I just got this email from a reader:
“My 3 year old loves your strip. Unfortunately for him, his prudish parents agree we’re not ready to be answering questions like ‘what is Mo doing to Harriet’s vagina?'”
This thoughtful person went on to suggest that I might want to consider doing a series called Children of Lesbians and Gays to Watch Out For, presumably G-rated.
Here’s a sneak preview of Madeleine (speaking to Sydney) from the next Dykes book due out in October. Thanks to Amazon.com’s hellish spirit of unceasing industry, they already have Invasion of the Dykes To Watch Out For listed on their site. But don’t order it from them. Order it from an independent bookstore like Powells.com, which is so mellow they don’t have the cover art up yet.
Alison’s up to her eyeballs in her graphic novel right now, so she didn’t write any new strips this month. Instead, she sent two archive episodes to the newspapers (and the website) that publish DTWOF. She chose two strips she thought might help put current events — like recent mentions of “Madeleine” — in context.
So this month you can re-read #222 (“Indiscreet,” 1995) and #252 (“The Trouble With Sydney,” 1996). Both appeared in the tantalizingly titled Hot, Throbbing Dykes To Watch Out For, and neither is available online, at least until Planet Out puts them up. Guess you’ll just have to buy the book. Or read ’em in the newspaper like in the olden days.
I love seeing Alison embrace the whole blogging thing — you’ll notice she’s written every post for the past couple of months. I’m only butting in again because I want to point out that she got mentioned in this article about graphic novels in Sunday’s Cleveland Plain Dealer. Thanks to an alert reader for the tip.
The story revolves around a panel discussion on graphic novels. Here’s the relevant exchange:
[It] attracted acolytes and skeptics, alongside hundreds of booksellers who lined the walls and scrunched onto the floor… Frank Miller, the macho creator of “Sin City,” made a dramatic late entrance, anointed by applause. Cleveland’s Harvey Pekar hunched and held forth in an orange T-shirt from one end of the table….First question: Why no women on the panel?
Charles Burns, author of “Black Hole,” a graphic novel that mines his own tortured adolescence, pulled the microphone to his chin. “Some of my best friends are women,” he offered, trying mild humor. The acolytes – young guys with backpacks who hang out in comic-book stores – thumped the rug in approval.
“Alison Bechdel – she’s one of the best, one to watch for,” Pekar said.
“Well, where is she?” grumbled the skeptics, young women in sleek black.
Answer: she was at the Boston Dyke March.
Well, I crawled out of my rural seclusion and went down to Boston for the Dyke March. (Waving like the queen is my girlfriend Amy on the right, our niece Lena in the pink pro-choice t-shirt, and Lena’s boyfriend Matthew in the middle.) I was rather startled, but pleasantly so, to find myself in such a multifarious crowd of lesbians and sundry lovely others. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a big city march. I’ve grown so disaffected with the whole depoliticized, Bud-Lite Pride Parade scenario, but the Dyke March was a most refreshingly radical assembly.
I spoke after the march, and I think it went over okay, especially after the hulking Lesbian Avengers Discipline Team surrounded the mentally ill and/or drunk guy who was yelling, and distracted him. I talked about the whole marriage thing, and how if I had charted the progress of this civil rights movement, I wouldn’t have picked marriage to be the deciding issue in our attainment of legal and social equality. But now that it is, let’s keep fighting for it. But more importantly, once we get it, let’s not sit back and lapse into a coma of orthodoxy, but work to undermine the false equation of marriage with citizenship. No one should have to have a state-approved sex partner to be considered legitimate, or to get health insurance. I didn’t have any practical suggestions on how to go about this undermining, but I have no doubt that everyone in the crowd was already on the job.
Anyhow, it was very overstimulating and I met lots of nice people. One of them took a picture of my shoes for her website, female sneaker fiend.com. Scroll down to “Boston (Sneaker) Pride” and there I am.
Come to the Boston Dyke March Friday June 10. I’ll be speaking. About something coherent, I hope. Here’s a recent article about the event from Bay Windows, the Boston LGBT paper.
Imagine my surprise when I saw David Horowitz’s name in my in-box the other night. He’s the once-radical-now-conservative force behind Students for Academic Freedom—an organization that is more or less to academic freedom what Bush’s Clear Skies Initiative is to reducing mercury emissions.
David was asking for permission to reprint a recent episode of my comic strip on the SAF website. It’s the one where the conservative student Cynthia is tabling for SAF, and Ginger, her professor, engages her in a little Socratic dialogue about the merits of teaching “theories” like creationism and holocaust denial. That episode was inspired by an excellent article called The New PC: Crybaby Conservatives in The Nation.
SAF is worried that the sizeable majority of college professors who are left-leaning democrats are indoctrinating their students by exposing them only to liberal ideas and not to conservative ones. Horowitz is also behind something called the ”academic bill of rights” which Republicans are introducing in various state legislatures. Here’s an informative piece on the Democracy Now! Site about how that effort is going down in Florida.
Anyhow, I told David Horowitz that absolutely, he could reprint my comic strip. And here it is on the SAF site. (Not sure how long they’ll keep it up—this is their home page, and they have a regular slot for a cartoon.)
I suppose that out of context like this, the strip could be read in such a way that Ginger appears to be the bad guy—for mocking Cynthia’s intellectual heroine, Ayn Rand. But I think that’s a small risk to run in the face of this opportunity for my comics to engage in a little Socratic dialogue of their own with Students for Academic Freedom. What do you think?
Here’s the strip in its own, cozy progressive context, should you care to peruse it.
Anyway, SAF is paying me a hundred bucks. I’m accepting suggestions on who to donate it to—preferably an organization that really is working to protect freedom of expression and promote intellectual honesty.
Friday June 10, 6pm, Boston Commons. They promise me there will be puppets, bikes, panties, boxers, and thongs. Come join the fray. For more info.
I thought an old college chum had rounded the bend when he told me he was going to start marketing a human-flavored meat substitute. But if there were an award for the most compelling realization of the most repugnant concept, www.eathufu.com would definitely be on the short list.
Damn that Newsweek! If only they’d stop telling people what was going on, we’d have world peace!
