Post-Dykes to Watch Out For

100 Comics #6

Alison Bechdel’s comics were always going to be on this list, and the obvious Bechdel book to discuss would be her most well-known graphic novel, Fun Home. Fun Home is a great work of comics (as are her the two subsequent books she produced, Are You My Mother? and the underrated The Secret to Superhuman Strength). These three books are an autobiographical trilogy of sorts, focusing on Bechdel’s relationships with her father, her mother, and her own body. It is an amazing body of work, one of comics’ greatest artistic achievements. But before she started producing these works, Bechdel produced a weekly comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For. Dykes to Watch Out For ran from 1983 to 2008, and are my favorite Bechdel comics.

In 1986, Bechdel started collecting the Dykes to Watch Out For strips into books published by a lesbian specialty publisher called Firebrand Books. (A weird footnote about Firebrand—for a hot minute, I was its publisher. I was working for Firebrand’s distributor, and when Firebrand’s founding publisher, Nancy K. Bereano, decided to retire, my employer bought the inventory and existing contracts. As publisher, I didn’t do much except clear up the complicated royalty situations and hire a designer I knew, Tom Devlin, to redesign the trade dress for the Dykes to Watch Out For series.) I want to talk about Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For book from the year 2000—Post-Dykes to Watch Out For.

Basically the strip ran weekly as a full-page strip, but in the book collections, the pages were always split into two. It seems that Dykes To Watch Out For was designed so that each strip could be separated (i.e. no panel or image would have to be cut in half). At first there wasn’t a ton of continuity, but eventually Bechdel settled on a cast of characters who lived in a particular place and interacted. It evolved quickly into a kind of political soap opera. The characters lived in the same world we do, more or less.