By Shaenon K. Garrity
First, a warning:
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For is not the complete
Dykes to Watch Out For. Y'all still have to track down all the
Garfield-sized Firebrand and Alyson paperbacks, from the self-titled 1986 debut collection through
Unnatural Dykes to Watch Out For (with the lesbian pulp novel cover) and
Post-Dykes to Watch Out For (with the gender spectrum of alternate Mos) all the way to 2005's
Invasion of the Dykes to Watch Out For, for the full experience. Sure, you may feel like you're getting the gist of things with
Essential, but can any thoughtful human being live a complete life without knowing how Madwimmin Books decided to start stocking dildos, how Stuart discovered the spinning class at the gym, or how Jezanna learned to admit she needed to use lube? I think not.
Alison Bechdel is my number-one role model as a cartoonist, and here are my top five reasons why:
1. She doesn't need the comics industry.
Sure, nowadays it's easy. If you have a comic targeted at video gamers, you put it on the Internet. If you have a comic targeted at furries, you put it on the Internet. If you have a comic targeted at scientists or librarians or left-wing political activists or feminist science-fiction fans or history buffs with a particular interest in 18th-century Bavarian religious debates…actually, you should probably reconsider doing a video-game comic. Those things bring in the benjamins. But now there are easy ways to reach an audience outside the mainstream comics industry, which is good because the mainstream comics industry is only sporadically interested in selling comics and is often distracted by shiny things.
Things weren't always so easy, but Alison Bechdel didn't care.
Dykes grew and throve far outside the comics industry, far even by the standards of strips that run in the free weeklies (the many tips-of-the-nib almost always namecheck people and organizations in the gay and/or feminist community; about the closest Bechdel gets to acknowledging the sequential-art world is a reference to Ariel Schrag). It may not be at your local comic-book store, unless your local comic-book store is awesome, but it can be found on bookstore shelves, in coffeehouse restrooms, under futons, and shoved between the vegan cookbooks and porn wherever agents of the Homosexual Agenda operate. Bechdel knows how to get her work to people who want to read it.
Where did I first discover
Dykes to Watch Out For, anyway? College. It had to be college.
2. She uses photo reference.
For everything. A little obsessively, to be honest. Most cartoonists only use a live model if a pose is especially tricky or weird; the rest of the time, we just make crap up, because doing things the right way is
hard. But Bechdel uses photo reference, usually of herself, for every friggin' pose. It's got to be insanely time-consuming, but it works, because you can tell at what point in
Dykes she started doing it. It's the point at which the art gets really good. Which brings me to #3…
3. Her art used to be pretty cruddy.
And now it's fantastic: perfect anatomy, detailed backgrounds, strong line, clean compositions. Reading
Dykes to Watch Out For, beginning to end, allows me to bulwark my desperate and sagging hope that if I just devote myself to nothing but drawing comics for 25 years, I will suck less.
4. She can draw black people.
John Romita Sr. has said that the test of a good cartoonist is whether he or she can convincingly draw people talking on the phone (which Bechdel can do; check out the Normal Rockwell homage cover to
Essential Dykes). For other critics, the crucial test is the ability to draw people of different ethnicities without shading in the skin. There are some fine-ass cartoonists who resort to the draw-lines-all-over-the-face-to-indicate-blackness technique, like Keith Knight, but for others it becomes a test of skill at drawing the human face: can you express recognizable racial characteristics without tipping into clumsy caricature? Bechdel seems to love exploring the nuances of eyes, noses, lips, chins, hair. Even in her crude early strips, she was drawing a racially diverse cast, and she wasn't using any tones.
Most cartoonists, it should be noted, get around this whole issue by just not drawing any nonwhite characters.
Sometimes all the diversity in
Dykes gets a little too Burger King Kids' Club: how about a physically disabled dyke? How about a Syrian Muslim dyke? How about…
a man? But Bechdel's interest in exploring characters with varied appearances and experiences (as long as they're—mostly—lesbians) has given her, over the years, one of the most eclectic casts in comics. Like Garry Trudeau, she has a character ready to engage any political or social development from a relevant point of view. In recent years, one of the strip's most challenging characters has been college student and eventual CIA agent Cynthia, who is white, blonde, Christian, gay—and Republican. In a way, that's harder to draw than a recognizable black woman.
(Incidentally, many people have described
Dykes as a lesbian
Doonesbury. I prefer to think of it as
For Better or for Worse as it ought to be.)
5. She popularized the Bechdel Test.
Which is useful sometimes. I'm looking at you, the rest of comics. Don't give me that face.
Image credits:
Panels from Dykes to Watch Out For strip "The Rule", ©Alison Bechdel
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2008
