Copyright © 2026 OyList. All Rights Reserved.
Share
Items6
1
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (2008)
Published
The strip came first, and it is the best follow-up to Fun Home if you want laughter rather than grief. Dykes to Watch Out For ran from 1983 to 2008 as a serialized ensemble comedy about Mo Testa, a politically committed lesbian feminist with a tendency to kvetch, and her circle of friends and lovers, with each year's news bleeding into their arguments.
This 2008 volume gathers 390 of the 527 strips, plus a 12-page introduction from Bechdel about drawing them. Read it in short sittings: the soap-opera threads reward following, but each strip still lands its joke alone. It is also where the Bechdel test began, as a gag in one strip.
More about The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For2
The Indelible Alison Bechdel; Confessions, Comix, and Miscellaneous Dykes to Watch Out For (1998)
Published
The missing link between the strip and the memoirs, for readers who want everything. This 1998 Firebrand paperback gathers childhood drawings, autobiographical stories, collaborations with other cartoonists, strips that never ran in the series and old calendar art.
The autobiographical pieces are the reason to look for it: they show Bechdel already turning her pen on herself, with the same deadpan self-scrutiny that Fun Home would later stretch across a whole book. It is a scrapbook rather than a story, so dip in rather than read straight through, and treat it as an extra once you know Mo and her friends.
More about The Indelible Alison Bechdel; Confessions, Comix, and Miscellaneous Dykes to Watch Out For3
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006)
Published
The one you already know, here for its place in the sequence. Published in 2006 after seven years of work, it circles Bechdel's father, Bruce, a funeral director and high school English teacher in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, returning to the same events from new angles instead of telling them in order. Joyce, Proust, Camus and Fitzgerald frame the chapters, and a gray-blue ink wash sets the mood.
Coming back to it after the strip shows how far she pushed her precision: she posed for many of the figures herself and photographed the poses as reference. Time named it the best book of 2006, and it won the Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work.
More about Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic4
Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012)
Published
Fun Home's companion, and the most demanding book here. Published in 2012, it turns from her father to her mother, an amateur actor in an unhappy marriage, and works through that relationship by way of Bechdel's own therapy, the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott's ideas about the true and false self, and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Each of its seven chapters opens with a dream.
Expect to reread pages: the jokes are quieter and the ideas carry the weight. Readers who loved the literary puzzle of Fun Home will find it richer, while those who came for the family story may find the theory heavy going.
More about Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama5
The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021)
Published
Bechdel's most physical book, colored with her partner Holly Rae Taylor. Published in 2021, it moves chronologically from the 1960s to the 2020 pandemic through her running, karate and a long parade of exhausting workout crazes, and sets her search for fitness beside writers who chased inner transformation, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Jack Kerouac and Adrienne Rich.
It is dense, with long detours into those lives, so it suits readers who enjoy literary history alongside memoir. The payoff is a funny, rueful portrait of a body that keeps trying to fix the mind. Pick it up when Are You My Mother? felt too inward and you want a memoir that gets outdoors.
More about The Secret to Superhuman Strength6
Spent (2025)
Published
The lightest and funniest place to finish, and a reunion if you read the strip first. Published in May 2025, this comic novel stars a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel who runs a pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont with her partner, Holly, while a hit TV series adapted from her memoir about her father makes her friends envious.
Those friends are the Dykes to Watch Out For cast, now middle-aged and living communally nearby. It pokes at money, greed and consumer capitalism with the strip's old op-ed bite, and it rewards knowing both Fun Home and the strip, since it jokes about each.
More about Spent
