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CBC
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- CBC
How characters from Alison Bechdel's past shook her out of her memoir-writing kick
Nearly 20 years after her breakout memoir, Fun Home, American cartoonist Alison Bechdel is still unearthing new truths about that period of her life. But this time, she's taking a look at her personal story through fiction, with her new comic novel, Spent. In Spent, she explores the life of a cartoonist, also named Alison Bechdel, who grapples with her complicated relationship with capitalism, community and activism after the success of her memoir and its subsequent TV adaptation. "When I was younger, I did lead a more communal life," Bechdel said on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "I lived in a communal house. I went out and did political activities and was involved in my community. Over time, I really stopped doing that — and it's a bunch of factors. Part of it's getting older, part of it is being in a relationship, but a big part of it was that I was living very much on the edge until I was in my 40s, until Fun Home came out, and slowly saved my financial bacon." "Then I started making a lot of money, which was a very weird experience for someone who had formed their sense of self as an outsider and especially as a poor outsider." Bechdel, who is also known for her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and books Are You My Mother? and The Secret to Superhuman Strength, joined Roach to revisit her debut memoir and how it shaped her return to fiction. Mattea Roach: You published your memoir, Fun Home, almost 20 years ago when you were 45. Now you're in your 60s. How has your relationship with the text evolved over the past nearly two decades? Alison Bechdel: It's funny to have this thing, this record of my life that is unchanging, like it's cast in stone. Even though I have found out lots of interesting information about various people or scenes in the book that would change the story if I were to write it now, it's done. This is the record and it's very odd to have to be constantly talking about it. The book was published almost 20 years ago, but I'm still talking about it as if it's a new thing to people. So that's a funny activity to get one's head around. How did it come about that you learned new information about some of the stuff that's depicted in the book? Was it a situation where people you knew read the book and said that's not actually how it was? I'll tell you one example of that, which is that I learned from my mother's best friend, that on the day that my father died, she had decided to not divorce him. Wow. Your dad died when he was hit by a truck and that was two weeks after your mom had asked for a divorce. And then there's some significant suggestion that it might have actually been intentional on his part. In this tumultuous time around between when I came out to my parents and when he died, which was just a couple of months, my mother had asked him for a divorce. And now I find out that she had been going to call that off. It just just casts her whole story into this really different light. It was already quite a tragic story, but now it's even worse, you know? Fun Home was made into this Broadway musical in 2015 and it won five Tonys. It's a very different work despite being adapted from your memoir. How did it feel to hand over a project that was so personal to be adopted for another medium? I didn't really know what I was doing. I knew I had sort of sidestepped an offer to option it for a film by asking for more money than they were willing to pay me. Which was a great relief. But then this offer came up for a musical and I didn't really have a connection to musicals. I've seen musicals, but I'm not like a big musical person. Somehow it seemed like it was different enough that I wouldn't mind if someone made a really bad musical out of my book — and the way that I would mind if it were a really bad film adaptation. I don't know what I was thinking now, but fortunately, that didn't happen. The people who made it did a very good job. It's a really good adaptation, but I always sort of think, "Wow, that was lucky." In my new book Spent, I explore what it would be like to really lose control of a creative project. Why did you want to explore this alternate path that you're grateful, in your real life, to not have gone down? Well, partly because once you become a writer in this world, everyone expects you to then somehow do something for TV or the great triumph is to get your book turned into a TV show and that just always strikes me as funny. Why can't we just make comic books that are comic books? I guess, obviously, because you make more money, but it's also just a cultural phenomenon. You know that if you're a writer, you have to grapple with this. Why did you want to revisit these characters from your weekly comic strips Dykes to Watch Out For who are now in late middle-age but are still living together in a communal housing situation? This book, Spent, was going to be another memoir. That's what I started doing after my comic strip. I retired the comic strip and began writing books about my life. And I thought that's what I was going to do forever because I really liked writing about actual life. Occasionally, someone