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In his famous metacomic Understanding Comics , Scott McCloud quotes Will Eisner to
define comics as “sequential art” (5). To be a comic, McCloud says, means that you have a
sequence of at least two images, between which something happens. The narrative of a comic
book is carried along by the reader's interpretation of what happens in the “gutter” between these
two images. Although certainly a comic, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home doesn't always seem to fit
this definition. Fun Home is a memoir that is heavily dependent on the written word. Bechdel's
narration provides her memories and reflections, while the comic panels usually serve to
illustrate her point rather than move the story along. If a reader was given only the text, they
would still get told the story of her father's death and her attempt to understand it. Why, then,
does she expend so much time and effort drawing over 200 pages of pictures? And why use the
medium of comics? Would Bechdel have been able to get the same effect using photographs
from her childhood as illustrations to a novel rather than painstakingly drawing everything over
again as sequential art? What do comics and cartooning bring to the memoir that photographs
cannot? Douglas Wolk points out in Reading Comics that drawings in comics are subjective.
Using as his example a panel by Will Eisner he says
you know that what you're seeing represents a tenement... and you believe on some level that it's real... but you also understand that you're not seeing an actual building or abuilding you could have seen unaided by the drawing. What you're looking at is a manifestation of Eisner's style, a personal interpretation of what that sort of building looks like (Wolk, 118). Comics allow for cartooning, a drawing style that “indicates that... [the] stories are subjective interpretations of... observations” (121). Cartooning allows Bechdel to use her interpretation of events in her pictures as well as her words. The words provide her view of past events as she writes in the present, while the images show us what she thought of events at the time, how she remembers seeing them, and how the reader should interpret her words. The unique medium of comics produces a rich environment deeply personal to Bechdel, fusing past and present, and opening up the memoir to further interpretation
from the reader as no other medium could. McCloud also introduces the idea that the iconographic nature of comics makes it easier for the reader to relate to them. He says that instead of maintaining a detailed sense of our own body, we merely have “a sense of shape... something as simple and as basic as a cartoon... when you enter the world of the cartoon – you see yourself” (McCloud 36). He proposes that one of the reasons comics are so effective in entertaining people is that they make it easy to see oneself as the hero, and therefore are easy to relate to. Bechdel's panels are drawn in a 'realistic' style in that they clearly and consistently portray her family and its surroundings. However the drawings are simplified. This is easy to see by contrasting her cartoon self with the much more realistic reproductions of photographs included in the story. The iconographic art allows the reader to bring themselves into the experience. The reader is invited to look at the pictures representing past events and relate to them. This audience interaction adds another layer of interpretation. First there is the Bechdel of the past whose interpretation of events is revealed in the way they appear in pictures. Then the Bechdel of the present describes her interpretation in words, and finally the audience moves through both of these, interpreting the mixture and adding their own meanings to the already rich memoir. The entire memoir is overwritten with interpretation through the comic medium. Bechdel's words betray an ever changing interpretation of events as she offers different possible reasons for a given sequence of images. For example she repeatedly questions the motives behind her father's death. All she knows for sure is that he was hit by a semi while crossing the road, but each time she mentions her father's death the words and the pictures bring us to a different understanding of how she feels and thinks about the occurrence. The first time it is brought up, she mentions it in passing. Text over a sequence of panels showing a young Bechdel driving a lawnmower with her father in the passenger's seat says “It's true that he didn't kill himself until I was nearly twenty”, blithely asserting that his death was suicide (23). Four pages later she contradicts this, and against a montage of her own father's funereal, explains that “no one knew it wasn't an accident” (27). This could be interpreted two ways. It could be that she knows it was suicide, but nobody at the funeral knew, or it could be that it was an accident and they have no proof
the freehand panel borders and the crosshatched photographs, to typed letters and dictionary entries, everything that appears in the comic book has been meticulously copied by hand. Even the text of the narration contains small changes from letter to letter, evidence that she wrote it herself rather than typeset it. This is certainly not a necessity or a convenience. It takes a lot of time and is easily avoided using a computer, so the decision must have been a very conscious one on the part of Bechdel. Wolk suggests the “wobble” in her hand drawn lines is “a deliberate gesture to soften the hyper-controlled precision of her drawings, as well as a nod to her first influence, Robert Crumb” ( Wolk, 361). Earlier in his book Wolk mentions that artists such as Crumb went against the mainstream by “drawing their panel borders freehand, instead of with a straightedge... [as] a way of declaring that everything on the page was the work of their hand” (40). Bechdel uses this technique to imprint the book with her personal style. This would be impossible to do without a comic book. Unlike the cold, impersonal feel of a typset novel or the stiff reality of snapshots, the