Alison Bechdel Parodies Her Fame in Comic Novel ‘Spent’
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Nina Kim. Coming up on Forum, acclaimed writer and cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Perhaps you've been following her work since her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which featured the now-famous Bechdel test. Or maybe you came to know her through her graphic memoir Fun Home, which was adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical. Bechdel's latest comic novel, Spent, is a work of autofiction that grapples with the effects of wealth and fame and how to make art when the world is on fire.

Listeners, what do you want to ask or tell Alison Bechdel about her work or the impact it's had on you? Join us. Welcome to Forum. I'm Nina Kim. If you're familiar with Alison Bechdel's honest, true-to-life memoirs like Fun Home about her dad and Are You My Mother? or her groundbreaking comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, Bechdel's new work called Spent is a great way to get to know Alison Bechdel.

will take you on a very different ride. For one, it's fiction. Autofiction, specifically, where the main character's name is Alison Bechdel. But she's a pygmy goat farmer with a book-banning mega-sister. She's famous for a memoir about her taxidermist dad.

and she's grappling with her wealth and fame. Well, that last one might actually be true. Alison Bechdel, welcome to Forum. Hi, Bina. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to have you. So your book spent, it ended up being autofiction, but I understand that it was originally intended to be a memoir. Yes, it was just going to be another straightforward memoir like my one about my dad, one about my mom, and my one about the secret to superhuman strength, whatever that book was about. Yeah.

But when I sat down, it was going to be a memoir about money, specifically about my relationship to money. What was, you know, the fact that we live in this capitalist system that is speeding over a cliff. Like, I wanted to address that somehow. But when I began the work, I realized...

I didn't want to do the kind of research that would involve. I assumed I would have to read some Marx. That looked really daunting. I'm not really interested in economics. So it didn't seem like that was going to work. But fortunately, I immediately got a new, better idea. I would write a book about economics.

a cartoonist named Alison Bechtel, who was trying to write a memoir about money. And then it all just kind of sprang to life for me. What was it like to write it that way, to write fiction? You know, it's funny because over the years, as I've done all these memoirs, people have asked me, well, do you ever think you'll write fiction? And I would just, my mind would go blank. It's like, fiction? What's that? Like, I couldn't even conceive of making stuff up. I was so embedded in my own life and the project of writing

you know, mining my actual life for narratives. And it would, sometimes people would say, oh, what about your comic strip? That was fiction. And I would be like, oh, right. Because that didn't really even feel like fiction to me. I felt like I wasn't so much making that up as sort of like pulling it out of the zeitgeist, you know? But somehow I just, I guess I was burned out on the memoir world.

track and trying so hard to be really brutally honest about myself. That was exhausting. And it just seemed fun to make some stuff up.

Yeah, I think you called it feeling like you're in a bit of a vulnerability hangover and that you wanted to kind of cover your tracks. What did you mean? Well, yeah, I didn't consciously do it for this reason. But one of the benefits of writing this autofictional story is now nobody knows whether anything I said is true or not. Maybe Fun Home was all made up.

I don't know that it'll obscure them. Yeah, maybe not. But is it because you experienced some degree of discomfort or any repercussions for being so honest about your life before? Honestly, only positive ones. You know, people really seem to value memoirs that tell painful truths. But yeah, I have revealed a lot of very intimate information about

And I try not to think about it. I sort of am able to dissociate from that. Like when I'm standing in front of an audience and addressing them, I don't think about the fact that I've shown them all these incredibly intimate and embarrassing moments from my life because I would have to go off the stage. Couldn't do it. So yeah, it's just kind of fun to cast it all into doubt.

So then let's talk about your book and how you cast certain things into doubt. First of all, what was the inspiration for the Alison Bechdel in the book having a pygmy goat sanctuary? Well, my grandfather was a goat herd as a boy, and I always found that very charming and touching. And my partner, Holly, was also a goat herd as a kid.

and goats are really cute. I don't know. I don't have a goat. I like goats at arm's length. They're fun to watch for a short period of time, but that was basically it. But then also I met a young farmer who told me that they had always had a fantasy of having a goat farm, and they would name all the goats after my dykes to watch out for characters. And that sort of sparked something, I guess, like,

It just was working away in the back of my head, and I think that was part of what happened with this whole...

