Alison Bechdel
And partly, the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me.Collection: Strength
It's a hard thing to age a character because you can't really suddenly give someone gray hair.
I just met someone who read Gone With the Wind 62 times for exactly that same reason. She couldn't bear that it wasn't real. She wanted to live in it.
People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.
But mostly, it's a book about my relationship with my father.
I don't know, maybe it's because I was raised Catholic. Confession has always held a great appeal for me.
The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence.
I get a lot of mail from men who really identify with Stuart, you know, Sparrow's boyfriend. I love that. Even though I used to say I wanted men to read the strip even though there weren't any men in it, so they'd be forced to identify with the women.
Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.
But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu.
Even drawing gray hair at all is difficult to render in black and white.
For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me.
I just have this sort of entrepreneurial spirit and I work really hard at promoting myself.
I love Jules Feiffer. I didn't discover him until I was a little older.
I never really read superhero stuff as a kid.
I probably read Harriet the Spy about 70,000 times.
I started to get bored with that stuff about only drawing men and I've taken it out of the slideshow.
I'm pretty illiterate when it comes to comics history.
My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up.
Partly I resented being perceived as weak because I was a girl.
Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.
Watching everyone root through their psyche, it just delights me. Especially R. Crumb's stuff.
Well, I'm always working on my comic strip and trying to, you know, keep cranking that out.
When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults.
Yeah, I read Judy Blume. My mother didn't like that, but I read it anyhow.
I hope that I can get people to read it without having to change it. Especially now that the strip has more different kinds of characters. It's really not all lesbians any more.
One of them is already having some menopausal symptoms. I'm working on that. I'm giving them all little lines under the eyes, trying to sort of make them age gracefully.
When I grew up, I studied karate for years. I got pretty strong, but eventually I had to acknowledge that I really didn't like fighting at all, so I quit.
It's definitely part of it, that the men were having fun and doing the interesting things but also, I don't know, I'm just thinking more about gender and how maybe in some way I am more of a boy than a girl.
Mostly it was Mad magazine. And I did read a lot of - I had a subscription when I was little, but I also had access to some old collections, the little paperbacks of the really good stuff.
Nancy Drew was always changing her outfits. I despised girls' clothing, I couldn't wait to get home from school and get out of it. The last thing I wanted to read was minute descriptions of Nancy's frocks.
That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project.
Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now.
I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.Collection: Erotic
The secret subversive goal of my work is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings.Collection: Goal
What would happen if we spoke the truth?Collection: Spokes
Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failureCollection: Grief
It's our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!Collection: Self
I'll watch a movie only if it meets the following criteria: 1. It has to have at least two women in it. 2. Who talk to each other. 3. About something besides a man.Collection: Movie
Grief takes many forms, including the absence of griefCollection: Grief
In a narcissistic cathexis, you invest more energy into your ideas about another person than in the actual, objective, external person. So the man who falls in love with beauty is quite different from the man who loves a girl and feels she is beautiful and can see what is beautiful about her.Collection: Beautiful
If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.Collection: Mind
I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.Collection: Children
It certainly was an important moment for me, that realization that I was not going to get what I wanted. It was very freeing. I keep using that word "freeing" or "liberating." I feel like Houdini sometimes, like I'm just getting out of one set of shackles after another, hanging upside down inside a burlap bag with handcuffs on. Hopefully one day, I'm going to get out of this tank of water.Collection: Water
The writing is hard, and the drawing is fun. It's very satisfying to see a drawing start to come together.Collection: Fun
People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that is important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.Collection: Book
I'm not that good of a drawer. I don't know how people just draw stuff out of their head. I'm always creating schemes. If I have to draw someone sitting in a chair, I have to go find a chair, sit in it, and take a picture of myself sitting in it.Collection: People
My father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta. But the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset - from salmon to canary to midnight blue - left him wordless.Collection: Father
Although I am good at enumerating my father’s flaws, it’s hard for me to sustain much anger at him. I expect this is partly because he’s dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than it is for mothers.Collection: Mother
Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?Collection: Undertaker