would ask me, do you ever think you'll do fiction again? And I would just go blank. Fiction? How do you do that? And I couldn't even remember that I had actually done this fictional comic strip. But I realized early on in the work for this book that doing it as a memoir was going to be really boring. I just somehow didn't want to write about my actual life or actually read Marx or all the things I would have to do to intelligently discuss money or capitalism. In the moment that I threw that idea away, this other idea came in. What would really be funny is if I wrote about a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel who was trying to write a book about money and then it just all sort of sprang to life — and in that new vision, there were my old comic strip characters who were going to be my friends. It just was one of those lovely moments when something just comes into your mind fully formed, which hardly ever happens to me.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Funniest Part of Alison Bechdel's Work
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Dykes to Watch Out For, the long-running lesbian comic strip that launched Alison Bechdel's career, is full of kitchen-table drama and dry humor, but its title is also more literal than those elements might suggest. Watch out, strip after strip said: Here comes Mo, the main character and author-avatar, spinning her way onto the page like a flustered Tasmanian devil of '90s-lefty anxiety. Look out for Mo, going hoarse over the rise of Pat Buchanan or chiding her circle for not thinking enough about genocide in Bosnia. There's Mo, nose in a newspaper, ignoring her friends' new baby to stress about the latest mainstream co-optation of radical activism. This might sound like a drag, but it's actually one of the funniest running bits in Bechdel's work. For decades, the author has allowed herself—or her stand-in self—to be loudly annoying, and often wrong, on the page. When Mo's a bummer, her friends snap back at her; when she talks or worries her way out of an opportunity to get laid, they poke fun at her. Mo is frequently uptight about other people's choices (to take Prozac, for instance, or to transition), but her diatribes usually end with her being dressed down or hurting someone she cares about. I've always been charmed by how much Bechdel is willing to let Mo be both her double and the butt of her joke. In her new book, Spent, Bechdel blurs the writer-character line even further, Hanna Rosin writes this week, and the result is even more gratifying. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic's books desk: Return of the shaman Shutting down Salman Rushdie is not going to help America's Johnson & Johnson problem An awkward truth about American work Spent is not a memoir, but neither is it wholly fictional. Instead, it's a graphic novel about a character named Alison Bechdel, who looks just like Alison Bechdel, the book's author—and also an older Mo. Novel-Alison, like real Alison, lives in Vermont with her partner, Holly, and has made a lot of unexpected money off a television adaptation of her memoir. (Bechdel's memoir Fun Home was adapted into a Tony Award–winning musical.) Alison and Holly's closest friends in Vermont are old standbys from DTWOF: Sparrow, Stuart, and their child, J.R.; Ginger; and Lois, who all live in a group house. They're busy with their own various crises and hookups, while Alison finds that more money means more problems. 'There's no avoiding it. She is complicit to the craw with the capitalist crisis,' a box of omniscient narration says in one panel. Alison, sitting at her desk doing her taxes, says aloud: 'Someone should write a book about this.' Spent is that book. Bechdel the author is 'astute enough to know that famous people lamenting the burdens of fame are insufferable,' Rosin writes. So here, 'she's created an Alison whose dilemma parodies contemporary celebrity culture, while also parodying herself, the author.' And, thank goodness, it's still funny. Alison keeps putting her foot in her mouth on social issues, especially in front of the radical recent college dropout J.R. and their companion, Badger. The young adults—furious with the world for going about business as usual during a 21st-century 'polycrisis' (the name of a podcast they host)—resemble in many ways a younger Mo. Meanwhile, Alison wonders where her fighting spirit has gone, growing concerned that luxury and age have dulled her into complacency. When Sparrow suggests that the kids cool it, Bechdel isn't mocking their idealism. And she's not suggesting that Alison's become a coldhearted reactionary—just that she has more to manage, and perhaps more to lose, than she did years before. After all, in DTWOF, Mo's all-consuming neuroticism prevented her from living a fulfilling life, driving away friends and lovers. As in previous books, Bechdel seems to hint that a middle path is the only way forward: Giving in to mega-corporations and nihilistically welcoming climate apocalypse, she suggests, is an abdication of our responsibilities to one another. But her characters have to learn, again and again, that sticking to your principles doesn't have to mean ruining every meal shared with your loved ones. What Is Alison Bechdel's Secret? By Hanna Rosin The cartoonist has spent a lifetime