And Alison in the book is famous for writing a memoir about her dad, though rather than a funeral director, the dad is a taxidermist. And there's a major TV series about it, right? Yes, yes. Instead of her memoir being turned into a Broadway musical, like happened to me, Alison Bechdel in the book, her memoir gets turned into a prestige TV series on Schmamazon.

So it's really just sort of one step removed from your real life in some ways. Yeah, just enough to be able to...

I don't know. Have some fun with it. And there's this page where the Allison in the book is trying to write a book on, quote, the role of money in her life from her middle class childhood to her bohemian youth on the margins of society to her breathtaking success. It would be a lens into the overconsumption, inequality, endless growth and media consolidation of late stage capitalism. Yeah.

A very big premise. Yeah. But one for very dark times, right? So talk about when the book is taking place. The book begins in 2022, still in the thick of COVID. People are still sort of testing and quarantining. And it ends in spring of 2024, before the presidential election stuff got really going. So

I didn't know what was going to happen. I had to sort of keep the book open ended because of that. And it's tracking just as my comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For used to do with the news as it's unfolding. Like we hear about, you know, different stuff in the news throughout to kind of ground it in that present day timeline.

All these little signs of a crumbling democracy on the radio or in the newspaper. And you can really sense that this character is feeling really overwhelmed with what the world has become. And this is, as you say, spring of 2024, so it's pre-election, but very accurate to the actual events of that. Yes. Yeah, it's pretty tightly keyed in. And so are you yourself grappling with where the world is right now and...

Yeah.

as what the world is facing? Because, you know, you're trying to address, at least the character is, overconsumption, inequality, media consolidation, as well as all the other things about people's relationship with money. Well, part of the arc of this story is Alison Bechdel's belief that she can solve these things, which is ridiculous. You know, she has to

I mean, but first of all, she also feels responsible for these things that she has somehow caused them with her own like success. But she will learn over the course of the book that she is one of many people who are working to change things. There's no way she can do it all alone. She just has to pitch in with her friends.

What sort of after effects of success did you want to explore with this? So initially, when you said you decided to turn this from a memoir into auto fiction, one of the things was just all the research that made you not want to do another sort of true to life memoir. But was it also just that to go where...

the examination of the role of money in your life would take you, you weren't sure you were ready for? You know, yeah. I realized that we have this taboo about talking about money for a good reason. And I just, you know, I thought I was going to be able to do it to really

That was part of my idea, just speak honestly about money because no one does it. But I couldn't quite face it. So that, too, was why I took this turn toward fiction. I mean, it's all basically a picture of my real life, but I just...

Didn't get into the specifics, really. Yeah. I mean, there are sort of the ones that you expect where sometimes your friends joke about, oh, you know, why don't you fly on your private jet, for example. Right. But there's something very interesting where you portray Allison's discomfort with the fact that she makes so much more money than her fictitious sister, who is an elementary school teacher. What were you wanting to convey with that?

Well, I also feel like, I mean, I do make more money than people who do really important work, which is so kind of distressing to me. I make more money than teachers do, than firefighters do, than farmers do. Like those people are doing vital work. Why don't they get more money? It's crazy.

And then is that also what you were saying about how Allison is blaming herself for the issues? Because it's this sense of like, how is it that me, quote unquote, lesbian cartoonist, which is what you call yourself in an interview, is making more money than an elementary school teacher? Like somehow people feel like things have gone too far in another direction or something? Yes. Well, I think that's certainly the narrative that they're pushing. Yeah.

all these marginal people are taking over, which is, of course, ridiculous. And you're finding yourself sort of, it is sort of affecting you. Yeah, well, I mean, in a way, the book is about trying to create anything in this moment, you know. I struggled for a long time to feel like I could even concentrate, you know. Certainly during Trump's first administration, you know,

But even, you know, it's just crazy times. Should I be doing something more practical or useful than sitting here trying to write a book? What's that going to do?

Let me remind listeners, we're talking with Alison Bechdel about her new book, Spent. It's a departure from her true-to-life memoirs as a work of autofiction, and it grapples with the effects of wealth and fame and art and politics and the changes she feels like are happening. Listeners, what do you want to ask or tell Alison Bechdel? What impact has her work had on you?

