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language: English
country: USA
year: 1983-2008
form: comics
genre(s): mundane
dates read: 17.10.22
I spent almost literally all day reading The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, an anthology of about 75% of Alison Bechdel’s long-running Dykes to Watch Out For comic. it took me a solid two hours to tear myself away this afternoon in order to go grocery shopping (I looked at my phone at 2:11 and thought, oh, I need to go shopping; I didn’t leave the house until after 4), and when I got back I spent another two hours reading more of it, took a break to make dinner, then raced on to the finish.
the comic itself is: funny, emotional, really engaging, and does a great job balancing and interweaving many different characters and storylines in an approachable format. it’s a delightful look at twenty years of urban lesbian life in the US, featuring a diverse cast of characters — Black, white, Latina, Syrian, lesbian, bi, trans, even a token straight(?) man. it’s also a really compelling and frankly often incredibly depressing look at twenty years of left and liberal politics, from the Reagan presidency through the Bush years. if you ever needed a reminder that our current political moment is in so many ways not a new one in US history, this is one. you could teach a whole course just contextualizing the politics of this comic over the years. someone probably has done precisely this.
the anthology as anthology left something to be desired in that it wasn’t the complete Dykes to Watch Out For; in particular it felt like a lot of the emotional climaxes or resolutions to, e.g., the revelation of an affair were just kind of missing? and while I still really (really) enjoyed it it did seem like sometimes it was just…skpping ahead as if nothing had happened, except that the reader had to just go along with the consequences of what it decided to skip over. but I still would highly recommend this as a reading experience.
moods: emotional, horny, lighthearted, polemic, reflective, tense