The essential Dykes To Watch Out For

My lil (huge) bedside comic book, the one I turn to when it's a tad too late, or when I'm too tired to read, and I need pretty pictures to go with the text... Thus it's been a slow read, and one that I've thoroughly enjoyed. No better bed partner than this lesbian lore essential!

In this compilation you follow the lives of the same lesbians during a span of 20+ years - and oh boy do shenanigans ensue! So many different tropes and types of lesbians: some are more queer, some are more normative, all coming from different walks of life... Beautiful lesbian biodiversity.

Although this is a comic strip it is also super political, and it's great to capture the zeitgeist of the times via the storylines and characters' opinions. It's also both amusing and slightly horrifying that issues that were relevant then, and that worried lesbians in the 80s, are issues that are relevant now, and are worrying this lesbian right here! ie rampant capitalism, environmental crisis, societal collapse, just to name a few.

Special mention to the one comic strip in this book that jokingly created the most basic feminist media analysis framework: the Bechdel test!

It's a nice and entertaining comic book with the majority of published Dykes To Watch Out For comics. If you like seeing the life of some liberal lesbians with all their ups and downs, it's for you. I really did not like the casual biphobia and transphobia at some places in the comic, and in the end it kinda bored me seeing them living their nuclear family life and only ranting about politicians. My favorite character: Lois. She's really cool.

I first saw a DTWOF comic in one of the campus newspapers of my hometown growing up. In the years of DTWOF comic strips that followed, I'd occasionally catch one posted online, or in another newspaper, or a few strips in a collection at someone's house. But the comics are intensely serialized (not making much sense as a standalone), the whole archive was never available online and only 527 comics were ever published in the 21 years of the strip, so it always seemed like I was catching a glimpse of an elusive whole. This collection is near-complete and the storyline finally manages to be cohesive. Don't get me wrong: this still reads like a serial, and threads drop and there are one-off jokes, but it reads a lot better as a collection.

Perhaps what I found the most interesting from a modern perspective was actually the politics. It was fascinating to realize that the things that the characters said about Bush (HW) and Clinton (Bill) strongly resemble the things that I've said about Bush (W) and Clinton (Hillary) and Trump and Obama, too, for that matter. And indeed, the protest wing of leftwing politics versus the run-for-office-wing versus the tear-your-hair-out-publicly wing have apparently always had the tension that is so apparent now.

Bechdel is truly a master at conveying a story through comics. Witty, emphatic, moving... she punches all the right buttons.
This collection aggregates the most significant portions of the major story arcs throughout the past 25 years of the strip. Though it's sad to me that anything was left out, the remaining material reads smoothly.
A great place to begin, if you're new to DTWOF, and a great place to reminisce if you're not.