cartoonist, author
For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me.
American cartoonist, author
Watching everyone root through their psyche, it just delights me. Especially R. Crumb’s stuff.
American cartoonist, author