Have you experienced a change in wealth or status that you're struggling with? Or how do you stay motivated to make art in a world on fire? You can email forum at kqed.org. You can find us on Blue Sky Facebook, Instagram, or Threads at KQED Forum. Or you can call us 866-733-6786. 866-733-6786. More after the break. I'm Mina Kim.

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This summer, venture into the storm with Mozart's sublime opera, Idomeneo. June 14-25. Learn more at sfopera.com. Greetings, Boomtown. The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming! Xfinity combines the power of internet and mobile. So we've all got lightning-fast speeds at home and on the go! That's where our producers got the idea to mash our radio shows together! Xfinity!

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Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking this hour with Alison Bechdel, a graphic novelist and cartoonist, and her new book is called Spent, which is actually a work of autofiction. Her previous books include The Secret to Superhuman Strength and Fun Home, which was adapted into a musical, Are You My Mother?, her comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For. So listeners, what impact has Alison Bechdel's work had on you? What do you want to ask or tell Alison about it?

Is there a Bechtel cartoon that has stayed with you? Why? We're also talking about some of the themes in Spent. Have you experienced a change in wealth or status that you've struggled with? And how do you stay motivated to make art in a world on fire? You can call us at 866-733-6786. You can post on our social channels. We're on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, or Threads at KQED Forum. And you can email forum at kqed.org. One of the things I was wondering is if

If wealth and fame made you a little more isolated or a little more protective, because it feels like that's kind of where the character Allison is at the start. Yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah, she's sort of isolated in her little Amazon Prime cocoon. And that's, I guess that's one other thing about capitalism I wanted to explore is the way that you just kind of get isolated.

slowly and steadily bought in. If you are lucky enough to get bought in at all, you start getting these rewards. You get money. And it makes you, it changes you. It immediately changes you and makes you have something that you don't want to lose. And that was fun to contrast the older people in the book with the younger people because the younger people, of course, don't have anything to lose yet. They don't have anything.

So they're willing to take more risks in a way that Allison certainly has not, although she's moving in that direction. Yeah. The other thing when we were talking just before the break about how you, a cartoonist who first came to prominence doing a comic called Dykes to Watch Out For at a time when, you know, lesbians were very much outsiders, right? And your sister is very much part of that.

The system in the sense of she has a very conventional job as an elementary school teacher, and now all of a sudden that sort of outsider status has given you tremendous, tremendous opportunities. It felt like that was something you wanted to explore as well. Do you feel like you have sort of moved from the margins as a result of the kind of, I don't know, I guess, rewards that capitalism provides?

I do. And it's strange because I formed my identity as an outsider. And so that has really, you know, as a young person, you couldn't do something more on the margins than A, being a lesbian and B, being a cartoonist. Those are both like really fringy pursuits. Yeah, it came out in the 80s. Yeah. So it's been a funny trajectory to see all of that change and to, you know, I

I sometimes feel like I wouldn't, what would appeal to me about the world of comics was that no one looked at it like it was just under the radar. It was lowbrow. It didn't get critiqued the way fine art or literary writing does. And it was kind of like, oh, I can do this because no one's watching. But now, of course, everybody's watching. So it's all different. We've got some calls coming in. Let me go to Kelly in Marin. Hi, Kelly, you're on.

Hi, I was calling in because I actually just saw spent a side copy at Green Apple Books yesterday and bought it. So I'm very excited to read it. And also just to say how much I love Strikes to Watch Out for. I used to volunteer with Off Our Backs in Washington, B.C. and getting to see the new strips was always such a highlight. So this is a thrill to be able to talk with you. Thank you so much.

Suzanne writes, I love Alison and have followed her since Dykes to Watch Out for, which I read in the Baytimes. I'm a closet writer slash cartoonist, having drawn cartoons for friends for years. I'd like to draw longer format graphic novels, but the idea of drawing such a long story is daunting. Can you comment on the timeframe it takes for a graphic novel and any advice or inspiration? Wow, that's really interesting because these have been very different timeframes with regards to the work that you've done over the course of your career. Yeah, that's interesting.

