The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For »

ALISON BECHDEL has been a careful archivist of her own life and kept a journal since she was ten. Since 1983 she has been chronicling the lives of various characters in the fictionalized “Dykes to Watch Out For” strip, “one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period” (Ms.). The strip is syndicated in 50 alternative newspapers, translated into multiple languages, and collected into a book series with a quarter of a million copies in print. Utne magazine has listed DTWOF as “one of the greatest hits of the twentieth century.”

From the author of Fun Home -- the lives, loves, and politics of cult-fav characters Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and others.

For twenty-five years Bechdel s path-breaking Dykes to Watch Out For strip has been collected in award-winning volumes (with a quarter of a million copies in print), syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers, and translated into many languages. Now, at last, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For gathers a rich, funny, deep and impossible to put down (Publishers Weekly) selection from all eleven Dykes volumes. Here too are sixty of the newest strips, never before published in book form.

Settle in to this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel ) of the lives, loves, and politics of a cast of characters, most of them lesbian, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis. Her brilliantly imagined countercultural band of friends -- academics, social workers, bookstore clerks -- fall in and out of love, negotiate friendships, raise children, switch careers, and cope with aging parents.

Bechdel fuses high and low culture -- from foreign policy to domestic routine, hot sex to postmodern theory -- in a serial graphic narrative suitable for humanists of all persuasions.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

Taken together, these comic strips don't have the tightly coiled impact of Fun Home, but in some ways they offer greater consolations—they're looser, more funny, and they offer the chance to watch a group of very appealing women grow and change (and struggle to have better sex) over the course of more than two decades. Ms. Bechdel calls her strips "half op-ed column and half endlessly serialized Victorian novel," and that's not far off. I suspect that, over the years, Dykes to Watch Out For has been as important to new generations of lesbians as landmark novels like Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) and Lisa Alther's Kinflicks (1976) were to an earlier one…The most important thing to know about The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, however, is how deeply amusing it is. It crackles with one-liners.