Alison Bechdel provides another cartoon extravaganza with an added attraction, "Serial Monogamy."
Synopsis
Alison Bechdel provides another cartoon extravaganza with an added attraction, "Serial Monogamy."
Publishers Weekly
Bechdel's ( Dykes to Watch Out For ) comics present an idealized community of lesbian friends, lovers and gay activists. This new collection of ``dykes'' follows the politically earnest and neurotic Mo and her affable lover Harriet as they prepare to live together. Their many friends--happily promiscuous Lois; Ginger, the black college professor; Ginger's Asian housemate Sparrow; and lovebirds Clarice and Toni--make appearances through subplots that humorously detail the course of their lives and love affairs. Needless to say, Bechdel's work is politically correct--racially diverse to a fault, her characters routinely spout liberal political platitudes and radical sexual ideology; but her stories combine a gentle humor with a forthright depiction of the complex social issues facing homosexual women. Her drawings are charming, simple and skillfully comic, but the book's real gem is a separate feature, ``Serial Monogamy,'' a very funny, autobiographical examination of the cartoonist's own inability to make a relationship last (``Not only do lesbians have less sex than Hets and Gay men, we break up more often''), something with which heterosexuals can certainly sympathize. (Apr.)
About the Author, Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel
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 fifty 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.”
Bechdel's ( Dykes to Watch Out For ) comics present an idealized community of lesbian friends, lovers and gay activists. This new collection of ``dykes'' follows the politically earnest and neurotic Mo and her affable lover Harriet as they prepare to live together. Their many friends--happily promiscuous Lois; Ginger, the black college professor; Ginger's Asian housemate Sparrow; and lovebirds Clarice and Toni--make appearances through subplots that humorously detail the course of their lives and love affairs. Needless to say, Bechdel's work is politically correct--racially diverse to a fault, her characters routinely spout liberal political platitudes and radical sexual ideology; but her stories combine a gentle humor with a forthright depiction of the complex social issues facing homosexual women. Her drawings are charming, simple and skillfully comic, but the book's real gem is a separate feature, ``Serial Monogamy,'' a very funny, autobiographical examination of the cartoonist's own inability to make a relationship last (``Not only do lesbians have less sex than Hets and Gay men, we break up more often''), something with which heterosexuals can certainly sympathize. (Apr.)
