When I finished reading this book, my first thought was "Where has this been all my life?" What a wonderful, wonderful comic. Honest, witty, strange, angry, and often quite funny. And it's not just that I love the characters and the community they're part of - Ms. Bechdel's sense of timing is absolutely incredible. I understand why she's held up as an exemplar of a great contemporary cartoonist. The second half of the book is an ongoing story, not broken down into the two-page installments of the rest of the strips. There are a number of different stories being told through this section, and the cuts from story to story, the tone and pacing of the dialogue, build to an almost frenetic pace before bringing us back to a comfortable, if not quite completely happy, ending. I am floored by Ms. Bechdel's mastery of this form, the sense of urgency that she conveyed to me through a very sophisticated technical use of the medium.
But, y'know, stuff like that aside, this is a great story about a bunch of gay ladies. I'm honestly not sure what else to say. The characters are, to a one, believable and lovable, some more than others, and none of them are perfect, either as people or as queer people. Some of the magic of this comic is that it paints the queer community exactly as it is: a community of flawed people, who don't always get along with one another, who are constantly growing and changing, evolving in our relationships with one another and with the wider society within which we exist. I've not seen a lot of queer comics that give quite so honest a view of the community. I'll be getting all of these books. It's not even a question.
Onward!
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