Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel’s fictional cartoon strip charting the lives and loves of an evolving group of lesbian friends and lovers, started over 25 years ago and now is syndicated to over 50 alternative newspapers and published by Firebrand Books in 11 volumes. In her gleeful, graphic soap opera, Bechdel tracks the relationships, political crises, sexual explorations, careers and parenthood of her characters, mostly revolving around her central heroine Mo, an often lovelorn, politically committed feminist and under-appreciated bookseller at Madwimmen Books. Now the cult soap has been gathered into a handsome coffee table book (dare I say perfect Christmas pressie? *ducking*) Essential Dykes to Watch Out For

Meanwhile, Bechdel has written a fantastic graphic memoir, Fun Home : A Family Tragicomedy primarily focussed on her complex relationship with her father, a funeral home director who lived a closeted gay life. This is an utterly engrossing and remarkably moving book, and the beautifully detailed drawings render it like watching a film and reading all at once. (if you have never read a graphic novel, try this one.. if you read loads, you probably have it already!)) She is an obsessive documenter, archivist and analyser – scraps of diaries, fragments of photograph, passages of literature are all scrutinised as she strives to understand the distant father that she identifies with so much. True to her DTWOF tone, there is much hilarity in here too and an incredible rich evocation of her early childhood.

Complex psychological layers of sexuality, family, and self identity are explored with the precision of a surgeon:

“Perhaps my eagerness to claim him as ‘gay’ in the way that I am ‘gay’ as opposed to some other category, is just a way of keeping him to myself- a sort of inverted Oedipal Complex..”

It is also a love affair with literature, as the books both she and her father read are evoked and quoted throughout. The verbosity and intellectual twirls will dazzle you, but ultimately it is a deeply emotional book. Her fumbled, thwarted attempts to hug her coolly intellectual father will make you cry, her gorgeous sexual awaking passages will delight you, and her loss – and bravery to address it – will break your heart.

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