A Rather Lengthy Interview with Alison Bechdel

All right, first of all, if you haven't read Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home", you need to go out and do so. Preferrably by purchasing it and preferrably from your local bookstore or comic book dealer. As someone with a general distaste for memoir, I've had plenty of crow to eat lately with the publication of this book and "Persepolis". What Marjane Satrapi accomplishes is a series of broad-stroke vignettes, Alison Bechdel renders in a story intricate within a single panel and as a whole. Images, characters and books recur throughout, changed in each appearance by their context, by new information gained by the narrator and given to the reader.

Okay, before I start actually writing my article, I should draw back a bit. This week, I interviewed Alison Bechdel for the Ithaca Times. She'll be speaking at Cornell on Thursday, April 10th. Since only a line or two from the long and pretty awesome interview (especially after my contributions were edited down to make me sound like less of a slack-jawed mouthbreather) will make it into the article, I wanted to post the interview here. Thanks to Alison, and also to Devon Sanger and the FedEx guy.



Bob Proehl: I wanted to start off, I know this is a certain kind of nerdy, but, talking to you about digital distribution. I was noticing that you seem to be primarily moving Dykes to Watch Out For over to the website and more what you mention as being a kind of NPR model of financing. I was wondering if you were finding people were generous or supportive of that kind of model.

Alison Bechdel: It’s not working that great. People do make donations but it’s not making up for what I’m losing in newspaper revenue as all these papers are folding. It’s something but it’s not totally working. I think I’ll figure out a way to make it work. I’m not aggressive about it, I don’t push people to make donations cause I feel awkward about it, so I don’t know what would happen if I did more of that pledge scenario like they do on NPR.

BP: I was curious about that, as far what form that would even take.

AB: I could put up a post like, every six months saying give me some money. Cause I feel awkward about it. I don’t like paying for online content, nobody does.

BP: I’m kind of curious as to how these speaking engagements work for you. It seems like the visual and the prose are so tightly linked, particularly in Fun Home. So when you do these speaking engagements, are you lecturing, are you reading from the work, how do you generally operate these?

AB: The magic of Power Point, my friend. It’s really fun because I’m reading the script and showing pictures at the same time, it’s like a whole different medium. It’s like I have control over timing when I’m reading in a way that I don’t when people are reading on there own. It’s a really interesting experience, exactly when I click to the next slide and when I choose to read my narration. It’s really fun; people I think find it pretty engaging. It’s like you’re being read a picture book. You know, did you ever watch Captain Kangaroo when you were little and they would read with pictures? I used to love that. It’s kind of like that.

BP: When you do that, do you use the full panels with text or do you strip the text from the panels and just use the illustrations?

AB: I strip the narration from the panels but I leave the dialogue cause that’s too complicated to remove. And also, the other interesting thing. Part of it is I’ll be reading from my work but also I’ll be talking about my work and showing images of it as I go and that’s kind of like doing a live comic strip because you have a picture and then you have narration that goes along with it. And with sort of the two of them it creates sort of this third level, which is fun to play with.

BP: Kind of following up on that, I wanted to ask you a little bit about process. Clearly you’re doing a lot of photo referencing. The level of detail is kind of an amazing and on par with the kind of detailing you find in TinTin comics. At the same time you lead off in the narrative by describing yourself as Spartan and having this design aesthetic that’s antithetical to your father’s more ornate aesthetic. I was wondering if you find this kind of packing of detail in your art to be at odds with that description.

AB: That’s kind of an interesting observation. I never equated—I do have an extensive level of detail, I think often it even obscures my work a little bit. But I never thought about it as a kind of ornate-ness. I guess it is. I think of it more as I’m so desperately trying to get things down accurately, it’s hard to know when to stop with the detail. You know, do I draw the name of the book on the spines of the books on the bookshelf, do I draw the logo of the publisher on the spine, do I draw the wood grain on the bookshelf? At a certain point, it all becomes illegible. But I find it hard to know when to stop with that. But I feel like it’s somehow in keeping with my Spartan aesthetic. I want to be accurate.

BP: I didn’t mean ornate to come across in a sort of negative or over embellished sense.

AB: Well, I see what you mean; you could make a case for that.

BP: I was just wondering if you see that as being practical or literal to what you’re doing.