worrying. In a new graphic novel, she finds something like solace. Read the full article. , by Elaine Castillo Girlie Delmundo—not her real name; she adopted it for her high-stress job—is a content moderator at a massive tech firm. Her work involves filtering through a carousel of online horrors so crushing that there are typically three or four suicide attempts among her co-workers each year. Girlie, however, is sardonic and no-nonsense by nature: She's an eldest daughter shaped by the 2008 recession, when her immigrant family lost everything. The job can't break her. But her life transforms when she gets a cushy position as an elite moderator for a virtual-reality firm. Suddenly, Girlie is enjoying perks such as regular VR therapy sessions, in which she experiences rare moments of bliss—swimming through cool water, touching the bark of a tree. The new gig is great, at least for a while. (All may not be as it seems there.) Her new boss, William, also happens to be a total stud, and his presence transforms Castillo's flinty satire of the tech industry into a sultry romance novel. As we watch Girlie's defenses melt, the book shows a woman slowly surrendering to human experiences that can't be controlled. — Valerie Trapp From our list: The 2025 summer reading guide 📚 Autocorrect, by Etgar Keret 📚 When It All Burns, by Jordan Thomas 📚 The South, by Tash Aw The World That 'Wages for Housework' Wanted By Lily Meyer But creating social conditions that are conducive to motherhood doesn't have to be part of a reactionary agenda. Indeed, one of the feminist movement's most radical and idealistic intellectual branches, a 1970s campaign called Wages for Housework, advocated for policies that, if ever implemented, genuinely might set off a baby boom. Its central goal was straightforward: government pay for anybody who does the currently unremunerated labor of caring for their own home and family. On top of that, the movement envisioned communal social structures and facilities including high-quality public laundromats and day cares that would get women out of their homes and give them their own time, such that paying them to do housework wouldn't consign them to a life without anything else. Read the full article. * Lead image: Excerpted from the book Spent, provided courtesy of Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. © 2025 by Alison Bechdel. Reprinted by permission. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Explore all of our newsletters. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Funniest Part of Alison Bechdel's Work
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Dykes to Watch Out For, the long-running lesbian comic strip that launched Alison Bechdel's career, is full of kitchen-table drama and dry humor, but its title is also more literal than those elements might suggest. Watch out, strip after strip said: Here comes Mo, the main character and author-avatar, spinning her way onto the page like a flustered Tasmanian devil of '90s-lefty anxiety. Look out for Mo, going hoarse over the rise of Pat Buchanan or chiding her circle for not thinking enough about genocide in Bosnia. There's Mo, nose in a newspaper, ignoring her friends' new baby to stress about the latest mainstream co-optation of radical activism. This might sound like a drag, but it's actually one of the funniest running bits in Bechdel's work. For decades, the author has allowed herself—or her stand-in self—to be loudly annoying, and often wrong, on the page. When Mo's a bummer, her friends snap back at her; when she talks or worries her way out of an opportunity to get laid, they poke fun at her. Mo is frequently uptight about other people's choices (to take Prozac, for instance, or to transition), but her diatribes usually end with her being dressed down or hurting someone she cares about. I've always been charmed by how much Bechdel is willing to let Mo be both her double and the butt of her joke. In her new book, Spent, Bechdel blurs the writer-character line even further, Hanna Rosin writes this week, and the result is even more gratifying. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic 's books desk: Spent is not a memoir, but neither is it wholly fictional. Instead, it's a graphic novel about a character named Alison Bechdel, who looks just like Alison Bechdel, the book's author—and also an older Mo. Novel-Alison, like real Alison, lives in Vermont with her partner, Holly, and has made a lot of unexpected money off a television adaptation of her memoir. (Bechdel's memoir Fun Home was adapted into a Tony Award–winning musical.) Alison and Holly's closest friends in Vermont are old standbys from DTWOF: Sparrow, Stuart, and their child, J.R.; Ginger; and Lois, who all live in a group house. They're busy with their own various crises and hookups, while Alison finds that more money means more problems. 