Well, it helped for me to have all those years of writing short form comics, writing these biweekly episodes that had to fit in 10 little panels. That sort of built up my chops enough to be able to do longer work. But even so, it was quite daunting. You should be daunted if you're about to embark on a graphic novel.

novel or memoir or whatever because it's a very demanding, it's very time intensive. You have to write, not just write a book, but then you have to draw it like a monk sitting at your little drawing board. And to draw something well is very painstaking. It takes forever. It just takes an insane amount of time. I can't even tell you. So you have to kind of

accept that. And I've spent years on these books. I mean, this book spent somehow, I was able to bang out in about three years, but my other projects took...

closer to six, seven, even eight years. Probably partly because you weren't so worried about being super accurate and studied in the topic that you were covering. Like you were going to read Marx to be able to write your memoir about your relationship with money. Yeah, I just lowered my standards. Not lowered your standards, but...

I guess there's a certain freedom in being able to make things up. Yes. Yes. Who knew all those fiction writers were having so much fun? I know. So does that mean that there's more fiction coming your way? Or the thing that people say about fiction all the time, which is that you can get to deeper truths in fiction than sometimes you can in memoir. Do you think that's true? You know, my writer friends would always say that when I was deep in my identity as a memoirist. And I would...

No, you can't. You really need to work with the actual truth. Anyone can make something up. I think this all goes back for me, perhaps, to my mother wishing that I had written Fun Home as fiction to disguise the family and protect her.

And even when I would say to her, Mom, no one would, everyone would think it was true anyhow, even if I called it fiction, because that's what we do when we read fiction. We always like imagine this is somehow a version of the truth at least. So that just always interested me. Like, would it have made a difference if I'd written it as fiction? I couldn't write it as fiction. The whole point of that book was that it really happened. Yeah. Yeah.

We're getting a lot of comments about Dykes to Watch Out for. Talk about bringing those characters back in spin. What was that like for you? Oh, man. And why you wanted to? It was so fun to be with those people again. I had gotten kind of burned out on them all. After 25 years of writing the comic strip, I was happy to move on to other things. But...

When times get tough, it was really reassuring to realize that they're still there. I still have access to these people and they're still doing the stuff they've always done. They're still doing all their various kinds of activism and community-based work. They're still living in their group household, even though they're in their 60s. And I was just so happy to be with these devoted, dedicated people.

progressive people. Yeah, there's Lois and Sparrow and Stuart and Ginger. You've talked about kind of needing to bring them back. What did you need? Well, when I was writing my comic strip, I would use the characters to process what was going on in the world. Eventually, current events became a real strong theme in the strip. It was almost like half soap opera about these characters and half op-ed cartoon where people are discussing what's going on in the world and in the news.

So I would use them as a tool to understand for myself what was happening in the world. Because I'm not like a news person. I can't really follow the news unless I make a story out of it. So that's what I used them for. And so they came in very handy now when things are even...

more chaotic and crazy. And the fact that they didn't really change, that was important, right? That kind of, describe what some of the characters are doing now and how they've sort of followed along that trajectory into their, what, mid-60s now, I guess? Yeah, they're all like on the verge of retirement. Sparrow works for Planned Parenthood. Uh,

Ginger is still at the university in the trenches, you know, fighting off the administration that wants to cut all the departments except the business classes. Lois, who used to work in the women's bookstore, now runs the queer youth organization in town. And Stuart, who was the stay-at-home parent of Stuart and Sparrow's child, J.R.,

does all kinds of random activism. He's doing Ukrainian relief efforts and get-out-the-vote letter-writing drives, and he hosts Shabbat every week for all the characters to come together and chill out. So was it that you were burnt out on them in 2008 when you stopped, or was there a part of you that didn't really need them as much at that point because it felt like maybe...

progress was being made? Yeah, it did. How naive I was. I thought, oh, well, yeah, there's not the same urgent need for this representation that there was when I started out. And I could maybe now take a break because everything looked like it was going to be just fine. Little did I know. But fortunately, I still had access to them when I needed them. Yeah. So it doesn't necessarily represent

something negative to you that you need them again? Well, I don't know. Yeah, it's tough times. But there's this weird upside to it. I'm trying very hard to stay in touch with whatever optimism I can reach. And there's something about

Going back to that kind of communal life that I had when I was younger, that these characters live on a daily basis, that's very promising. It's the opposite of this atomized way that we've all been living. We're cut off from each other in so many ways in terms of technology, in terms of wealth inequality. All of these things are just

pushing us apart and we need to come in the opposite direction. Right. These characters in Spent, they all live together in a communal household. They're part of like a university longitudinal study. I know. Like, I don't, I mean, when I was younger, I lived in a group house and I loved it. But then it was like, oh man, let me out of here. But now it's like, huh, there's something very appealing about it.

