Blog

Bechdel on Spiegelman

November 24th, 2004

Last Thursday, Alison attended an Art Spiegelman lecture at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. Burlington’s excellent alternative weekly Seven Days commissioned her to draw a comic about the event.

Life Lessons from Melissa

November 23rd, 2004

In case you missed it, here’s a link to a story in The Advocate about Melissa Etheridge’s battle with breast cancer. Alison is quoted because, as alert readers know, Mo’s partner Sydney was recently diagnosed with breast cancer and is now recovering after a lumpectomy, chemo and radiation. Roughly 216,000 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004.

FYI, The Mautner Project in D.C. is a great clearinghouse for lesbian-specific information about breast cancer.

Update: The above link has been fixed and is now correct. Thanks!

RSS Feed

November 9th, 2004

A number of readers have requested that we activate an RSS feed, and I think I’ve finally figured it out, with help from Jessamyn, the local radical, anti-capitalist librarian blogger. Try this out, see if it works. If not, please post here or email us (dtwof at dykestowatchoutfor dot com) and let us know. We appreciate any tech tips you may have. The feed URL is http://feeds.feedburner.com/DtwofTheBlog.

The Big Day

November 2nd, 2004

Yes, I am, in fact referring to today, November 2nd, when our fine country elects its next leader. But I’m also referring to the pub date of Alison’s next DTWOF collection. We’ve received several queries recently asking when exactly that big day will be. My source tells me sometime in the fall of 2005.

The lame duck episodes

October 26th, 2004

If you’re curious about how the DTWOF characters handle the election results (or lack thereof), you’ll have to wait until December 1, when episode 454 comes out. I just finished and sent off episodes 452 and 453, which are scheduled to run during the weeks of 11/3 and 11/17 respectively. Because I had to write these well before the election happened, they obviously could not be about the election. I couldn’t even write about the pre-election anxiety we’re all seething with, because that’ll be old news by 11/2.

This was a frustrating prospect, like not being allowed to mention the elephant (or please god, the donkey) in the living room. In the end, I decided to use these two episodes to do some much needed exposition. I’ve devoted so much space to the depredations of the Bush administration lately that I’ve been neglecting the characters’ lives and relationships.

Required Reiding

October 26th, 2004

Alison says she’s going to post something later, but in the meantime, here are some links to another awesome feminist cartoonist blogger, Mikhaela Reid. If you haven’t seen her work, do check it out. Mikhaela draws political cartoons for the Boston Phoenix and for Bay Windows. Her work also appears in Women’s eNews, In These Times, Ms., and the Funny Times. She was featured, along with Alison and some other kick-ass strip artists, in Ted Rall’s recent book, Attitude II: The New Subversive Alternative Cartoonists. As you can tell by her blog, she’s clearly more web savvy than either of us.

Who is that masked woman?

October 16th, 2004

Originally uploaded by Alison Bechdel.

Did you know October 13th was National Freeway Free Speech Day? Check out FreewayBlogger.com for some inspiring examples.

Self-oppressed Minority

October 12th, 2004

I had a fun time speaking at Dartmouth yesterday. I delivered my getting-rather-old rant about being ghettoized as a lesbian cartoonist. “Why can’t I be just a plain, generic cartoonist,” I whined. “Just because I write about drag kings and dildos and transgender children. I mean, what’s the big deal? I’m writing about my world just like Garry Trudeau writes about his, and no one calls him a heterosexual cartoonist.” I read from a bitter cartoon essay I wrote for The Stranger a couple years ago,“Oppressed Minority Cartoonist,” to punctuate my premise.

Afterward, I was somewhat chastened but delighted to learn that James Sturm was in the audience. He is a.) one of the founders of The Stranger, b.) a great graphic novelist, c.) not a lesbian, and d.) the director of the Center for Cartooning Studies, an absolutely amazing 2 –year cartooning program that will be starting in the fall of 2005.

Also in the audience was Ana Merino, an academic and poet who does a lot of theoretical writing about comics. She included some of my work in an exhibit that she curated last year called Comic Release. And she’s on the board of directors of the Center for Cartooning Studies.

So the presence of these comics luminaries kind of shut me up about the “oppressed minority cartoonist” shtick. I’ve decided that the secret to being plain and generic is to just act like you’re plain and generic.

A mere simpleton can update a blog, but only our webmaster can change the website!

October 6th, 2004

Alert readers may have noticed that the DTWOF website hasn’t been updated in a while. Rest assured, new items are coming soon. In the meantime, you can read the latest strip on Planet Out. Or you might actually go off-line and read it in a newspaper, like they used to do in the olden days.

Alison speaking at Dartmouth

September 28th, 2004

Alert DTWOF fans and event organizers might have noticed that Alison has recently curtailed her public speaking schedule. She’s curtailed pretty much everything, in fact, as she’s working on a graphic novel. She will, however, be driving to Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH to give a talk on Monday, October 11th, in honor of National Coming Out Day. The talk’s called, “Can I Stop Coming Out Now? Or, If ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’ is organizing closets on television, is there, properly said, anything left to come out of?”

Alison will show slides of her work and talk about identity, assimilation, liberation, propaganda, what kinds of pens she uses, the origins of totalitarianism, the sorry state of democracy, and coming out, among other things and not necessarily in that order.

Start time is 4pm. Carpenter Hall, Room 13.