Alison Bechdel

Two years ago Alison Bechdel seemed to come out of nowhere with a graphic memoir, “Fun Home,” that knocked a lot of people, myself included, right over. You didn’t have to go quite as far as Time magazine, which called “Fun Home” the single best book of 2006, to recognize Ms. Bechdel’s achievement. Her memoir, about coming of age as a lesbian in her secret-filled family’s rural Pennsylvania funeral home, was moody, astringent, microscopically observed. “Fun Home” belongs on that same small, high shelf of comic books where “Maus” dwells.

Plenty of readers, however, needed no introduction to Ms. Bechdel. For more than 20 years she has been the creator of “Dykes to Watch Out For,” a weekly comic strip, printed mostly in college-town alternative newspapers, about the fractious lives and loves of an articulate group of lesbians in a city that resembles Minneapolis. The strip is sexy, sometimes in an R-rated way — imagine “Doonesbury” with regular references to sex toys — and it’s political, in a feisty, lefty, Greenpeace meets PETA meets MoveOn.org kind of way. Ms. Bechdel’s lesbians wanted to impeach the first George Bush.

Taken together, these comic strips don’t have the tightly coiled impact of “Fun Home,” but in some ways they offer greater consolations — they’re looser, more funny, and they offer the chance to watch a group of very appealing women grow and change (and struggle to have better sex) over the course of more than two decades. Ms. Bechdel calls her strips “half op-ed column and half endlessly serialized Victorian novel,” and that’s not far off. I suspect that, over the years, “Dykes to Watch Out For” has been as important to new generations of lesbians as landmark novels like Rita Mae Brown’s “Rubyfruit Jungle” (1973) and Lisa Alther’s “Kinflicks” (1976) were to an earlier one.

As Ms. Bechdel observes in her introduction to this new anthology, “The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For,” it was not especially easy to be openly lesbian back in 1983, when she published her first cartoon. “We had no ‘L Word,’ ” she writes. “We had no lesbian daytime TV hosts. We had no openly lesbian daughters of the creepy vice president. We had ‘Personal Best,’ and we liked it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/books/03garner.html?ref=arts