Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

I'm cribbing a couple of kinks from Tom Spurgeon's Comics Reporter. It appears that Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is the buzz book of the summer. You may remember Bechdel from such comic strips as Dykes to Watch Out For. I picked Fun Home up at BEA last month, but I haven't had a chance to read it yet. I guess I'd better before the hype raises my expectations too high.

What kind of hype am I talking about? Well for one, Fun Home led off the first ever graphic novel round up from The Globe and Mail. Nathalie Atkinson calls it "this season's 'it' book" and compares it favorably to Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis from a couple of years ago, noting that Fun Home "is in fact more complex and nuanced, emotionally, narratively and artistically." Atkinson in fact runs through twelve other graphic novels by creators such as Julie Doucet, Lewis Trondheim, Rick Geary, and Hope Larson before ending with Seven Soldiers of Victory. Even with the nod to Grant Morrison, though, she closes with, "Although, with graphic novel sections bursting with such a selection of strong non-traditional comic offerings this summer, you'll be lucky to get to a superhero title by Labour Day."

But back to Alison Bechdel and her press, we have to take note of the review she received last weekend in The New York Times Book Review. Here's Sean Wilsey's opening:

If the theoretical value of a picture is still holding steady at a thousand words, then Alison Bechdel's slim yet Proustian graphic memoir, "Fun Home," must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced. It is a pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics and memoir) in multiple new directions, with panels that combine the detail and technical proficiency of R. Crumb with a seriousness, emotional complexity and innovation completely its own.

And then he starts to gush. I sure hope Bechdel is using "slim yet Proustian" somewhere in her publicity. Run out and pick up a copy before everybody you know has already read it and you have to play catch up.