[MoCCA] Best Of The Books

There were a couple of [MoCCA] Best of Books in this Wizard article, but I'll just publish the one about Fun Home. For the entire article and more reviews of awesome books, go to this link:

[MoCCA] Best Of The Books


[MoCCA] BEST OF THE BOOKS
The Wizard staff sounds off on the future smashes and hidden gems that made MoCCA a comic buying bonanza

By Sean T. Collins

Posted June 26, 2007 5:40 PM

Come six o’clock in the evening this past Sunday, one question was on the lips of every indie comics fan in downtown Manhattan: What did you get?

Each year, the MoCCA Art Festival sees a blend of books vie for the attention of the comics cognoscenti. From hand-stapled minicomics straight from the local copy shop to phone-book-thick hardcovers from acclaimed indie pioneers, the sequential art that will set the scene for the following year can frequently be found here. Particularly since 2003’s convention, when the one-two punch of Craig Thompson’s rapturous autobiography Blankets (Top Shelf) and editor Sammy Harkham’s trailblazing avant-garde anthology Kramers Ergot 4 (Avodah) debuted to huge sales and huger acclaim, the unofficial title of “Book of the Show” at MoCCA has become one of alternative comics’ most sought-after honorifics.

So what won the hearts and minds of con-goers this year? Wizard Universe lined up the Wizard staffers in attendance to share the books that blew them away. Consider their suggestions a great place to start your summer reading, and a taste of what makes MoCCA a must.

Brian Cunningham, Executive Editor: “This may be old news by this point, but Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home still impresses the hell outta me. Her panel and reading at MoCCA truly engrossed me and demonstrated how the medium has matured with storytelling as riveting as any classic prose novel. Also while at the festival, I loved the stylish pop-art-meets-’50s-kitsch quality T-shirts being sold by Emily Ryan Lerner (check ’em out at emilyryanlerner.com) and distinctly Watchmen-esque wear from a guy whose name we never got but we have his email (thespanishinquisition@gmail.com)—all really neat stuff. And I was impressed with the raw honesty of a minicomic my girlfriend picked up: Boobage by Monica Gallagher (eatyourlipstick.com). You can laugh at the title, but I was entertained by the author’s humorous confession of how her diminutive bra size negatively impacted her teenage life in a way only a comic book can convey. Oh, and someday, I'll save up to buy some Evan Dorkin Milk & Cheese original art. Someday...”


Speaking of Milk & Cheese, I absolutely love the work that Evan Dorkin does. It's irreverent, it's off the wall, it's laugh out loud funny. Check out his Milk & Cheese and Dork Vol.1 and Dork Vol.2 series!

[MoCCA] Festival Award Homes In On Bechdel

And yes, it's not just won critical acclaim, but Fun Home has also won an award from The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art [MoCCA]!

[MoCCA] FESTIVAL AWARD HOMES IN ON BECHDEL
The ‘Fun Home’ creator discusses her drive to become a cartoonist and adds a MoCCA honor to a landmark year of acclaim

By Brian Warmoth

Posted June 25, 2007 4:25 PM

The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art’s annual Festival Award covers as wide a spectrum as any honor, having gone in years past to creators as diverse as comic book legend Neal Adams, Maus creator Art Spiegelman and New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast. 2007’s recipient Alison Bechdel adds the accolade to a breakthrough year of recognitions for her graphic novel Fun Home, which garnered a National Book Critics Circle Award, in addition to top mention on the 2006 reviews lists of The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly and Publisher’s Weekly.

Bechdel received the Festival Award from MoCCA’s Kent Worcester following her one-woman panel about becoming a cartoonist and her personal history that shaped Fun Home, the autobiographical story of her family and her experiences as a lesbian.

“I wanted to see representations of people that looked like me,” Bechdel began, describing the lack of gay and lesbian characters she felt the need to counteract when she began making comics. She characterized her role as a cartoonist as more akin to that of a journalist than that of an artist. “It was very important to me not to compromise my particular point of view and my specific experience with the world as a lesbian,” Bechdel explained, looking back to the beginning of her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For in 1983 and the lack of mainstream attention she had received for her work prior to Fun Home’s massive success.