We're talking with Alison Bechdel about her new book, Spent, which grapples with the effects of wealth and fame on her relationships and her art and even her politics. There's some of that that sort of creeps in there, too, or a questioning of that in that time period.

And you can join the conversation listeners at 866-733-6786 at the email address forum at kqed.org. Or you can post on our social channels at KQED Forum. Anything you want to ask or tell Alison Bechdel or if her work had an impact on you, what kind of impact is that? Or questions about being a cartoonist or about making art in a world like

That feels like it's in flames, essentially. The last time we had you on, Alison, it was to talk about the secret to superhuman strength. And one of the things that I found really comforting in reading that book, which was really about your journey, I think, of self-improvement internally and externally and figuring out if you could do that through physical exertion and so on. One of the things that I found really comforting about that was this idea

almost like this conclusion that this book is drawing about how life is very circular, or it's like this constant process of sort of trying to retrieve things that were so meaningful in previous times while still moving forward. And I've often used that as a way to think about the times that we are in now where it constantly feels like, you know, you make progress and then there's maybe a backlash and a regression of that progress.

But I think I've comforted myself in thinking that that sort of circular or elliptical motion is sort of always moving upward. That's a very full, yeah. What are you thinking? Well, I mean, I want to say two things. First, I will say something that doesn't...

directly respond to that. But in The Secret to Superhuman Strength, yes, I'm writing about my own circling around these issues, these problems that I have that keep recurring in my life. And I keep thinking I'm resolving them, but no, they come around again. But on a higher level, as you say, like it's an upward spiral that you're going around. You never quite fix everything because you

There's something remaining on the next rotation that you have to deal with. Right. Which I try to do as accurately as I could, but makes for not very interesting storytelling. Because, you know, you want a story to go somewhere. You want people to change and become something new and different. But change takes forever. Change is really difficult. And, of course, I'm talking in this case about personal growth and change. Yes.

It's a lifelong process. You can go by these books that tell you there's five steps to this or that, but it takes forever. True lasting change takes a long time. But it's funny that you're now casting this as a political pattern too. And yeah, I've always understood the progress and backlash model. But man, lately I just, yeah, I've been feeling very kind of,

You know, I really allowed myself to believe in this upward movement or this moral arc of the universe bending toward justice, you know, and who... It doesn't. It doesn't. We can choose to believe that, and I think we have to. But I thought it was really happening. Yeah. And so reading Spent and comparing those sort of experiences and interpretations, one of the things that made me think about is...

Maybe I've been really too preoccupied with this idea that it is moving upward, though, ultimately. And the fact that it feels like what the character of Alison Bechdel gets to in Spent is that what really sort of matters is the people around you and how you engage with what is around you within your realm. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, like politics and ideology can get so abstract. And in really turbulent times, it's important to just be with your people and support each other and do what needs to be done, which is also, I think, what needs to happen on a larger level, too. But it's also immediate and pressing to do.

engage in mutual aid with the people around you. Yeah. And in some ways, sort of the change that you can affect to some degree is like a ripple. There's no like upward or downward movement, but it's like a ripple among the people that you interact with. Yeah. Yeah. So it's been really interesting to think about how those things have kind of

come together within these two books, even though they're so incredibly different to some degree. Yeah, totally. One quick thing I wanted to ask you about before we get into the next break is that I understand that this is also an audiobook. This graphic novel is an audiobook. Yeah, it will be. It's not out yet, but it's coming out soon. And so how are you able to do that, given the fact that so much is within the image itself? Yeah.

It's been a real learning curve. We thought it was just going to work to have actors read the lines in the book, but no, that's not true at all because...

there's so much visual humor and information in these drawings that you need to somehow get into verbal form or sound effects. As I started to learn about it, it was like writing a, it was writing a radio play, basically, which is a whole different kind of skill than my normal skill set. But it was fun. We're talking about the new book spent by Alison Bechdel, which is going to be an audiobook with sound effects. It's a

It's a graphic auto fiction novel. And we'll have more with Alison Bechdel and you. Stay with us, listeners. You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Support for Forum comes from San Francisco Opera. Amidst a terrible storm, Ida Mineo promises the god Neptune that he will sacrifice the first person he sees if he and his crew survive the tempestuous waters.

