Book Review: "Fun Home"

I never got into comics much as a kid. Oh, I was familiar with a lot of the titles, even bought one now and then to peruse while draining the sandy sweetness of Pixy Stix. But they never got under my skin as they did with some people I know.

Many years later (how many years past Pixy Stix?) I have become interested in comics and particularly graphic novels as a medium. Watchmen got me started - elegantly cyclical, subtly detailed; I get something new out of each reading, and have loaned it with good results to many people who had not previously encountered graphic novels. I have encountered many worthwhile works since then: the ponderous metaphysics of Swamp Thing, the dark world of The Dark Knight, the cross-work fun of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Frank Miller's amazing Sin City... And Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics helped me look in a new way at not only comics but how we interact with all visual media.

The latest work to impress me is Alison Bechdel's Fun Home (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). Like Watchmen, I would not hesitate to hand it to someone who needed an introduction to the possibilities of graphic novels as a form. But Bechdel's work is perhaps an even better introduction, since Watchmen deals with the superhero mythos and Fun Home is an autobiographical work about growing up, and family, and life -- things to which anyone can relate regardless of how they feel about tights and capes.

Bechdel's storytelling style is something like John Irving: wry, intelligent observations on everyday life with the occasional bizarreness thrown in, and then sudden shocks of revelations delivered in a dry voice. This delivery is often in the form of juxtaposing scenes of everyday life with narration of memory or great change, what Scott McCloud calls the "interdependent" and "parallel" modes in comics structure.

Why a graphic novel, rather than a text-story version? First, Bechdel is an artist; favoring words must seem almost an insult to images, when you are able to draw them. But the primary reason is that Bechdel has a nice command for steering the reader across sudden time jumps and philosophical considerations, using the "implied time" between frames.

Bechdel has a fine voice, and the work is rich with both historical & literary allusions and historical & literary influences. The lines:

I was Spartan to my father's Athenian. Modern to his Victorian. Butch to his Nelly. Utilitarian to his Aesthete.

give some idea of the flavor of the writing, with the illustrations varying from point to counterpoint with the text. Far from the "Pow!", "Uggh!" some people expect from comic books, the reader can expect to visit a world in which Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce are oft-quoted off-frame players.

Humorous, saddening, literate -- Alison Bechdel's Fun Home comes highly recommended, both as a read and as a fine example of how some writer/artists dignify the genre of the "comic book".