“At a certain point I realized my big breakthrough wasn’t happening—this embrace by the mainstream that I had imagined,” Bechdel said. “I was getting more readers, and a wider range of readers, but it was still a quite precarious way to make a living. By the end of the ’90s, more and more gay newspapers were folding [and I was losing income]. My own publisher that published my books folded, and things started looking grim.”

Bechdel’s career had stretched for two decades before Fun Home found a publishing house.

“In 2003 I sold it to Houghton-Mifflin, who was a mainstream literary publisher, so that was very bolstering emotionally, and also really saved my ass financially,” she chuckled.

Fun Home was a long, involved process, however, as Bechdel explained. “It was a very personal, intimate project, and it took seven years to complete it. I found out when I came out to my parents as a lesbian when I was 19 that my dad was gay, and shortly after that he died under certain mysterious circumstances, and pretty likely committed suicide—he was hit by a truck.”

She described Fun Home as “a powerful and intense story that I felt like I needed to tell for a long time” that congealed into the long-form graphic novel now circulating.

Bechdel presented a series of photos and video of her creative process as well, demonstrating the sequence of steps she uses to combine color washes with her inked pages and text. She also showed examples of the original texts and dictionary illustrations she incorporated into her artwork.

“I copied a lot of different texts in Fun Home,” she said, presenting images of paragraphs, photographs taken by her father and drawings from other sources that she painstakingly studied and integrated into her own hand-rendered scenes.

“The real story of this book was about becoming an artist,” Bechdel stated, looking back on the photos taken by her father that she said ultimately made Fun Home a collaborative effort between the two of them, since she was using his comprehensive photographic records of their house for reference.


Before receiving the Festival Award at the panel’s conclusion, Bechdel fielded several questions from the audience, revealing the shock she experienced when she first saw the TV show “Six Feet Under” and noticed the many similarities between it and her memoirs, and the fact that the font used in Fun Home was based on her own lettering designs.

Secret Stash: Fun Home

Here's the review of Fun Home from Wizard magazine:

SECRET STASH: FUN HOME
The hidden shame of a family and the pains of growing up with an overbearing father collide to make Alison Bechdel's stunning graphic novel the next Maus

By Kiel Phegley

Posted June 4, 2007 4:00 PM

Writer/Artist: Alison Bechdel
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Website: http://www.dykestowatchoutfor.com/fun-home/

REVIEWER OF THE MONTH

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KIEL PHEGLEY (Staff Writer)

WHAT I READ: Genre comics with a focus on fun over angst (All Star Superman, Scott Pilgrim) and book-length series with a strong sense of history and imagination (Love & Rockets, anything by Seth).

WHY I DIG ‘FUN HOME’: The antithesis of every pretentious, boring autobiographical comic, Alison Bechdel’s honest memoir portrays real, fallible people rather than stereotypes. To top it all off, it’s an extremely smart, literate comic—and not in that “The Kingpin just quoted Shakespeare” way.


There’s something I have to get off my chest.

I scammed a free copy of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home off of a book publicist at the New York Comic Con before I ever knew I’d review it in Wizard. But when the award-winning graphic novel memoir gets an affordable and accessible softcover treatment this June, you need to go out and buy it. Entirely revealing in its depiction of Bechdel’s life growing up with her family, the book holds a magnifying glass over key moments in her development (her first lesbian experience, her father’s sexual involvement with young men, etc.) to display an absolute depiction of one family struggling through its dysfunction.

“I think what most people respond to in the book is the way I expose my family’s secrets,” says Bechdel, a 24-year veteran of the alternative comics scene who’s most known for her strip Dykes to Watch Out For. “I don’t think that’s quite lost its appeal yet, even in this age of gutspilling memoirs. I think the other thing is, I didn’t just spill my guts. I tried to sort them all out, to label and examine them. I think that provides a more satisfying reading experience in the end than just a pile of guts.”

