Vermont Conversation: Cartoonist Alison Bechdel on hope, humor, and ‘waking up’ in dark times

Alison Bechdel. Photo by Elena Siebert

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

“Who can draw when the world is burning?” asks celebrated Vermont cartoonist Alison Bechdel in her new graphic novel, Spent.

This tension between the political and personal has been a deep well for Bechdel in her art. Bechdel has been cartoonist laureate of Vermont, as well as a recipient of a MacArthur “genius award” and a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.

She garnered a cult following with her early comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For.” Her best-selling graphic memoir, Fun Home, was named Best Book of 2006 by Time. It was adapted into a musical that won five 2015 Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Fun Home tells the story of growing up in a family that ran a funeral home, and how, after Bechdel came out as a lesbian, her closeted gay father died in a presumed suicide.

The cartoonist is also known for the Bechdel Test, which rates movies on whether they include at least one scene in which two women talk to each other about something other than men.

Bechdel is now a professor in the practice at Yale University. She divides her time between teaching for a semester at Yale and living and drawing at her home in West Bolton, Vermont. Bechdel’s wife Holly has been the colorist for her last two books. 

This week, she had an op-ed cartoon featured in the New York Times about how to stand up to tyranny.

She spoke to me from her home in Vermont.

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

David Goodman

You wrote on social media while sharing your New York Times op-ed that you were especially moved by the murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, because it occurred in a neighborhood that you lived in. Can you say more about that?

Alison Bechdel

I was living in the Powderhorn neighborhood of Minneapolis in the late 1980s when I was starting to create the characters of my comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, who I’ve continued to write about over the years, and sort of resurrected quite recently in my latest book, Spent. This cartoon in the New York Times was just a little funny glimpse at the world of this Vermont goat farm I invented for my book, and I’ve brought my old comic strip characters into this world. They live in a group household together, even though they’re in their 60s, they’ve always lived the same way they did when I started the strip out and I was in my 20s. 

It was strange to be working on this cartoon for the New York Times with these characters as that whole terrible story was unfolding. It just hit me so viscerally to realize that any of my characters would have done the same thing she and her wife did, which is stand up to help their neighbors, to alert them to this ICE raid that was going on, and she got blown away. It’s horrifying any way you look at it, but just having this personal connection to that particular neighborhood and the culture of activism in that neighborhood was just very, very upsetting.

David Goodman

Early media accounts referred to Good’s child as having no parent after her murder, but you made the point that the child does have a parent: Good’s wife Becca.

Alison Bechdel

It was kind of stunning how clueless the media were in piecing her story together. They called her relatives, which I guess is what you do. But I started to think, “Oh my God, this is some lesbian. No one has a clue how to figure out who her family is, what her story is.” 

What’s been most upsetting to me is the weird way that the shooter published his own cell phone video of the whole incident, thinking that it was somehow going to exculpate him. That was horrifying. I think he was banking on the fact that these women were clearly not suburban ladies, but a lesbian couple, and Becca Good, a mouthy lesbian, really telling him off. She was harassing him, but in a completely nonviolent way. He somehow thought that was going to win people’s sympathy. That is really disturbing to me.

David Goodman

It reminded me of the 2020 shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black jogger in Georgia. The shooter released his own footage thinking it would justify his actions. Instead, the footage was used to convict him. 

Alison Bechdel

I doubt that’s going to happen in this case, but it should.

David Goodman

As we speak on January 13, the Supreme Court is hearing arguments in a case that may ban transgender kids from participating on girls sports teams. Right now, 27 states ban trans athletes. You have been writing and fighting for visibility of LGBTQ people your whole career. How do you explain the moment we’re in with this incredible backlash against LGBTQ people?

Alison Bechdel

I feel like I’m still in a state of shock. For the past few years, it’s just been one blow after another. It seemed to me as I went along in my life watching progress after progress happen in this movement, that this was something that wasn’t going to go back. I think about Weimar Berlin, and how it was like this little oasis of queer freedom before the Nazis shut it down. And I was thinking, “Could that happen again?” Yes, clearly it could, but I really wasn’t sure. It seemed like maybe we’d reached a tipping point—people understand that we’re not a threat, that we’re just extending democracy to more people. But I guess it’s pretty threatening for the powers that be. I’m a cartoonist, not a political analyst, but that’s my general take.

