II. Fun Home. A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel After ...
II. Fun Home. A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel
After reading Fun Home, I felt embarrassed that I had so aggressively avoided comics. I didn’t know books like this existed. I think I refused the idea of using comics in my project because I associated them with superhero comics. I imagined that all such work contained exaggerated action words such as “Pow!,” “Smack!,” and so on. Bechdel (along with many others, including Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, David Small, Craig Thompson, David B., et al.) redefined how I thought of visual text and how it belongs to literature.
Zander 2 Alison Bechdel started her comic career with the strip Dykes to Watch Out For in 1983. The strip was originally independent stories without a set storyline or characters but eventually Bechdel created a world dedicated to the lives of several lesbian characters. After working on Dykes to Watch Out For for over 20 years, she released her first novel. Fun Home is a story about Alison’s father and, particularly, his obsessive compulsions and constant ridicule. Within the story, Bechdel (an out lesbian) discovers her father’s secret identity as a homosexual man. The story chronicles the narrator’s life from early childhood until early adulthood, when the narrator’s father dies. The art of Fun Home is simple but beautiful. This simplicity is echoed through the drawings with their lack of shading (minus the blue hue filter) and the loosely cartoonish drawings, though there are moments when Bechdel almost reaffirms that she is capable of more complex art. The first page of the memoir is a drawing Bechdel made of her father. At first, when I thumbed past that first page, I was taken aback by her cartoonish rendering. My hope was that the body of the memoir was going to mirror the chapter’s title page. But after reading through that first chapter, I came across another detailed drawing, and I realized that she was introducing each chapter this way. I must admit, these
Zander 3 breaks from the story came as a wonderful surprise to me as a reader. Once I developed an appreciation for her style of art, it was nice to see her break from that pattern and focus energy and dedication to these brief but exceptional drawings of photographs. Such moments lend a worldly aspect to Bechdel’s memoir. These pictures make the whole thing seem more real—as if the author understands that the assumption with cartoon drawings is that they are fiction—and often perceived as childish—and this was her moment to say to the readers: “Look, this is a true photograph and here I am visualizing this for you.” That type of understanding between the author and the reader is important when deciding to write/read a visual text. The author, as well as the reader, understands that this type of literature has a past and assumptions and associations connected to it, all of which are inescapable. It’s up to the author to lead the reader into appreciating the graphic nature of their work as beyond mere mimicry of usual comics. The pressure on the author ripples out as a pressure on the reader to engage in this type of text with openness and respect for the medium that was used to tell the story.
I experimented with Fun Home, separating the images from the text, to see if each could stand on their own. How much did the author depend on words, how much on images? Did one medium outshine the other? I approached this exercise thinking that the ideal visual text blends the two together in a perfect marriage. I chose a scene in Fun Home that seems to merge text and images evenly. After scanning the page, I removed the text from the images:
Zander 4 In this scene, one sees clearly what is happening in each frame. In the first, the young Alison is pretending to be a gunman; the look on her father’s face suggests annoyance. In the next frame, she misses the trashcan; her father’s physical reaction is obviously negative. In the next, Alison is wearing a dress on top of her shirt, and her father points away from Alison to suggest that she change. In the last, Alison is polishing a chair. Her expression is angry, and her father’s expression is stale.
Zander 5 Here is the same scene:
With the text restored, the scene is elongated, not explained. Bechdel’s words never outshine the images, nor do the images outshine the words. But there is something absolutely remarkable about Bechdel’s use of the written word. As shown here, the words are always matched with the images perfectly and to separate them renders the text incomplete. In a similar experiment, below are words from Fun Home separated from the accompanying: My actual obsessive-compulsive disorder began when I was ten. Odd numbers and multiples of thirteen were to be avoided at all costs. Crossing
Zander 6 thresholds became a time-consuming procedure since I had to tabulate the number of edges of flooring I saw there. If these failed to add up to an even number, I’d include another subdivision, perhaps the small grooves in the metal strip. Then came the invisible substance that hung in doorways, and that, I soon realized, hung like swags of drapers between all solid objects. This had to be gathered and dispersed constantly, to keep it away from my body—to avoid in particular inhaling or swallowing it” (135-136). This particular passage is obvious; Bechdel’s visuals are not necessary, but the layering that results with the inclusion of images (and the addition of thought bubbles), deepen the narrative by adding juxtaposition and by allowing the reader to actually see the visuals remembered by the narrator:
Zander 7
Bechdel’s language is her strongest talent. Her images are descriptive, but the words are what make Fun Home so enjoyable. The language is simply intelligent. Bechdel has mastered the craft of combining poetry with intellect and she documents that well with the transition from a curious, young child to a witty, self-reflective adult. In the transition, readers are learning not only about Bechdel’s own life but also the relationship between her and her father where she carefully and successfully shows the evolution. Her memoir is a perfect example of the marriage of images and words.