But as he arrives safely to shore, his relief transforms into horror when the first person he lays eyes upon is his own son.

This summer, venture into the storm with Mozart's sublime opera, Idomeneo. June 14-25. Learn more at sfopera.com. Greetings, Boomtown. The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming! Xfinity combines the power of internet and mobile. So we've all got lightning-fast speeds at home and on the go! That's where our producers got the idea to mash our radio shows together! ♪

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking this hour with Alison Bechdel about her new book, Spent. It's a book that's been in the works for a long time.

It's a work of autofiction that grapples with the effects of wealth and fame on her relationships and her art. You may know Alison Bechdel from Dykes to Watch Out For, Fun Home, which was adapted into a musical, and Are You My Mother, both graphic memoirs. Her previous book includes The Secret to Superhuman Strength. Listeners, what do you want to ask or tell Alison Bechdel? And let me go to Victor in San Francisco. Hi, Victor. You're on.

Hi there, you guys. I was going to ask a technical question about, I'm really lazy and I wanted to do a cartoon and I was wondering if you have any tools like AI generative where you can teach it five or six different poses and then have it draw the whole strip for you or the whole series. But as I was listening to you, I am so blown away by your brain and your, I, it,

It takes a lot of time to develop a voice as a writer and as a cartoonist. I was a cartoonist in high school 30 years ago, and it's taken me 30 years to accept my reality as a cartoonist. And so you found your voice as a cartoonist and as a writer, a radio play. And then there's a certain objectivity that keeps that voice moving forward and gives it its credibility. So how do you combine it all together?

I mean, just writing alone and then drawing alone, drawing cartoons. And then how do you do it? What kind of discipline does it take to be so awesome? Thanks, Victor. It takes a lot of discipline. You know, as I said earlier, cartooning is incredibly labor intensive. I mean, you could, I'm sure you could find some AI tool that would

collect those poses as you said. It's also a long-standing tradition among some cartoonists to just use clip art and add captions to it. That can be amusing and fun. But for me, the whole point I do it is because the drawing is interesting and so much of the storytelling for me happens in the characters' gestures and expressions and you can really show their relationships and

I don't know. I just love the drawing. So I wouldn't want to cut that out. That being said, I did make a sort of crossed over to the dark side in the middle of this book and began drawing digitally. I've never done that before. I always just drew, you know, with a pen and ink on paper like people have done for millennia. But that's a much slower process, I learned, than drawing on a tablet. So...

I was falling behind in my deadline and I just did it. I just started drawing on a tablet. And how did that feel? Is it something that you think you'll continue to do now? I really liked it. It was so much easier. My God. I miss, I do miss the ink on paper feeling. I just couldn't get that same kind of intimate connection with the tablet anymore.

But there was something very freeing about it. I could try stuff and not worry if it wasn't going to work because I would just start over. I don't like not having a product. Like there's no finished piece of paper with that drawing on it, which is very sad. But in terms of just getting the work done, it was kind of amazing. Yeah. And then you do have the book itself, but the actual paper along the way.

We have another question from the Cisner who wants to know, when you're making a comic, how do formal choices like shading and gradation, panel framing and composition, line weight and negative space help you both express and process the emotions you're exploring? This is from Jesse. I honestly am not.

a really great drawer. I'm not a great cartoonist. I wish I thought of all those things as I was working, but I don't. I'm just trying to like get information on the page. I suppose in some sense, I'm unconsciously making all kinds of, you know, storytelling choices in the line I make or the way I shade something. Although this, this book is, it's full color in a way that I've never worked before. My partner, Holly,

colored it in Photoshop. I'd do these, the black and white line art and hand it over to her. And that meant no shading of any kind. It's all kind of flat colors. Oh no, that's not true. Then I had another person, a wonderful guy named John Chad, who put a layer of shading of shadow on everything on top of the color. Um,

So I wasn't actually making those decisions. And that was kind of fun, just turn it over to these other people to do all the coloring. Yeah, but you're happy with the product. I am. I am. I love the work of Hergé, who did the Tintin comics. I mean, it's a little problematic in many ways, but I love those immersive, full-color stories that he would tell. I loved getting lost in those when I was younger. And I wanted to...

