The 40 Years of Comics Project - The (Pride) Weekly Graphic Novel Number 73 - post-Dykes to Watch Out For, 2000

I'd originally meant to blog this book during my Pride Month readings, but I got bogged down with work so it got shifted. That said, I'll reiterate what I said in my previous review of one of these collections - it's great. Alison Bechdel's cast is by turns ridiculous and real, which really is what real life feels like, so the characters come across as real. I feel like I'm reading comics about people I know, which, despite her many technical proficiencies, is the true gift that Ms. Bechdel gives the queer community in this series. And while we're starting to see such depictions in media nowadays (can't wait for Supergirl to start up again), Dykes to Watch Out For was doing this at a time when the idea of a queer person being an actual person, not a stererotype, was just about unheard of.

Given my current propensity for undergrounds, imagine the candor of the undergrounds crossed with Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse.

Maybe?

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Pride Weekly Graphic Novel Number 69 - Split-Level Dykes to Watch Out For, 1998

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!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Pride Weekly Graphic Novel Number 68 - Juicy Mother: Celebration, 2005

We're in a bit of an interesting moment for queer comics in print. Though webcomics have been making significant strides in representation and diversity, thanks mostly to the availability of the platform for burgeoning cartoonists, print comics, as a more expensive medium and as a more competitive field, have lagged behind somewhat. An anthology publication like Juicy Mother provides an excellent venue, and the inclusion of such queer cartooning luminaries as Alison Bechdel and Howard Cruse in the book provides the kind of star power that, hopefully, would push this collection into the public eye. Last year's Love is Love did a similar thing, but it's nice to see a queer anthology that doesn't appear to be in response to a tragedy of some sort. As my favourite super-teams will often say, it's nice when we can come together for happy occasions, rather than just for the sad ones.

I think, though, that Juicy Mother was a bit ahead of its time. It's more queer underground, for print comics, than it might be now in a time when queerness is beginning to have a real effect on mainstream culture. Or that's the world I live in, I suppose. It's not the same everywhere.

Picking up on the idea of happy occasions, though, note that this, the inaugural issue (there were 2 more), is titled "Celebration." And though the stories inside aren't all happy ones, and indeed some deal with very profound issues, the impetus of the comic was, as editor Jennifer Camper notes, "to read comix relating to our own experiences of the world." And experiences, good ones and bad, need to be celebrated. They're how we continue to grow as humans.

Though I'm a queer man, and I like to think of myself as...worldly, I suppose?...I definitely find as I explore the variation that exists within queer culture just how much work I still have to do on my own perceptions. The first story in the collection opens with a bunch of punks at a bar, having arguments and conversations, and it was only about 3 pages in that I realized that they were all butch lesbians. On the one hand this illustrates the cool ability of iconically-abstracted comics representations to allow the reader to inhabit a particular character. On the other hand it illustrates a culturally-programmed response to media to assume that the male is the focal viewpoint. I was a bit embarrassed when I realized the error I'd made. The comic is, after all, for "Discerning Homosexuals, Uppity Ladies, Fierce People of Color and all their friends."

Honestly. With cover copy like that, how can you say no?

For those in the Calgary area, I've seen a few copies of this kicking about in the stores I frequent, so it might be accessible somehow.

Onward!