Works Cited Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. Boston: Mariner Books, 2007. Print.
After reading Fun Home, I felt embarrassed that I had so aggressively avoided comics. I didn’t know books like this existed. I think I refused the idea of using comics in my project because I associated them with superhero comics. I imagined that all such work contained exaggerated action words such as “Pow!,” “Smack!,” and so on. Bechdel (along with many others, including Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, David Small, Craig Thompson, David B., et al.) redefined how I thought of visual text and how it belongs to literature.
Zander 2 Alison Bechdel started her comic career with the strip Dykes to Watch Out For in 1983. The strip was originally independent stories without a set storyline or characters but eventually Bechdel created a world dedicated to the lives of several lesbian characters. After working on Dykes to Watch Out For for over 20 years, she released her first novel. Fun Home is a story about Alison’s father and, particularly, his obsessive compulsions and constant ridicule. Within the story, Bechdel (an out lesbian) discovers her father’s secret identity as a homosexual man. The story chronicles the narrator’s life from early childhood until early adulthood, when the narrator’s father dies. The art of Fun Home is simple but beautiful. This simplicity is echoed through the drawings with their lack of shading (minus the blue hue filter) and the loosely cartoonish drawings, though there are moments when Bechdel almost reaffirms that she is capable of more complex art. The first page of the memoir is a drawing Bechdel made of her father. At first, when I thumbed past that first page, I was taken aback by her cartoonish rendering. My hope was that the body of the memoir was going to mirror the chapter’s title page. But after reading through that first chapter, I came across another detailed drawing, and I realized that she was introducing each chapter this way. I must admit, these
Zander 3 breaks from the story came as a wonderful surprise to me as a reader. Once I developed an appreciation for her style of art, it was nice to see her break from that pattern and focus energy and dedication to these brief but exceptional drawings of photographs. Such moments lend a worldly aspect to Bechdel’s memoir. These pictures make the whole thing seem more real—as if the author understands that the assumption with cartoon drawings is that they are fiction—and often perceived as childish—and this was her moment to say to the readers: “Look, this is a true photograph and here I am visualizing this for you.” That type of understanding between the author and the reader is important when deciding to write/read a visual text. The author, as well as the reader, understands that this type of literature has a past and assumptions and associations connected to it, all of which are inescapable. It’s up to the author to lead the reader into appreciating the graphic nature of their work as beyond mere mimicry of usual comics. The pressure on the author ripples out as a pressure on the reader to engage in this type of text with openness and respect for the medium that was used to tell the story.
I experimented with Fun Home, separating the images from the text, to see if each could stand on their own. How much did the author depend on words, how much on images? Did one medium outshine the other? I approached this exercise thinking that the ideal visual text blends the two together in a perfect marriage. I chose a scene in Fun Home that seems to merge text and images evenly. After scanning the page, I removed the text from the images:
Zander 4 In this scene, one sees clearly what is happening in each frame. In the first, the young Alison is pretending to be a gunman; the look on her father’s face suggests annoyance. In the next frame, she misses the trashcan; her father’s physical reaction is obviously negative. In the next, Alison is wearing a dress on top of her shirt, and her father points away from Alison to suggest that she change. In the last, Alison is polishing a chair. Her expression is angry, and her father’s expression is stale.
Zander 5 Here is the same scene:
With the text restored, the scene is elongated, not explained. Bechdel’s words never outshine the images, nor do the images outshine the words. But there is something absolutely remarkable about Bechdel’s use of the written word. As shown here, the words are always matched with the images perfectly and to separate them renders the text incomplete. In a similar experiment, below are words from Fun Home separated from the accompanying: My actual obsessive-compulsive disorder began when I was ten. Odd numbers and multiples of thirteen were to be avoided at all costs. Crossing
Zander 6 thresholds became a time-consuming procedure since I had to tabulate the number of edges of flooring I saw there. If these failed to add up to an even number, I’d include another subdivision, perhaps the small grooves in the metal strip. Then came the invisible substance that hung in doorways, and that, I soon realized, hung like swags of drapers between all solid objects. This had to be gathered and dispersed constantly, to keep it away from my body—to avoid in particular inhaling or swallowing it” (135-136). This particular passage is obvious; Bechdel’s visuals are not necessary, but the layering that results with the inclusion of images (and the addition of thought bubbles), deepen the narrative by adding juxtaposition and by allowing the reader to actually see the visuals remembered by the narrator:
Zander 7
Bechdel’s language is her strongest talent. Her images are descriptive, but the words are what make Fun Home so enjoyable. The language is simply intelligent. Bechdel has mastered the craft of combining poetry with intellect and she documents that well with the transition from a curious, young child to a witty, self-reflective adult. In the transition, readers are learning not only about Bechdel’s own life but also the relationship between her and her father where she carefully and successfully shows the evolution. Her memoir is a perfect example of the marriage of images and words.
Works Cited Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. Boston: Mariner Books, 2007. Print.
