Alison Bechdel and Fun Home

 Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was named one of Time magazine's 10 best books of the year in 2006. Prior to the publication of her graphic novel-cum-memoir, Bechdel was best known for her comic strip, "Dykes to Watch Out For," which was syndicated in a number of alternative publications throughout the country. In Fun Home, Bechdel persists in exploring some of the themes she first examined in her strips, particularly gender and sexual orientation, as well as the trials and tribulations of a smart and witty young woman in America. However, Bechdel's memoir is an even more personal and poignant account--both of growing up gay and simply growing up. Bechdel's book asks us to look at the future of contemporary American literature. Will the "great American novel" be something other than a traditional novel? Have we moved past the genre of the novel onto more hybrid literary forms, such as the graphic memoirs of Spiegelman and Bechdel?

See below for resources on Bechdel:

Comics Journal interview

All About Women Festival interview

Book with great chapter about Bechdel

Announcement of MacArthus Genuis grant award

Dykes to Watch Out For strip

Musical version of Fun Home

Cvetkovich article on the queer archive in Fun Home

Fun Home (1-105)

Fun Home, Topics For Discussion

1) The Relationship Between Text and Image
 

One of the first things that struck me about Fun Home was how dominant the text was in comparison to the illustration. There’s not really more of it (word-count-wise) than there was in the other stuff we’ve read, but Bechdel’s strong narrative voice really upstages her drawings a lot of the time (not a bad thing).

The relationship between the text (especially the narration) and the images becomes a really important part of Bechdel’s narrative strategy. One aspect of this that I think is particularly interesting is described by the concept of anchorage and relay, coined by Roland Barthes in his 1964 essay, ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’. (A pretty good summary can be found here http://tracesofthereal.com/2009/12/21/the-rhetoric-of-the-image-roland-barthes-1977/).

Barthes was looking at pictorial advertisements and analyzing the visual arguments they were making (but I think it’s a pretty clean translation to comics as well). For images, he wrote about the difference between denotative and connotative meanings. For the text, he identified two major roles that it could play: anchorage, which solidified the expected meaning of the associated image; and relay, which added different meanings or challenged the original meaning of the associated image (or vice versa).

Bechdel is using both strategies here with her narration, and I’ve included an example of each below.



Anchorage (Text solidifies the meaning of the image)

Relay (Text challenges the original meaning of the image)

How do you think Bechdel is playing on the relationship between text and image in Fun Home? What does this relationship look like in a ‘traditional’ comic? What are the limits and opportunities of this relationship?

 

2) Allusion and Comics as Literature

The other thing that really stood out to me about Fun Home was the expert use of allusion and reference, mostly to works from the Western literary canon. While obviously Bechdel weaves these references into excellent metaphors and poetic language, it did strike me as a bit strange. She is working the comics medium, so why reference so heavily to a totally different medium? Is she trying to ‘legitimize’ her comics work by making these references? Why not reference previous comics and/or graphic memoirs? Is there even a comics canon worth referencing?

More Than Meets the Eye

Now that we have read through the entire graphic novel, we can see how Yang has interwoven and tied all three story arcs together.

Wei-Chan's transformer is incredibly symbolic in the graphic novel. In this vain, we see many of the characters making physical transformations (Danny to Jin, Chin-Kee to the Monkey King, etc.). What are some other ways the characters transform? Are these transformations - or changes - for he sole purpose of adapting to American society?

Now that we have read "American Born Chinese" in its entirety I am curious to see if our own perceptions of the novel have changed. Clearly, there is more to the story than initially meets the eye. Why do you think Yang chose to tell Chin-Kee's story in the form of a television sitcom, while on the hand, told the Monkey King's arc as a mythic tale? How do those two threads compare, contrast, or even compliment Jin's story?  

Extra Credit Project

 Due on December 1st, after Thanksgiving break (giving you the CHANCE to avoid your family during Thanksgiving break by saying you are working on a school project!), your extra credit optional assignment asks you to draw your own comic of approximately one to two pages, inspired by the work we've read this semester.  You might write something autobiographical, like Spiegelman's Maus or Bechdel's Fun Home, or entirely made-up, like Gene Yang's American Born Chinese.  You can use black and white or color images.  I only ask that you submit one copy to my mailbox at McMicken and upload one copy to the blog (we can make sure those entries are private), so we can discuss your work with the class.  I also ask that you include a 1 page write-up, explaining your work/ experience making the comic.

 I know some of you are better artists than others.  The assignment is more about seeing the ways in which the work you've read have influenced your use of panels, space, and narrative structure, rather than your artistry.  If you can only do stick figures, do stick figures.  If you want to use digital tools to make your images, that is okay, too (see example). The author of Hyperbole and a Half uses Paintbrush.

There's a lot of information online about creating comics.

Look at:

rules for drawing comics

making a comic

this youtube video on making a comics page.

how to draw comics 

this WikiHow on making comics

how to make a comic book

online comics tool

General Comics Links and News

Great article about "why comics are more important than ever" in the digital age

Local comic on the Cincinnati riots, Mark Twain Was Right, published

Get involved in the Graphic Futures project. Proposals due, soon!

Check out Jill Lepore's new look at the "secret" history of feminist icon, Wonder Woman

Present a paper (maybe one you wrote for class!) for the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics conference

Racism in "American Born Chinese"

This narrative is unlike the others we have read so far in that it is comprised of three very distinct narratives that seem to have no overlap.  We see an adaptation of the Chinese myth of the Monkey King, a contender for the most racist sitcom ever created, and a simple story of a Chinese boy at a new school.  But I don't think the author would just write three completely separate stories and not create some kind of connective thread between them.  What do you think connects these stories?  Is it that they all center on outsiders fighting an in-crowd?  Or are these characters fighting something else?

One thing all three of these stories have in common is overt racism, which is at times downright offensive.  The Monkey King feels like a victim of racism and so he strikes back at the other deities that saw him as inferior.  The sitcom starring Chin-Kee (even typing that name feels wrong, I must admit) shows the title character as a walking amalgamation of every racist stereotype and caricature of Asian people every created.  Jin Wang's story has him being the victim of racism, but he seems to have racist views as well.  Given all the overtly displayed racism in this story, what do you think that the author is saying about racism?

Finally, the artwork in this story is very different from every other novel we have read.  The style is very cartoony and very colorful, which seems like an odd choice given the subject matter.  But I also think that Yang makes some very interesting choices with regards to the artwork, such as having Chin-Kee (Ugh!) have yellow skin or having the Monkey King break out of a comic panel into nothingness.  Do you think the art style works for this book?  Why or why not?

American Born Chinese

     As we have seen in previous readings, American Born Chinese is another comic that is touching on the personal life experiences of its creator from a child’s perspective. The greatest difference is the use of a Chinese mythological folktale as a secondary story running along side the primary narrative.

Each frame-by-frame movement of the story takes the reader through various moment-to-moment transitions, subject-to-subject transitions and action-to-action transitions. However we rarely see an aspect-to-aspect transition during the story. If you think back to Scott McCloud’s chapter ‘Blood in the Gutter’ these transitions show a lot of “happening” moments.

How do you think that these transitions invoke the reader’s emotional response to the story? Or do you think that these transitions bring a different light to the story being told?

 Do you feel that these transitions differ in their use when compared to how such transitions were used in previous stories?

Remember Scott McCloud said, “Traditional western art and literature don’t wander much. On the whole, we’re a pretty goal-oriented culture.” So a great deal of western art and comics often emphasize ‘getting there’ versus ‘being there.’

How do you think this concept of ‘getting there’ versus ‘being there’ is shown in or has impacted how this story perceived?