'There's no avoiding it. She is complicit to the craw with the capitalist crisis,' a box of omniscient narration says in one panel. Alison, sitting at her desk doing her taxes, says aloud: 'Someone should write a book about this.' Spent is that book. Bechdel the author is 'astute enough to know that famous people lamenting the burdens of fame are insufferable,' Rosin writes. So here, 'she's created an Alison whose dilemma parodies contemporary celebrity culture, while also parodying herself, the author.' And, thank goodness, it's still funny. Alison keeps putting her foot in her mouth on social issues, especially in front of the radical recent college dropout J.R. and their companion, Badger. The young adults—furious with the world for going about business as usual during a 21st-century 'polycrisis' (the name of a podcast they host)—resemble in many ways a younger Mo. Meanwhile, Alison wonders where her fighting spirit has gone, growing concerned that luxury and age have dulled her into complacency. When Sparrow suggests that the kids cool it, Bechdel isn't mocking their idealism. And she's not suggesting that Alison's become a coldhearted reactionary—just that she has more to manage, and perhaps more to lose, than she did years before. After all, in DTWOF, Mo's all-consuming neuroticism prevented her from living a fulfilling life, driving away friends and lovers. As in previous books, Bechdel seems to hint that a middle path is the only way forward: Giving in to mega-corporations and nihilistically welcoming climate apocalypse, she suggests, is an abdication of our responsibilities to one another. But her characters have to learn, again and again, that sticking to your principles doesn't have to mean ruining every meal shared with your loved ones. What Is Alison Bechdel's Secret? By Hanna Rosin The cartoonist has spent a lifetime worrying. In a new graphic novel, she finds something like solace. Read the full article. What to Read Moderation, by Elaine Castillo Girlie Delmundo—not her real name; she adopted it for her high-stress job—is a content moderator at a massive tech firm. Her work involves filtering through a carousel of online horrors so crushing that there are typically three or four suicide attempts among her co-workers each year. Girlie, however, is sardonic and no-nonsense by nature: She's an eldest daughter shaped by the 2008 recession, when her immigrant family lost everything. The job can't break her. But her life transforms when she gets a cushy position as an elite moderator for a virtual-reality firm. Suddenly, Girlie is enjoying perks such as regular VR therapy sessions, in which she experiences rare moments of bliss—swimming through cool water, touching the bark of a tree. The new gig is great, at least for a while. (All may not be as it seems there.) Her new boss, William, also happens to be a total stud, and his presence transforms Castillo's flinty satire of the tech industry into a sultry romance novel. As we watch Girlie's defenses melt, the book shows a woman slowly surrendering to human experiences that can't be controlled. — Valerie Trapp Out Next Week 📚 Autocorrect, by Etgar Keret 📚 When It All Burns, by Jordan Thomas 📚 The South, by Tash Aw Your Weekend Read The World That 'Wages for Housework' Wanted By Lily Meyer But creating social conditions that are conducive to motherhood doesn't have to be part of a reactionary agenda. Indeed, one of the feminist movement's most radical and idealistic intellectual branches, a 1970s campaign called Wages for Housework, advocated for policies that, if ever implemented, genuinely might set off a baby boom. Its central goal was straightforward: government pay for anybody who does the currently unremunerated labor of caring for their own home and family. On top of that, the movement envisioned communal social structures and facilities including high-quality public laundromats and day cares that would get women out of their homes and give them their own time, such that paying them to do housework wouldn't consign them to a life without anything else. * Lead image: Excerpted from the book Spent, provided courtesy of Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. © 2025 by Alison Bechdel. Reprinted by permission.
Washington Post
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Alison Bechdel makes a welcome return to fiction in ‘Spent'
No artistic border is more poorly defended or muzzily mapped than the wavy line that separates self-consciousness from self-parody. Too many of the greats stumble unintentionally across the divide, and when they do they rarely return. The wisest artists are those who make the journey with eyes open and head held high. How else would we know when they're winking? Witness Alison Bechdel in her charmingly shaggy new graphic novel, 'Spent,' her first proper work of fiction since she ended the 25-year run of her beloved comic strip 'Dykes to Watch Out For' in 2008. Here she is once again her main character, as she was in her graphic memoir 'Fun Home,' but the fictional Alison is the creator of a series called 'Lesbian PETA Members to Watch Out For.' Like the real Bechdel, this one lives in Vermont and is married to a woman named Holly (based on the artist Holly Rae Taylor, who is responsible for the vibrant colors of 'Spent'), but her friends are almost all fictional characters drawn from the cast of 'Dykes.' They're older now than they were when Bechdel last checked in on them, but they remain recognizably themselves as they aspire to thrive in the interregnum years of the covid-19 pandemic and the Biden presidency. Bechdel's return to fiction — even in an autobiographical key — is welcome, not least of all because graphic memoir yielded increasingly diminishing returns for her. 