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Lesbians Get Graphic

In the last few years, the graphic novel has blossomed as a genre, and several lesbian cartoonists and writers have garnered a fair share of recognition. Last year marked the release of Alison Bechdel’s (Dykes to Watch Out For) critically acclaimed Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic; lesbian manga from newcomer June Kim; and Jokes and the Unconscious from Daphne Gottlieb and Diane DiMassa (Hothead Paisan). This May, L Word writer Ariel Schrag’s latest book is due out; titled Stuck in the Middle: Seventeen Comics from an Unpleasant Age, it is an anthology of comics about middle school.

“The graphic narrative is a vivid, potent way of conveying information and experience,” Bechdel said to AfterEllen.com. “It’s an important format for any stories: lesbian stories, conservative Republican stories, Islamic fundamentalist stories, whatever.”

The acclaimed “Best Of” series recently embraced comics with the publication of The Best American Comics 2006, which included a strip from Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For. Though Bechdel’s strip is syndicated in numerous newspapers, these days she is most known for Fun Home, a memoir about her complex relationship with her father and her struggle with her sexuality. Named by Time magazine as the Best Book of the Year, it was also listed in the New York Times’ “100 Notable Books of 2006.”

“The comic form is a very immediate and intimate medium,” said June Kim. “It’s been viewed as a charming part of any subversive cultural movement for that reason, and for the accessible and economic production process.”

Kim admits that she was surprised when manga publisher Tokyopop accepted her pitch for 12 Days, a novel about a woman who mourns the loss of her lover by drinking her cremated ashes. “It made me believe there is room for diverse stories,” she said.

Publishing companies are opening up to the graphic market, Kim said, and “seeing it as an opportunity to find new readers.”

This increased opportunity and access is also changing the landscape for many artists, said Ariel Schrag, whose autobiographical comic book series Awkward, Definition, Potential and Likewise records her experiences, including coming out, at Berkeley High School in California. “The industry has changed in the past few years,” she said, with graphics receiving more critical acclaim and media attention, and cartoonists picking up book deals with mainstream publishers.

While this certainly has its benefits, Schrag pointed out that the past also had its own set of advantages. “What is nice about comics, at least what was nice for me writing about being gay, was that I felt very uncensored,” she explained. “For a long time alternative comics – not superhero comics – were sort of this ignored, free-reign territory. Nobody expected to be published by a large company or to make a lot of money, so people just wrote whatever they wanted.”

As the industry changes, naturally, so does the audience. “At first my readership was almost all lesbians,” Bechdel recalled. Now, however, it is far more diverse. “Most of them seem to share a leftist ideological bent, but there are the odd self-identified straight white Republican males who follow the strip, too.”

When Bechdel first began writing back in the early 1980s, she was more “conscious of writing for a community – but even then, I imagined that community as being just a bunch of people like me.”

Schrag agrees. “My target audience is me,” she said, then added, “and the amorphous idea in my mind of ‘everyone else.’ Also, sometimes it’s my sister or my girlfriend, trying to imagine their reactions to something.”

But the idea of trying to satisfy a specific reader or readership can be daunting, said Schrag: “Having a ‘target audience’ usually stunts the creative possibilities in your work. It really makes me happy when anyone relates to my book.”

Kim also considers her own interests first. She did not learn how to draw properly until she attended college in Korea, where she is from, and joined a group of aspiring cartoonists. “As a kid I just daydreamed a lot and started putting it down in a comic form when I was 8 or something,” she said. “For me, I’m the audience. It’s all about my daydreams.”

The rise of the graphic narrative is, to some degree, a recognition of its complexities. The form requires an intricate collaboration between storytelling and drawing, language and imagery, and it has received recognition for its cultural and literary contributions. Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about his father’s experience in the Holocaust, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992.

Some may believe that the recent popularity of the graphic novel is the result of declining attention spans in a media-saturated world, but Bechdel does not agree. “It’s easy to joke and say that part of the reason visual storytelling is such a trendy thing is that people are becoming less and less literate,” she said. “That might be true in a very strict sense, but the way people process information is constantly evolving, and comics is a language whose expressive potential has only begun to be tapped.”

As for the future, Kim will only reveal that her next project will be “much lighter and entertaining” with “lots of cute lesbians.”

Schrag, who was the subject of the 2004 NewFest Audience Award-winning documentary Confession: A Film About Ariel Schrag, has been promoted from staff writer to story editor on Showtime’s The L Word and recently wrote the screen adaptation for her comic Potential. The script is in development with Killer Films (Boys Don’t Cry, One Hour Photo, Far From Heaven) and will be directed by Rose Troche (Go Fish, The Safety of Objects). “We’re currently casting,” said Schrag, who will also work on the animation segments of the movie.

Though Bechdel took a different direction with Fun Home, she is sticking to familiar terrain in Dykes to Watch Our For. “I’m harping on the same old theme I’ve always harped on,” she said, “the cognitive dissonance of trying to hang onto a shred of radicalism in an increasingly complacent, assimilated, commodified, corporate world.”

She admitted that readers have noticed some changes in the strip. “People have pointed out to me that I don’t have as much sex in my cartoon as I used to,” she said. “I’m not sure if that’s more a function of middle age or the anaphrodisiac effect of the Bush administration.” Bechdel also recently sold her book Love Life: A Case Study, a graphic memoir about her love life set against her complicated upbringing and childhood, to Houghton Mifflin.

Kim admits that when she first began writing there were very few lesbian cartoonists to serve as mentors. Her influences were varied, from Neil Gaiman and Kiriko Nananan (who, though not a lesbian, has written several stories about women in love) to Gertrude Stein and other left-bank writers such as Sylvia Beach and Djuna Barnes.

Schrag began cartooning when she was young and did not necessarily identify as lesbian. However, she said, “my greatest inspiration was Lynn Johnston, creator of the strip series For Better or For Worse. In the mid-’90s she did a thread about one of her longtime characters, Lawrence, coming out as gay. I remember feeling really involved in that story line.” When Schrag grew up and realized she was gay, most of the writers she admired were still straight, such as Ariel Bordeaux, Joe Matt and Adrian Tomine.

As the graphic narrative continues to evolve in form, content and even readership, it will be interesting to watch how these artists manage to influence future generations with their own work — as, undoubtedly, they will.

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