392 pages
English language
Published April 9, 2008 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
From the author of Fun Home—the lives, loves, and politics of cult fav characters Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and others
For twenty-five years Bechdel’s path-breaking Dykes to Watch Out For strip has been collected in award-winning volumes (with a quarter of a million copies in print), syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers, and translated into many languages. Now, at last, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For gathers a “rich, funny, deep and impossible to put down” (Publishers Weekly) selection from all eleven Dykes volumes. Here too are sixty of the newest strips, never before published in book form.
Settle in to this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it “half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel”) of the lives, loves, and politics of a cast of characters, most of them lesbian, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis.
Her …
From the author of Fun Home—the lives, loves, and politics of cult fav characters Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and others
For twenty-five years Bechdel’s path-breaking Dykes to Watch Out For strip has been collected in award-winning volumes (with a quarter of a million copies in print), syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers, and translated into many languages. Now, at last, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For gathers a “rich, funny, deep and impossible to put down” (Publishers Weekly) selection from all eleven Dykes volumes. Here too are sixty of the newest strips, never before published in book form.
Settle in to this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it “half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel”) of the lives, loves, and politics of a cast of characters, most of them lesbian, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis.
Her brilliantly imagined countercultural band of friends—academics, social workers, bookstore clerks—fall in and out of love, negotiate friendships, raise children, switch careers, and cope with aging parents.
Bechdel fuses high and low culture—from foreign policy to domestic routine, hot sex to postmodern theory—in a serial graphic narrative “suitable for humanists of all persuasions.”
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.
Ich mags sehr; es ist hochpolitisch, lustig, sehr realistisch, leider manchmal zu deprimierend in Bezug auf Affären und den aktuellen Status der Welt ...
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 …
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.
