In 2015, I was dating a much older trans man; he paid for a ticket for 19-year-old me to shake hands with Alison Bechdel at a meet and greet. Bechdel seemed actively terrified when I told her that she’d changed my life. I still find it hard to resist recommending her comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, to absolutely everyone. For 20 years between 1983 to 2008, the Dykes of DTWOF lived somewhere that was kind of Minneapolis and kind of Buffalo, New York, and talked about everything from trans rights to lesbian cruising to abortion to the Iran-Contra scandal to the Iraq War, all while falling in and out of love, having babies, and running a bookstore. It’s a remarkable piece of documentation of queer life; over the 25 years of its run, it brought Bechdel little money and only subcultural fame.
Since ending DTWOF, Bechdel, accidental author of that famed Test (originally a one-off joke in DTWOF), has turned her focus to memoir. The first two were about her father’s suicide and her relationship with her remote, brilliant mother (Fun Home and Are You My Mother?). She got a Broadway musical and a MacArthur “Genius Grant.” Then, in The Secret to Superhuman Strength, she wrote about her butch relationship with exercise, her girlfriends, and Jack Kerouac, with an emotional account of her mother’s death thrown in. Strength is thematically weakest, diffuse and sprawling, but I reveled in Bechdel’s neurotic masculinity, her desire for connection interrupted by individualism and workaholism.
Bechdel’s newest book, Spent, straddles fiction and memoir. She brings back several of the Dykes of DTWOF — sans many characters of color — and replaces Mo’s character with a fictional Alison, offering a sense of where she stands on her various compromises since striking it big: the radio play bafflingly produced by Amazon, being rich, and the retreat to the country and away from the queer town life she once lovingly cataloged. Maybe Alison, post-2023, is rethinking the individual focus of her last memoir. She tries to put to paper the new zeitgeist: Trumpers, reality TV, Zoomer asexuals, middle-aged bisexual polycules, and the economics of making art in a world on fire.
I reveled in Bechdel’s neurotic masculinity, her desire for connection interrupted by individualism and workaholism.
Bechdel takes comic liberties with her own life in a way that’s kind of New Narrative. Instead of writing a book called Fun Home about her gay funeral home director father’s suicide, which was made into an award-winning Broadway musical, the fictional Lesbian PETA Members to Watch Out For cartoonist Alison Bechdel wrote a graphic novel about her father, Death and Taxidermy, which was made into a prestige TV series that she has no control over. The TV show haunts her nightmares while providing her money, via royalties, to run a goat sanctuary. Fictional Alison’s wife, idealized Holly (real Holly is the book’s colorist), effortlessly cans tomatoes while Alison labors to finish another book and limit goat copulation.
Fictional Alison’s taxidermist father went to prison for using endangered primrose moths in collector’s art. He takes a poetically just resonant path to death: He became an animal rights activist in prison, only to be poisoned by one of the toads in his vivarium after his release. It’s worth asking what the injection of animal rights into this narrative does, exactly; real-life Bruce Bechdel’s crime was abuse, suicide, or the sexual pursuit of his students and teen babysitter, depending on who is talking. The primrose moth scandal reframes her father’s problem as a willingness to destroy beautiful, fragile things to make money — topical for junior Bechdel — but avoids real Bruce’s sexuality and unfulfilled aesthetic and personal desires. Spent makes a curious elision around Bruce at the painful nexus of gay youth seduction and grooming, the same one right-wingers currently fixate on. Are teen boys like beautiful moths or toads? Is this a way of making Bruce a Gay Libber? Bruce’s giant stuffed moose head looks down on Alison as she works, but his altered crime is a brief joke. Spent playfully pulls a punch. It weakens the possibility for narrative tension — Bechdel does not want to draw the full range of desire, conflict, and harm between people (or animals) who wield power over each other.
The bugs-on-the-board image isn’t new for Bechdel. At the end of the introduction to DTWOF, she gestures to her board with pinned insects that represent lesbians, exclaiming suddenly that she has just realized she can’t describe something without changing it. She squinted out at the viewer, at queer life she couldn’t name or control. That was me! The bug on the board, the primrose moth. DTWOF showed me a diverse queer community without abuse, addiction, or abandonment — not a utopia but a world of casual communal solidarity. Now Bechdel recoils from the job of ambassador. Each wincing self-deprecation about her own mincing mercenary nature is also an act of distancing herself from her past imaginary world — though by the fact of her return, I suspect she misses the old vision. Who among her characters can help her face the future?
Reading Spent, I was excited to catch up with Janis, the Black trans millennial girl who in DTWOF is parented part-time by then-slutty white butch queer activist Lois. Tiny Janis was ahead of her era, singing Britney in a crop top and reading The Transgender Child alongside Harry Potter. In DTWOF circa 2002, Lois advocates with her girlfriend, Janis’s mother Jasmine, for Janis’s access to puberty blockers and hormones. She homeschools Janis, fights Michfest’s trans-exclusive policy, sends her to Camp Ten Trees, and stands up for her when other dykes get TERFy. She also provides her with sometimes inappropriate gifts, such as a Hello Kitty thong. The sex-positive milieu that Janis was raised in, though not without angst, opened my own pubescent mind. As a transmasc 14-year-old reading in a library in 2010, I wanted an elder like Lois: her devotion to Janis was compelling, and she was rakishly attractive and sometimes breathed fire for political reasons. Bechdel showed me I could accept nothing less than a love like that.