I always had this fantasy of like, could I do that? Could I tell a story that was, you know, created this virtual world in that same way? And so that was my goal. And I think, I think I did it. The secret to superhuman strength was watercolor, right? Yes. Yeah. And not exactly full color. Like all spaces aren't necessarily colored because it was just so much work and we were still figuring it out. Holly also worked with that book, uh, with me and, um,

It was a crazy coloring process. I can't even talk about it. Everyone would fall asleep. But it's interesting you're exploring color in this way and continuing to see. Yeah, with every book it gets a little technologically more complex. Does it still feel like the dark side then to you or no? Oh, probably. But that's part of this whole world we live in. It just takes you over and you don't know it's happening anymore.

So maybe I'll have a revolt at some point. Go completely offline. Live with a flip phone. As somebody does in your book spend. Yes. Let me go to caller Larry in Belmont. Hi, Larry. You're on.

Hi, Alison. I'm so, so have so, so thoroughly enjoyed your conversation and talking about what you do and how you do it. And I, I'm 81, um, have cancer, don't have a whole lot of years left and I live on social security and I, uh,

spend as much as I can trying to make the world better by donating to political people who I think, or at least I hope, can change what is happening today. And since you talked early in the show about

your feelings about having amassed a certain amount of wealth and how that's affecting you. It's a pleasure, first of all, to hear someone who has achieved that level, who still has a conscience. Now I'm curious, there are so many ways to try to make the world a better place. What ways are you trying to use some of that wealth to make it a better place?

Well, I too give money, you know, there's a scene in InSpent where Allison is like making her annual charitable donations. And it's just become this huge task because over the years, there's more and more people who need money. And she's just feeling like hopeless is just doing anything for anyone. But she does it and she and she doesn't give enough. She's all she

had this goal as a young person to donate 10% of her income every year, and she never quite does that much. But she's working toward it, and I am too. But yeah, I always have felt bad over the years that I'm not really out in the streets. I'm not like an activist or an organizer. I don't

I felt like I can't really claim that my comics are my political work, but, you know, I'm starting to just decide that that's okay. This is my contribution. My hope is that I'm at least entertaining the people who are out there in the streets. Like I'm giving it, creating an accurate picture of those people's lives in a way that will, I don't know, hearten and amuse them.

Is the title spent in part a reflection of feeling pretty spent after kind of fighting the good fight, I guess, in a way, for so long? Yeah, it is. Like, we've all been doing this for so long, and it's just getting worse. It's exhausting. And now I'm old, you know? I don't have the energy I once did. So was this also sort of a reflection on aging, too, for you?

Yes. Yeah. Alison sometimes can't tell if things that are happening are because she's getting older or because like the world has changed. It's often confusing. But also I liked looking at these people in their 60s living their lives like there's this, they're all still like, you know, doing stuff. There's a

The longstanding couple, Stuart and Sparrow, get interested in this other woman, and they form a thruple. It was so fun to talk about older people having sex lives and drawing their aging bodies felt really fun and important to do. What was driving the desire to have a MAGA sister? Oh, just to be able to talk about this intrafamilial thing

stress that so many of us have. I mean, most people have a MAGA person somewhere in their family, if not many. And I wanted to write about how they're staying connected in spite of that. It looks like they're not going to be able to do it. Allison's impatient. Sheila doesn't respect Allison. But they somehow find some common ground. Yeah, they do find some common ground. It's kind of shocking that

Allison's sister, Sheila, is so MAGA to the point where she even advocates for the banning of Allison's book about her dad, the taxidermist. But of course, sorry, you wanted to say something. Well, it's funny because Sheila, the real reason Sheila doesn't like Allison's book is because Sheila got left out of it. Allison left her sister out of this family memoir, supposedly because...

to protect her privacy. But really, I think Alison just thought it made a better story if she were the hero, you know? Yeah. And so that continues to rankle with Sheila. Well, I ask that because your book, Fun Home, for example, it's been banned in a lot of places. Oh, yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah, that was my little response to the book banning efforts. Yeah.

It's been really crazy. I mean, it's crazy to see all these books being banned, books by queer people, books by people of color. They want to ban the people. That's what's happening. But my mind just kind of goes blank when I think about banning books because what can you say about it? It's evil. Let me remind listeners, you're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

I do, though, want to ask if you can reflect on what gets lost when we ban books, but in particular when we ban books that depict queer lives. Yeah, well, the interesting thing about gay people and books is that for so long, that was how we found ourselves, how we learned who we were, you know? Yeah.