'Are You My Mother?,' her follow up to 'Fun Home,' was a denser book in every way — intellectually, narratively, formally — than its predecessor. Cluttered with lengthy quotations from British psychoanalytic theory across pages sometimes overcrowded with panels, it resembled an endless footnote appended to an already abstruse tome. 'The Secret to Superhuman Strength,' in which Bechdel retold her life story by discussing the kinds of physical exercise she did in different decades — call it a bildungsmuscleroman — aimed for a lighter tone but still overloaded the bar with plates. Both books are really about Bechdel's attempts to follow up 'Fun Home,' which lends them an exhaustingly self-referential tone. 'Spent' satirizes that impulse from the start. The fictional Alison is the author of 'Death and Taxidermy,' a memoir that reimagines the real Bechdel's schoolteacher father as a rogue taxidermist. (An excerpt from the book within the book demonstrates that it looks an awful lot like 'Fun Home,' though its themes are much sillier.) As 'Spent' begins in 2022, an acclaimed television series adapted from 'Death and Taxidermy' is increasingly going off the rails — its own version of the protagonist has just eaten a burger, to the vegetarian Alison's horror. Seeking to reassert herself, Alison is struggling to write her follow-up, '$um: An Accounting,' a book that will, she modestly hopes, 'put the final nail in the coffin of late-stage capitalism.' One problem: She's not entirely sure what 'late-stage capitalism' actually is. Alison's creative frustrations are less the spine of 'Spent' than one recurring gag spilling out of a horn of plenty. With its cast of familiar, aging lesbians, 'Spent' sometimes reads as if Bechdel had relaunched 'Dykes to Watch Out For' in AARP: The Magazine, its story ambling peripatetically between characters and situations. The results are often wry and sometimes raunchy. In one plot strand, a married, barely heterosexual couple from 'Dykes' cautiously opens their relationship to another woman. As things heat up ('Spent' is refreshingly graphic about postmenopausal sex), they settle on the term 'throuple' to describe their arrangement, on the grounds that 'polycule' sounds 'like a skin disorder.' Alison, meanwhile, has to push down jealousy after Holly, who becomes an internet celebrity when a video of her chopping wood goes viral, starts flirting with the alluring veterinarian who keeps stopping by. As Bechdel knows well, queer enclaves in liberal college towns are all alike in their insistence on difference, and she skewers those routine eccentricities as lovingly as ever. When almost all the characters gather for an 'anti-colonial Thanksgiving,' one is delighted to find that the old electric carving knife still works. 'Is that really necessary for Tofurky?' another asks. Alison and Holly are perpetually preoccupied with their finances, but they still spend on groceries with comedic profligacy, partly because they can't imagine going anywhere other than the organic co-op, where three bags of provisions run them $480. Despite its self-reflexive conceits, 'Spent' largely eschews the smirking pomp of metafiction. Yes, the fictional Alison is friends with the real Bechdel's characters, but no one ever comments on that fact — she seems to have simply slid into the place that Mo, her longtime alter ego, occupied in 'Dykes.' Lois, Ginger, Sparrow and the rest are here instead, one senses, as stand-ins for Bechdel's real friends, and the veneer of fiction gives Bechdel that much more permission to go broad as she takes aim at the proclivities of lefty Vermonters, herself included, who long to reclaim their old activist passions but can't quite escape the comforts of Burlington and its environs. Alison's artist's block, similarly, seems to have less to do with Bechdel's own attempts to repeat the triumph of 'Fun Home' than it does with — to put it both earnestly and hyperbolically — the struggle to do anything worthwhile in a dying world. Despite that, Bechdel's visual style is freer and lighter than it has been in years. Panels flow fluidly into one another and occasional splash pages vividly capture the communal tempo of Vermont life at cookouts and farmers markets. Her characters are crisply rendered, but her linework has a slightly wavy quality that imbues her drawings with the improvisatory tone of life as it is lived rather than plot as it is planned. Not much happens, but you don't need it to: The real pleasure of 'Spent' derives from watching its characters go about their lives, and imagining that Bechdel might continue their stories for the rest of her career. To the extent that there is an organizing story here, it is a book about people who need to get over themselves so that they can better look after one another. Holly slips into egomania as she watches her view counts on social media rise and fall, formerly revolutionary parents grapple with the radicalism of the next generation, Alison tries to respect her MAGA-minded sister. Ultimately, the very thing that threatens to grate in 'Spent' — the self-involvement of its characters, Alison in particular — is what makes the book so rewarding. In teasing herself and her friends, Bechdel finds a new way to have fun with both. That attitude, in turn, opens up forms of sweet-minded sincerity, and 'Spent' shines most in fleeting moments when its characters tenderly push one another, often with simple acts of care, to overcome their obsessive impasses and paralyzing dreads. We may not, Bechdel suggests, be able to help ourselves any more than we can save the world, but we can always look after those we love. Jacob Brogan is an editor with Book World. A Comic Novel By Alison Bechdel Mariner. 257 pp. $32
