Alison Bechdel has been worried about selling out for decades. Not selling out of books — the award-winning graphic novelist has more than enough to go around — but selling out to capitalism for the sake of comfort. The specter of compromising artistic ideals, activist fervor and queer identity to the maw of the monoculture ran through Bechdel’s groundbreaking queer comic strip, "Dykes to Watch Out For," as it built a loyal fanbase in the pages of now-defunct gay and lesbian newspapers. The layers of intellectual insulation that characterize graphic novels like “Fun Home” and “Are You My Mother?” serve to distance Bechdel from the family whose secrets she’s publicly exploring. Her newest book, “Spent: A Comic Novel,” has no choice but to admit that “selling out” is now just selling.
The 25-year run of "Dykes to Watch Out For" followed a group of Sapphic pals and partners whose relationship and interactions seemed to reflect an author in conversation with several possible selves, squabbling and brooding over whose worldview was the right one. Mo, the strip’s main character, was Bechdel’s closest avatar, a self-serious proto-doomer whose fealty to living correctly both as a human and a lesbian put her at perpetual odds with herself, her friends and the world. Like "Where’s Waldo?" by way of the Vermont Country Store, Mo railed and wailed and gnashed her teeth through the strips, turning every engagement with commerce or politics or popular culture (yep, that Bechdel) into a referendum on her own ethical rightness.