AB: It’s like an uncontrolled literalism. I wish I could be easier with more abstraction.

BP: I wanted to ask you about the function of books within the text. There’s a heavy level of allusion and there’s whole books that are being used as a mode of communication, particularly between you and your father. Particularly the writings of Collette and “A Happy Death” and…

AB: Yeah, the physical book becomes a kind of character.

BP: You actually make a mention of refusing to take your father’s copy of…I can’t remember which Camus book it is right now.

AB: Oh yeah, “The Myth of Sisyphus”.

BP: As someone who, for a long time has not been working in a book format, how is seeing this as a cohesive whole and more of a physical object different from a syndicated strip?

AB: It was kind of a hard leap to make. Because I’m so used to this temporal, temporary nature of the comic strip, you know? I make kind of things up as I go along, I can’t really go back and revise anything. I can make small changes, but I can’t change the story. So this was working with a level of permanence I wasn’t used to, and it was very daunting. But once I realized that I could rework stuff, it was really exciting to have the whole thing there before me and be able to manipulate it and get everything just right and work in all these internal structural things that I’ve never been able to do with the comic strip, so I kind of got into it, but it took awhile.

BP: Did you embark on this thinking of it as a book-length project?

AB: I did, I did. And that was just, you know, mind-blowing. I’m used to creating a two-page story at a time and now I have two hundred plus pages yawning ahead of me, I didn’t know how I was going to….

BP: Well, that’s quite a jump.

AB: In a way, what helped me was learning that even a graphic novel, even a full-length graphic novel has structural constraints to it. There are things you have to pin down and start working around. And that helped me to manage all those empty pages, when I learned that they weren’t really all that empty.

BP: What kind of structural constraints did you find you were running into?

AB: Things like, you want to use the act of turning the page, like if you have a surprising image or a surprising moment coming up, you don’t want people to just see that before its time, so you try to time it so it’s on a left hand page, so they turn the page and there’s the big moment. It’s like you’re telling stories in a physical way, in a two dimensional way. I think of prose writing as like one dimensional, it doesn’t really matter where anything falls on the page. And graphic storytelling is kind of like poetry, or concrete poetry, at any rate, in that it very much matters where on the page or within the chapter. You really have to deal with the physical reality of the book in an interesting way. And then I broke it down into chapters, which helped, and each chapter would have a beginning, middle and an end, it’s own little structural constraints.

BP: I mean, you can see the attention to some of the page layouts, but the idea of saving something for the left hand page—

AB: Well I’m not even very good at that. You know, real masters use that. And people also use the composition of a page spread better than I do. Sometimes I’ll use the opportunity of a page spread to further the narrative. Mostly I’m just going panel to panel.

BP: I wanted to ask some sort of general questions about fathers. You have a comment earlier in the book that the bar is set lower for fathers than for mothers. And in Dykes to Watch Out For, you’re kind of exploring this sort of reversal of gender roles in parenting, where you have a father figures who’s more of a traditional, feminine mothering role. And I was wondering, do you think the shift in gender roles in parenting, if there are any, are going to affect—you discuss your father as being sort of, I don’t know if mystifying is the word, but there’s a distance and mystery that doesn’t come across in the character of your mother. I was wondering if you think that shift is going to affect the sort of mysticism that parents can carry for their kids.

AB: I imagine that it would, that that’s all changing. I mean, somebody must be studying this. When I say the bar was set lower for fathers than for mothers, that’s very much a generational thing. My dad’s from a generation when fathers didn’t change diapers. And now they do. It’s really different. I’m sure that the whole absent father thing is going to change for the next generation, and they’ll be writing about their overbearing fathers.

BP: I was surprised to see, well not totally surprised, to see that the book had nearly been banned. There was a situation with a library in Missouri that was attempting to ban both “Fun Home” and [Craig Thompson’s] “Blankets”, which is kind of an odd pairing. I was wondering what your reaction and what your involvement was with that process.

AB: No, I didn’t really have any involvement, I kind of just watched from the sidelines. And actually, they put the book back. It was really kind of an interesting situation and it makes sense that it was “Fun Home” and “Blankets”, because they’re graphic stories and it was the images that they were objecting to, because the illustrated story is presumably a sort of an attractive nuisance, like kids are going to be more likely to pick this book up than another book that might touch on adult themes, that didn’t have pictures. And I don’t know, I guess that might be true, but banning it doesn’t seem like the proper solution.