In Spent, Janis is not mentioned. Bechdel does show Fox News doxxing Lois for her nonprofit-centric advocacy for trans youth. But the youth Lois is most known for advocating for has evaporated instead of reaching adult Black womanhood. Rather than opening that box, 2025 Lois, once chaotic, is now Good but one note — clean, liberal, unsexed — and Janis is either dead or not in Vermont. This feels sad and too real. Was adult Janis pushed out of community for vague sins, rendered unmentionable? All the Zoomers who appear in Spent are middle-class and asexual; none are trans women. I get that the anti-porn stance of post-Covid youth is a common joke, but is Bechdel perhaps scared of overly sexed children who have also grown up in her wake? In one notable scene, Alison is imagining media that might unite the country when she and her wife must pause their sauna to stop their goats from fucking on the roof. Bechdel, meet Larry Kramer?
As Death and Taxidermy unfolds over the course of Spent’s seasons, humorous deviations between fictional Alison’s “real” life and TV fiction become more dramatic: TV Alison eats her mother, and Bruce, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, is dropped into a volcano by a dragon. The stress of having her family in the spotlight weighs on Alison. We are introduced to a fictional Trump-supporting sister, Sheila, who’s writing her own version of the events of Alison’s book that she asks Alison to edit. Sheila’s arc gestures toward a theory the real Alison Bechdel seems to have about ordinary Americans embracing MAGA ideology: Their grievances are rooted in the same systemic problems that plague everyone else. For Bechdel, most are not interested in murder, even as the policies they support effect death.
Who among her characters can help her face the future?
Bechdel’s stance must indeed be true if we are to organize a working class against fascism — we cannot believe that people are irrevocably evil. DTWOF, too, included a token conservative lesbian during the Bush years. Bechdel could be castigated for her lack of radical rigor or lauded for spending time with a real phenomenon. Sheila loves “seed art” — a monetarily thankless form of expression that earns her acclaim from mainly other folk artists and helps her form bonds with people with very different political sensibilities. Other Trumpers turn out to be just as benign, like the man at Home Depot who compliments Holly’s wood-chopping Insta videos. Left out of Spent are depictions of violent racism, police brutality, poverty, ableism, and the experiences of people who do find themselves on the wrong end of a harassment campaign, a gun, or a right-wing politician. I am left feeling unsure if Bechdel has appreciated the scale of the danger, so surrounded are we by basically empathetic humans who just need to hear a lark sing. I am unsurprised that Black lawyer Clarice or Black bookstore owner Jezanna are no longer hanging around fictional Alison. Maybe Janis doesn’t want to, either.
Meanwhile, Alison’s friends — Jewish house husband Stuart and Asian shelter director Sparrow — explore polyamory with bi Naomi from the food co-op, which is cute. Sparrow has missed women and feels electricity on the tennis court with buxom, funny, divorced Naomi. Genderqueerish Stuart has dearly wished to wear a purple strap-on and live his fantasy of being a real lesbian, and with Naomi, he finally can (Stuart, try progesterone). Through initial rockiness, they find good faith while Alison and formerly-poly Holly make snide comments. Stuart has long been one of my favorite characters in DTWOF, representing Bechdel’s knowledge of people who need queer scenes despite not being easily placed within them. His centrality here shows us that Bechdel has continued to ruminate on his role in raising the next generation. At a protest for Gaza on campus, Stuart’s child, J.R., and their companion, Badger, supply halal, vegan “overwintered parsnips with oat milk bechamel” to protesters. J.R. and Badger capture what Bechdel thinks young people do: They drop out of school, host a podcast from a yurt, help clean up after a flood, and pack mifepristone for distribution to red states.
At the end of Spent, it is Stuart who reveals the most solidarity with the youth — along with a strange, massive back tattoo of a Kropotkin quote. But revolution has yet to take real shape. For a book with chapters titled after Capital and plenty of characters involved in organizing, there isn’t much Marxist theory here. The cat reclining on a copy of Capital at the start is perhaps revealing. If there is any relationship between Bechdel’s chapter titles and their contents in Marx, it is opaque to this reviewer. The production of capital via culture is what’s at stake here: Bechdel is sorry she’s released her creations to be turned into products. She’s interested in Marx, and yet is more interested in narrative, symbols, and literary resonance than revolution; her commitments are to liberalism and a narrowly defined community. Functionally, Spent seems to have been produced to meet a deadline and make some royalties from longtime fans.
Spent’s onion-layered, clever, weird, oft-campy mostly-white autofiction isn’t useless — for one, it’s very funny as satire of a moment in time and of the particular generation Bechdel is part of. Art and representation and waves of feminist activism have not saved us from conservative revanchism: What now? When Bechdel’s gaze isn’t focused on herself, she’s a sharp, relatively empathetic observer of a lot of people, dynamics, and relationships, and she reflects a complex American cultural landscape. The problem is she has spent two decades looking inward rather than building solidarity, and it shows. Spent feels like she has glanced up and grokked that it is not the end of history after all, and something must be done — but she is scared to do it. If she’s not quite a Marxist, there is a mutual-aid-will-save-us feeling here that’s not so bad if it’s in earnest. I want to see a nonfiction work from Bechdel about queer history, activism, or real-life mutual aid next: Her true gift is synthesizing literature and capturing how people and ideas work together.
Hal Schrieve is a public librarian, author and comic artist. Ze’s book Out of Salem was long listed for the National Book Award For Young People’s Literature in 2019, and hir book Vivian’s Ghost won the Cartoonist Studio Prize in 2023. Ze lives in New York.
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