SPEND - ALISON BECHDEL

A return to form. I went to college in Asheville North Carolina, so I’m familiar with both the comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For (pretty common bookshelf find in student houses/punk houses/communes) as well as the general milieu that the comic is parodying. And if Bechdel had just kept making that comic, and it ran for 25 years, it would be an impressive and laudable achievement. But, as we all know, Bechdel ended up making a couple of longer form autobiographical comics, starting with Fun Home, which broke containment from the lefty lesbian space and into mainstream culture. The book was a legitimate hit, it ended up being a broadway musical. Her other books in this vein, Are You My Mother? and, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, are also more straightforwardly autobiographical. This one goes back the DtWOF formula (and shows us some now late middle age DtWOF cast members), where the characters and situation are lightly fictionalized even though it takes place in our social and political world. In the world of Spend, Bechdel’s book about her father, who is a taxidermist in this version, not a funeral home director as he was in real life and in Fun Home, likewise becomes very popular and is the basis for a TV show that makes Bechdel uncomfortable since it’s corny and increasingly insane. The book is ostensibly about money and the pressures that come along with it. Like her previous 3 books, this one seems like it is going to play with a lot of material from older books, the way that Are You My Mother? weaves in all the Don Winnicott material, for instance. She teases that this time it’s going to be Das Kapital by Marx, and shows her character starting the book. Likewise, all of the chapter titles are Kapital chapter titles, though, sadly, the connection sort of ends there. She doesn’t go in depth on Kapital or Marx or really anything else, this story is much more self-contained. Unlike her previous volumes, this one doesn’t feel like the definitive excavation of a certain part of her life, it feels like an episode of a good TV show. She could crank one of these out every few years for the rest of her life and I’d be happy. She’s an amazing cartoonist, her drawings are never show-off-y but they’re super legible and very stylistically consistent. Plus, I love the colors. Likewise, she’s still got a great sense of pacing and story. It never gets super melodramatic, and it never gets too boring. It’s satirical but it’s light. DtWOF always had this sense of dread in the background, the main characters are mostly politically attuned activists who have a sense of where the country is headed, starting in the Reagan era. Now that some of their worst fears are being confirmed, basically daily, Bechdel nails the way that this dread just sort of becomes normal and background. Obviously, I wish there was more Marx but overall a very strong addition to the Bechdel cannon.