BP: I mean, these are not books that are more explicit than a prose text.

AB: Only in so far as pictures are more explicit than words. And there is something to that, you know? I don’t know what the proper way of handling it is. My book is also, there’s something going on in Utah, at the University of Utah. A student, I think it’s just one lone student, but he protested having to read it for his English class. Because it was pornographic! He’s part of some group called No More Pornography. And so he got the teacher to assign an alternate text for him. It was on the news and everything. And it was just cause there’s one picture of, like, me having oral sex with somebody. I guess that could be pornographic, I don’t know.

BP: But other than the fact that it’s visual, it’s no more pornographic than the stuff you might read in a standard English class text.

AB: Exactly.

BP: The last quick thing, are you working on any sort of larger project now, other than keeping up with the strip every couple weeks?

AB: I’m working on another memoir. Theoretically. I’m kind of having trouble getting down to it. I’m writing a book about relationships. I’m going to draw on my own relationship history and weave it in with psychoanalytical reading that I’m doing and maybe more literature like I did in “Fun Home”. It’s all kind of hazy right now.

BP: Do you think there’s any particular reason that—

AB: Bob, could you hold on for one second, I think the FedEx delivery is here.

BP: Oh sure.

(At this point, AB goes to answer the door, carrying her phone and the FedEx guy takes over the interview for me)
AB: Hello.

FedEx Guy: That’s for you.

AB: Oh, and that’s for you. Did you know I had something for you?

FEG: Well, yeah, somebody called it in. Evidently, it wasn’t you?

AB: Yeah, it was me.

FEG: And you know, I gotta tell you, I’m psyched, cause I read the Best American Series…

AB: Oh really?

FEG: I love it and I was psyched to see your stuff in there. And I’ve been dying to tell you that, I’ve come here a couple time and you haven’t been here. I wanted to tell you I was psyched.

AB: Cool. That’s really sweet of you. Yeah, it’s a great series.

FEG: It really is. As far as I’m concerned it’s absolutely required reading. I haven’t really gotten into the other ones; I know there’s a bunch of them. A poetry series and a fiction.

AB: They doing a comics one now too, that’s just comics.

FEG: Is that right? Graphic novels?

AB: Best American Graphic Narrative or something, it’s called.

FEG: Cool, anyway I was psyched. Good to see you.

AB: You too. (Returning to the phone) Hello?

BP: Hello.

AB: Did you hear any of that? I was trying to hold my microphone up. (laughing) That was the FedEx guy.

BP: Yeah, I heard all of that.

AB:Isn’t that wild?

BP: That was great.

AB: Anyhow. What were you asking me?

BP: I hadn’t really formed this question too well, but the form of autobiography and memoir seems so prevalent among, I don’t know if I want to use the term alternative comics artists, but you know, outside of superhero publishing. Do you think there’s any particular reason for you that this form of expression seems to work so well for memoir and autobiography?

AB: I keep trying to work up my grand theory of this, because there is something that seems peculiarly conducive to autobiography in graphic storytelling. But I can’t think why. Except, the furthest I’ve gotten is the act of trying to draw yourself, it forces a kind of objectivity about yourself. I mean, this could be totally bullshit. I’m sure prose memoir writing, if you’re any good you also have to have a degree of objectivity about yourself. But something about that act of looking at yourself from the outside, the way you do when you draw yourself…I mean, I haven’t worked out this theory.

BP: If you think of writing longer prose memoir, you still have the project of constructing the “I”, of imagining yourself as a character.

AB: Now I’m thinking of examples of first person shooter style comics that I’ve seen, where you see everything through the narrator’s eyes, you don’t actually see this guy as a character; you just sort of see what he sees. But that’s sort of an experimental thing. You couldn’t really sustain that.

BP: And it seems that the opposite is more common of autobiographical comics work, the idea of having the artist in the panel.

AB: But maybe it’s just the tradition. I feel very inspired by R. Crumb and Harvey Pekar’s work for example. That kind of kind of gritty daily-ness and trying to be really honest about their real lives. Maybe it’s just that tradition that’s inspired everyone else to keep doing it.