Design Matters from the Archive: Alison Bechdel

For some artists, their work and their life are so intertwined it’s impossible to tease them apart. Alison Bechdel is one such artist. To talk about her work is to talk about her. Her cartoons and graphic novels, layout the intimate intricacies of her life in all their heartbreaking splendor. Her long-running comic strip, “Dkyes to Watch Out For”, is one of the major achievements in the comics genre. Her graphic memoirs, Fun Home and Are You My Mother?, brought her work to a mainstream audience. In 2015, Fun Home was adopted as a Tony award winning Broadway musical, and it’s still going strong.

Debbie talks to Alison about her work, her life, and about how identifying herself as a lesbian when she was young led her into a career as a cartoonist. “I became an outlaw at a young age, and was very freed up to do whatever I wanted. And I was … writing this crazy, marginal comic strip. For free. It was not a great career path. And bizarrely it has worked out.”