The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For

Jan 2, 2025 8:15 PM

Author:Alison Bechdel

Internationally-acclaimed graphic-literary talent Alison Bechdel offers acerbically funny insight into the lesbian culture of 1980s America in this comic strip collection.

Bechdel's brilliantly imagined counter-cultural band of friends - academics, social workers, booksellers - fall in and out of love, negotiate relationships, raise children, switch careers and cope with aging parents. The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For fuses high and low culture - from foreign domestic policy to domestic routine, postmodern theory to hot sex - in a serial graphic narrative 'suitable for all humanist persuasions'.

Alison Bechdel has been chronicling the lives of a small universe of cartoon characters in her strip Dykes To Watch Out For, which has been syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers in the USA and has been published in eleven volumes. For this first time, this collection gathers the best of those volumes.

'So much more than a comic strip... No one comes close to Alison Bechdel' Times

Reviews

So much more than a comic strip... No one comes close to Alison Bechdel

—— The Times

This compendium is testament to a unique literary-graphic talent

—— The Times

For 25 years Bechdel's path-breaking Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip has been collected in award-winning volumes. Now, at last, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For gathers an irresistible selection from all 11 volumes

—— Chicago Tribune

Ms. Bechdel began her strips... partly to provide ''an antidote'' to culture's image of gay women as ''warped, sick, humorless and undesirable.'' Boy, has she succeeded. Her crazy lesbians seem saner than the rest of us, and beyond beautiful

—— The New York Times

The greatest lesbian soap opera... is Bechdels miraculously well-sustained chronicling of a circle of friends over the course of 20 years, Dykes to Watch Out For

—— Booklist

Breezy, efficient storytelling and all-round smarts

—— Bartholomew Bennett , Guardian

Simple, accessible tools which cover everything from getting your child to clean his teeth to picky eaters and bullying.

—— Mail on Sunday, YOU Magazine

Reading this book is like having a chat with your friends or with other mums at the crèche or the school gate.

—— Mothers and Babies

A no-nonsense guide to running a family – whatever your personality.

—— Easy Living

In this memoir she describes her eccentric, dangerous, wonderful bohemian parents...Blackburn emerged from this turmoil as a fine writer, and this book is full of understanding and reconciliation

—— Margaret Drabble , New Statesman

a rich account...brilliant vignettes

—— Camilla Long , Sunday Times

This piercing memoir paints in vivid colours Julia Blackburn's nightmarish childhood

—— Alison Flood , The Telegraph

Blackburn tells us about these things in a compelling authorial voice which is by turns numb and incredibly sensitive

—— William Leith , Evening Standard

Brutally honest book ...deeply moving testament to the love that can somehow survive

—— Aimee Shalan , Guardian

An extraordinary family memoir... A bohemian classic

—— Week

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