The study of those family innards took Bechdel seven years to complete as she toiled over the details of her upbringing. Those details mostly focus on her relationship with her father Bruce, a well-read, closeted gay man who, in her opinion, committed suicide. From the museum-like detail her father applied to decorating both the Bechdel residence and their family-operated funeral home (aka Fun Home) to the stern manner in which he’d introduce his children to classic literature, the relationship between father and daughter was often a strained affair whose doors only opened wide after Bechdel’s adolescent discovery that she was a lesbian.

However, writing off Fun Home as another self-indulgent, diary-like autobiographical comic is a massive mistake. I’ve read countless, whiney, “my life was so rough” indies, and what makes Fun Home such a dominant, true-life comic is that Bechdel not only tells a complete story, she does so with an unabashed, well-thought style that will drag you into the highs and lows of experiences. There are panels in the book where Bruce trades his quiet decorating for an angry and physically abusive demeanor and where Alison lays out her own obsessive compulsive tendencies like uncontrollably drawing loops through words and ideas in her diary that make her anxious. But those parts never made me dislike the Bechdels. They made me sympathize with them in an effective, almost uncomfortable way. It’s like watching your role model cousin laugh and cry her way through a confession of what went on behind the closed doors of her home.

“I flailed around for a very long time,” explains Beschdel of her approach to a full-length book. “Suddenly having 200-plus pages of a graphic novel sprawling out before me was sort of like getting out of prison—it was scary, and I wanted my walls back. But as I plugged along, I discovered that this larger form had its own constraints and rules and strictures.”

Although, being the book nerd I am, the thing that brought Fun Home’s themes into clearest focus for me was the way the structure and story intersected with established literary classics from Bechdel’s past. Whether it’s her father’s romantic comparisons of his flawed marriage to the life of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald or Bechdel’s own attempts to tackle the behemoth that is James Joyce’s Ulysses, the string of smart (and occasionally sarcastic) literary nods played important roles in the lives of the Bechdel family, serving as an engaging and fateful doorway into their personalities.

“I started noticing individual literary parallels fairly early,” recalls Bechdel. “It took a long time of working with that material before I could see the larger patterns underlying it, and get some perspective on why I had this tendency to read my parents as fictional characters.”

Readers nationwide must identify with the parents-as-fictional-characters ideal, too. Time named Fun Home “Book of the Year” and classrooms across the country have begun teaching the tome alongside graphic classics such as Maus and Persepolis.

“I visited a bunch of classes,” explains Bechdel of her interaction in the book’s academic crossover. “Sometimes students got a little hyperfocused on the personal aspects of the story. But I’m trying to find ways to turn my answers to those intimate questions back onto the writing, back to questions about the aesthetics of memoir and graphic narrative.”

Those aesthetics were lost on a library in Marshall, Mo., though, when it attempted a very public ban of the book from its shelves. Eventually, in mid-March of 2007, the ban was overturned. Still, the ban created more press around the book than had been there before and brought new family heartache as Fun Home became a critical sensation.

“Sharing the intimate details of my private life with thousands of anonymous strangers was nothing compared to showing this book to my mother and brothers,” admits Bechdel. “It’s been strange seeing this very intimate book get so much attention. Of course that’s a good thing, but there’s no way to really be prepared for it. I have all kinds of conflicting feelings, and so does my family. Though we haven’t really talked about it very much.”

THE LAST WORD In the end, Fun Home isn’t just important in the comics scene—it’s an important book, period. Merging the world of pop culture and high culture in a dizzying display of storytelling, the book cannot be passed up and should be passed on to everyone you know.

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Purchased Alison Bechdel's Fun Home yesterday from Minotaur and I can't wait to open up the plastic wrap and start reading it!

Amazon.com has a pretty awesome tool which allows potential buyers to preview some of the contents of books sold on their site, and here's the preview for Fun Home:

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Click and be blown away!