Quotes from Alison Bechdel


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One of them is already having some menopausal symptoms. I'm working on that. I'm giving them all little lines under the eyes, trying to sort of make them age gracefully.


Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.


For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me.


When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults.


But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu.


But mostly, it's a book about my relationship with my father.


I love Jules Feiffer. I didn't discover him until I was a little older.


I never really read superhero stuff as a kid.


My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up.


Watching everyone root through their psyche, it just delights me. Especially R. Crumb's stuff.


That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project.


Yeah, I read Judy Blume. My mother didn't like that, but I read it anyhow.


I hope that I can get people to read it without having to change it. Especially now that the strip has more different kinds of characters. It's really not all lesbians any more.


I just met someone who read Gone With the Wind 62 times for exactly that same reason. She couldn't bear that it wasn't real. She wanted to live in it.


It's definitely part of it, that the men were having fun and doing the interesting things but also, I don't know, I'm just thinking more about gender and how maybe in some way I am more of a boy than a girl.


Mostly it was Mad magazine. And I did read a lot of - I had a subscription when I was little, but I also had access to some old collections, the little paperbacks of the really good stuff.


Nancy Drew was always changing her outfits. I despised girls' clothing, I couldn't wait to get home from school and get out of it. The last thing I wanted to read was minute descriptions of Nancy's frocks.


When I grew up, I studied karate for years. I got pretty strong, but eventually I had to acknowledge that I really didn't like fighting at all, so I quit.


Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.


People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.