New York Times
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
These Boomer Radicals in Vermont Just Want to Be ‘Good Progressives'
Alison Bechdel, the protagonist of 'Spent,' is a sellout. She is not exactly the same person as Alison Bechdel, the author of 'Spent,' whose previous books include the graphic memoir 'Fun Home,' an adroit reflection on her relationship with her mortician father. But there are similarities. The fictional Alison also wrote a memoir about her secretive father who embalms dead bodies, but hers is called 'Death and Taxidermy' — which should give you an idea of this book's tone (silly) and its aim (introspection). Our heroines are Alison and her wife, a sunny sculptor named Holly (who resembles the author's own wife, Holly Rae Taylor, an artist who did the coloring on 'Spent'). Complicating their life on a pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont is a crew of old friends who live nearby, several of them in the same house. There's Stuart, the sweetly irritating middle-aged man who wears a utility kilt and a Bernie Sanders T-shirt; his stoic wife, Sparrow; their kid, J.R., who drops out of Oberlin after getting disillusioned with their asexual polycule; everyone's pal Lois, who acts as a sort of tour guide to other people's sexual hangups and fetishes; and so on. Though it's the lightest of comedies, the book's biggest question is a laudably difficult one: Can you be a good progressive if you're a safe and privileged member of the upper middle class in a society tainted by oppression and selfishness? It's an urgent question for Alison: After devoting years to her syndicated, minimally lucrative comic strip 'Lesbian PETA Members to Watch Out For,' she's sold the rights to a prestige TV series based on 'Death and Taxidermy' that's now streaming on 'Schmamazon.' She and her friends watch with mounting horror as the showrunner, Çedilla Ümlaut (I laughed), turns Alison's most personal work into provocative, sophomoric nonsense. She's being exploited, but she's also being paid generously. Charting the group's adventures in leftist activism, polyamory and animal husbandry, Bechdel pulls off a delicate balancing act. It would be easy to make excuses for these lovable but almost transcendently annoying people preoccupied with their own comfortable lifestyle, or to nastily mock them. Bechdel does neither: Her genuine affection for her characters — with the possible exception of the one who bears her own name — gives 'Spent' a sweetness that makes even its cheapest shots feel good-natured. It's hard out there for a lesbian PETA member in rural New England, where a fan of Holly's YouTube channel might approach her outside Home Depot from a truck with a bumper sticker that says, 'MY OTHER CAR IS A GUN.' And it's endearing to see Stuart trying to celebrate the kids' nascent political awareness with a tattoo of a Kropotkin passage that takes up most of his back ('it was the shortest quote I could find'). Bechdel keeps the jokes coming at the pace of a good 'Simpsons' episode, and with the same self-referential reflexes, unnecessary erudition and jokey signage in the background. (The book's own 12 'episodes' borrow their titles from headings in Karl Marx's 'Capital.') 'Spent' is not quite a sequel to Bechdel's long-running domestic-comedy strip, 'Dykes to Watch Out For,' a witty, inclusive contribution to the serial form that flourished in newspaper comics from 'Walt and Skeezix' to 'For Better or for Worse.' But it's not not a sequel, either. Bechdel's earlier mouthpiece, Mo, has been replaced with a fictionalized version of the author herself, but most of the cast — Stuart, Sparrow, J.R., Lois — first appeared in 'D.T.W.O.F.' (Here I feel obligated to reassure you that there's absolutely no need for you to do any homework before reading 'Spent.' It stands on its own.) J.R. was only a toddler when the curtain came down on the strip in 2008; now our old friends have to share their farm-country paradise with 'Covid refugees from Brooklyn' ('Dude, I hate to bring this up, but the goats have been kinda loud,' one says to Alison), and to deal honestly with the fact that they're all, well, aging. If these characters are sad and bewildered by the state of the world, their frustration feels like a reassurance to readers who share it, and perhaps a gentle reminder that it's easy to confuse being socially conscious with being self-serious. But there's also the uncomfortable fact that a black-and-white strip about boomer radicals that ran in alternative newspapers for 25 years has been gentrified into a full-color hardcover published by Mariner, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (In 'Spent,' Alison frets over whether to sell her new book, '$UM,' to Megalopub, a publishing house 'owned by the conservative billionaire family that hit TV show is based on.') If that strikes you as a little suspicious, maybe even hypocritical, well, have both Bechdels got a book for you.