David Goodman

You are also a very astute social commentator through your cartoons. But let’s turn to your latest piece in The New York Times, “Eight Things You Need to Start Your Own Commune.” Tell us what some of those eight things are and what the deeper meaning of this is.

Alison Bechdel

The idea was to just show the lighter side of banding together during the apocalypse. Like these characters with their group household is just a lighthearted take on the things that they’re doing, like building a safe room in their attic for their trans and immigrant neighbors. It’s evoking this moment that we’re living in and how it’s best done together with our friends.

David Goodman

Which comes right out of your latest book Spent. It is subtitled “A Comic Novel,” but it is also very much a memoir. So much of your work is autobiographical—Fun Home, Dykes to Watch Out For, Secret to Superhuman Strength were drawn from your own life experience. How do you find ways to go back to your own story and tell it differently?

Alison Bechdel

This time I found the well drying up a bit, which is why this most recent book is not strictly memoir or autobiography. It’s based on the kind of life I live now. I’m a character in it. My partner Holly is a character in it. But we’re living on a goat farm, which is not actually—we don’t live on a goat farm at all. I totally made that up. So it was fun to take these fantasies and loosen up the rules about what’s strictly true. And the best part of that was making my friends in this new world, my old characters from Dykes to Watch Out For and seeing how they’ve aged and how they’re still living in that house and doing all the work in the community that they’ve been doing for decades now.

David Goodman

You parody the struggles of a modern, progressive person with fame and fortune, the things that may or may not come with midlife. How much has that been a struggle for you, as it has for the fictional Alison Bechdel in Spent?

Alison Bechdel

I have been improbably successful in my life, when I think about getting started drawing a lesbian soap opera comic strip that ran in the tiniest newspapers that were constantly folding and starting up again. To actually have become someone who’s considered a legitimate figure in the comics world kind of blows me away. It’s come with some strange reckonings. I formed my identity in my youth as this outsider, as this lesbian, as someone who’s not aiming for mainstream fame and fortune, yet I’ve kind of ended up somehow making it or crossing over in a strange way.

David Goodman

What was the moment of crossover? Why do you think your story finally captured people’s imagination in the general public?

Alison Bechdel

That moment came when I published a memoir about my family called Fun Home, which was about my learning that my father was a closeted gay man at the point when I came out to my family and what a strange, disconcerting realization that was. It’s also about his suicide, which happened very shortly after that came out in the open, which is something I was trying to figure out for a long time before I finally started writing about it in my 40s. Somehow that book touched a nerve. My Dykes to Watch Out For work has never quite crossed over to that same extent. It kind of got grandfathered in a bit in the process, which is great, but I think most people know me for that family story.

David Goodman

Now you are wearing a new hat: you’re a professor at Yale. You are new to teaching and you never studied writing. So how do you now teach it, and what is the challenge of teaching college students?

Alison Bechdel

I am having so much fun teaching. This isn’t something I ever envisioned that I would be doing, but the opportunity came up and I deliberated over it, and I’m so glad I pursued it, because it turns out I really like it. I don’t have children. I’m not around young people very much, and it is such an amazing feeling to just talk with and be around young people and to see their hope and their energy. These students at Yale are pretty remarkable. They all do multiple things and many of them are good cartoonists. So it’s really fun to be able to try and teach them things that can help guide them. It’s stuff that I had to learn on my own, because comics wasn’t something you learned in school when I was young. In fact, I applied to the Yale art school to their graduate program in graphic design and didn’t get in because most of my work was weird cartoons, which didn’t really make sense in the early 1980s to anyone who was looking at them.

David Goodman

What has surprised you about working with young people and teaching?

Alison Bechdel

I was afraid that the kids were going to be disaffected or bratty, and it is so the opposite of that. They are so dear. I just feel kind of love for each of these kids that I’m working with. I love helping them to tell their stories, and I find that is something useful I can do. I know a couple things about telling stories, and it’s amazing to watch kids actually take what you tell them and run with it and do more than I even could have hoped for.

David Goodman

You’ve described yourself as a writer who draws. What does that mean?