It's different. Being queer is different from like being... If you're black, you're usually raised by other black people and you learn about your identity from your family. But with gay people...

That doesn't happen. Even me. My dad was gay. I was gay. We had no idea. We were living in the same house for 18 years and had no idea. So I had to learn about who I was from books. And in Fun Home, there's a whole long story of me going to all the libraries, the town library, the college library, amassing these books to learn about who I was. I mean, now there's the Internet. It's different a little bit. But still, books have been this vital resource.

avenue to learning about our identity. So it's all the more galling to see them trying to stamp them out. This listener writes,

What's the part you love most about working in comics, and how do you see this delightfully weird medium staking its claim in the wider art world, which sets it apart from painting, sculpture, and other fine art forms? You know, when I started out, I was doing single-panel comics where I did have to do that punchy one image with a great concept just all in one go.

Because I thought that was easier than a comic strip where you had to draw the same characters more than once and, you know, have more writing. But over time, I found that it was actually much easier to tell stories than to tell those punchy one-panel comic strips. So I just kind of went off on this storytelling track, and that's what I love about it, too.

Especially when I was doing my comic strip and I was telling these stories episodically over time and hearing back from my readers and having their feedback affect where the story went in the future. It was this really fun kind of communal project.

Yeah. Actually, we have a question about continuity from Tori, who writes, my question is about how to keep the characters looking like who they are frame to frame. Have you ever struggled with this? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, it's hard. I realized at a certain point, you know what, they don't have to look exactly the same. Just make them vaguely recognizable and that will be fine. And after doing that for a little while, I got better at it.

just drawing them again and again. And the fun part with the characters in Spent is that you had to imagine what they would look like, you know, decades out. Yeah, yeah. Well, I always, the comic strip always existed in real time, so the characters were aging all along. Right, right. Which was easy to show with kids because they grow so quickly, but the other characters, too, would just slowly get a little more haggard-looking, a little gray-ish.

But now in their 60s, they're full on getting old. And the most dramatic, of course, being the change in the one who is a kid in Dykes to Watch Out For and then their college student, J.R. Yeah, now 19. In Spent. Yeah, that was fun to imagine how that kid grew up.

Very much following in their parents' footsteps, I must say. Yeah. So you're teaching at Yale now, right? I am. Isn't that crazy? Teaching comics at Yale. And so you must hear or have you heard from students? Are they picking up Fun Home? Yeah, it's weird. Like, yeah.

They, they've all read it, if not in high school and then in other college classes. And they tell me stuff like how formative it was for them. And it's, it's hard to know what to do with that often. I don't know. What do you, what do you, I mean, you can't really take that on. It's just, I'm just doing what I do. History is happening. It's not like I did this, but I know that we want people to

We want people to latch on to, people to look up to. And I guess I still find it kind of uncomfortable taking on that role. Yeah. I'm just drawing over here in the corner. Don't pay any attention. So then for people who have, I think, felt very familiar feelings to what the character that Alison Bechdel feels in the book, which is that

It feels really overwhelming right now. And they're really questioning the point or the value of the work that they do in this moment. How have you come to some kind of conclusion about how to face that and work through that through the process of this book? I kind of have. I mean...

Working on this book was fun. There was something really fun about it, even though the subject matter is quite grim and the direction of the country is quite grim. I felt like I'm writing about these people connecting. I'm writing about connecting with nature. There's a lot of seasonal stuff in Vermont in my story. And those are the things that sustain me and that we all really need. And we just got to...

just got to find joy because that will keep us strong for the struggle. Alison Bechdel, thank you for spent and thank you for this conversation. Thank you, Mina. And my thanks as well to Caroline Smith for producing this segment and to our listeners for their questions and comments as well. You've been listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Support for Forum comes from San Francisco Opera. Amidst a terrible storm, Ida Mineo promises the god Neptune that he will sacrifice the first person he sees if he and his crew survive the tempestuous waters.

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This summer, venture into the storm with Mozart's sublime opera, Idomeneo. June 14-25. Learn more at sfopera.com. Greetings, Boomtown. The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming! Xfinity combines the power of internet and mobile. So we've all got lightning-fast speeds at home and on the go! That's where our producers got the idea to mash our radio shows together! ♪

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