Alison Bechdel

Different cartoonists map out differently on the writing and the drawing. Some people are really good artists and maybe not such great writers. Some people are stronger writers than artists. I feel like my writing is kind of stronger than my drawing and leads the drawing. Some people, the images lead the way. They would probably call themselves more artists who write.

David Goodman

You have a pretty remarkable partnership with your wife Holly, who is the colorist.

Alison Bechdel

We’ve started working together on my last two books and that’s been so fun. Coloring is really a lot of work and it’s nothing I could do on my own—it would take me twice as long to produce these books. So she has stepped up to learn Photoshop and learn how to create color palettes and it’s a fun way for us to be really collaborating and working closely, instead of me just being off in my room doing this by myself.

David Goodman

Some people might be terrified to work with their spouse. How do you navigate that?

Alison Bechdel

It certainly has its fraught moments, but we’ve gotten a lot better at it. Part of the reason I even became a cartoonist is because I’m such a lone wolf and I like doing everything myself. So I definitely had a learning curve when it comes to collaborating, but it’s paying off, and I’m glad we’re doing it.

David Goodman

I saw an interview with one of your students at Yale who had never drawn. What’s your first bit of advice to somebody with no background in telling stories, in creating art?

Alison Bechdel

I don’t insist that kids know how to draw or draw well at all to take the class. It helps to have some drawing skill but what I’m teaching them is not how to draw or how to write, it’s how to combine those two things. That’s its whole own skill, and some people have a real knack for it but other kids, you can teach it. What are you trying to convey in this story? What’s the best way to do it? Don’t say in the pictures what you can say in the words and vice versa. There are some very simple formulas. It’s a whole new way of telling a story.

David Goodman

What is the key element of a good cartoon?

Alison Bechdel

I think it is the little gap, like in a spark plug, between the pictures and the words. That is just enough space for the reader to come in and make that connection, make the spark. It gives them a way in and just kind of makes the magic happen, unlocks that fusion between those two planes.

David Goodman

In Spent, you lampoon the fact that the main character uses a cartooning program, but there’s a serious element to that. How is AI impacting your world?

Alison Bechdel

In fact, I kind of went over to the dark side a little bit on my latest book, Spent, because I did not draw that all with a pen and paper. I did half of it digitally just because I needed to work faster, and digital drawing is a lot quicker. I’m still drawing it myself, but it’s just on a screen, and it’s kind of different. Interestingly, I used AI for the first time as I was writing that New York Times cartoon—one of the panels is about how to generate your own electricity, given that now the AI data center down the road has jacked up your electricity rates. So I drew myself on a treadmill with my flock of goats and we’re generating our own renewable energy. I asked ChatGPT to make me a drawing of goats on a treadmill, and it did, and I sort of copied it. So who knows where I’m going now—I’m just going right down a chute to hell.

David Goodman

One of the subtexts throughout Spent is the background noise of the incredibly disturbing deluge of daily news. How do we get through these times? What wisdom can you offer from your own experience?

Alison Bechdel

One thing I’m really grateful for is this teaching job because it is so all-consuming I don’t have time to sit around watching the news all day. Does it really help to know exactly what horrors they’re perpetrating? I just try to follow the headlines and I can’t spend any more time than that. I need to do more stuff in the real world, do more activism, connect with my friends. 

David Goodman  

What gives you hope in this moment?

Alison Bechdel  

The protests that are going on. There’s this weird silver lining which is that it is getting more people out into the streets and we’re on our way to that 3.5% tipping point, which gives me great hope.

David Goodman  

And by that you’re referring to if 3.5% of the people are engaged in any form of protest, the regime falls.

Alison Bechdel  

Supposedly that’s been true in history and in different political situations and countries. I certainly hope it’s true here and I hope that we can get to that number. We’re over halfway there in terms of who’s been showing up. People are waking up. Many of us have just been asleep through all of recent history. We’re not going to be around if we stay asleep. It’s pretty dark. It’s pretty bad.

David Goodman  

Thank you for sharing your work and your thoughts in these crazy times.

Alison Bechdel  

Thank you for your work in these crazy times. Just keeping people together, talking to each other, is so important.