comic book overflows with individuality. It gives Bechdel the creative freedom to create the version of events she believes in or wants the reader to see. Through the use of freehand cartooning, everything in Fun Home becomes Bechdel's, from the way she sees the dictionary to her parents' past. The color she uses maintains the idea of personality and reinforces the idea that this memoir is Bechdel's personal view of the world by differentiating between reality and her own memories. While Fun Home is not really in color, it is not printed in black and white either. The panels are shaded with a gray- green wash that softens their impact. Compare a page of Fun Home to Art Spiegelman's comic book Maus. Maus is entirely drawn in harsh black and white ink, creating a huge impact on the reader and imparting the feeling of the black and white morality of the time. In contrast, Fun Home has a soft, nostalgic feel to it. The color wash makes the pages feel like old sepia-toned photographs, faded with time and overexposure. The grayness reflects her indecisions about events, both what she thought of them at the time and her opinions on them now. She doesn't have a black and white view of her past. She lives in a gray area, constantly rethinking and reevaluating her own life. Her indecisions in the past are revealed in her diary entries from when she was 10 years old. Within the gray entries, she begins to insert the words
"I think", that morph into a symbol representing her lack of commitment to her words. The inserted “i think"s are highlighted in white, and give way to thick black lines obscuring entire entries. The sharp contrast of black and white highlights that the only thing she is really sure about is her own insecurity, while even simple events like making popcorn are open for interpretation. In some cases the images of the memoir are completely imagined. She illustrates her parents history from what she knows of their past. However aside from a few reproduced passport photographs, the images are all her own. She imagines the story of her parents meeting in a production of The Taming of the Shrew. Although the pictures are clear enough, her words are full of qualifiers. She says “I speculate on what attracted my father”, “my parents must have found” and “they would probably have been appalled” (Bechdel 69,70). The lack of definite language makes it clear that the images are products of her own imagination, although taken alone they would look like the truth. This is her parents as she sees them, and perhaps not as they really were. In some cases, she admits outright to fallacy. Telling the story- within-a-story of her father as a small child getting stuck in the mud, she draws a milkman, and specifies that that's how she always pictured him, even though she knows it was a mailman. The contrast between the unsure text and the clear pictures emphasize that the memoir is her life as she remembers it, but not necessarily as it really happened. In other situations she points out a bit of truth. Her mother reads aloud a poem by Wallace Stevens saying “... and the green freedom of a cockatoo upon a rug” while behind her hangs a painting of a cockatoo alighting on a branch. Bechdel points out in a caption “Honest to God, we had a painting of a cockatoo in the library” (83). In another scene describing the possibility of the semi “pass[ing] without incident”, her caption tells the reader “Yes, it really was a sunbeam bread truck” (59). These inserts of “honest to god” reality ground the story, but also remind us that the rest of it is not so clear cut. There are many details, but only some of them are definitely true. The variation between memory, possibility, lies and truths combine to run the full range of anyone's memories, half made up and half true. Cartoons allow her to draw the past with a combination of reality and imagination the way photographs or text alone wouldn't, and the vagueness of the gray shading reflects this indecisive mix of verity.
her speculations as to the sexual nature of her father's relationship to some of his students. In
discussing The Importance of Being Earnest , Bechdel proposes that within the play “illicit desire
is encoded as one character's uncontrollable gluttony” (166). The next panel shows her father
eating cucumber sandwiches being made to serve as props in the play “faster than [they] can
make them” (167). The image of their father devouring the same food as Earnest' s Algy with the
same “uncontrollable gluttony” connects him to the play's unspoken theme of homosexuality. In
the botanical themed chapter “In the shadow of young girls in flower”, her father is reading an
issue of “Wayside Gardens”, which has a picture of a ladyslipper on the back cover. The
ladyslipper is a member of the orchid family, and the Latin root of orchid (orchis) comes from
the ancient Greek word for testicle, making the panel a subtle hint at her father's homosexuality
similar to his “unabash[ed] fixation” on obelisks (OED, Bechdel 29). In the same chapter
Bechdel uses the comic panels to carry on a motif of lilacs. She tells the reader “If my father had
a favorite flower, it was the lilac” (92). Throughout the rest of the chapter, lilacs appear. They are
shown in a painting her father holds, on the storefront of “LiLac Chocolates” near her mother's
apartment, and in a vase in her father's bedroom (96, 105, 119).
The drawings also provide most of the memoir's subtle humor. As Bechdel was “comic relief in [her] parents' tragedy” the pictures provide comic relief to the weighty narration (58). Wolk describes her humor as “poker-faced hilarity”, a type of comedy which is well represented by her pictorial references to her father's death (Wolk, 361). After specifying that her father was hit by a “sunbeam bread truck”, sunbeam bread appears on a poster at the gas station, in their kitchen as her mother prepares dinner, and on the bread her father takes on their camping trip (Bechdel, 96, 67, 112). The cheery little girl on the logo provides an ironic contrast to the death it represents, resulting in a morbidly amusing reference to the event Bechdel spends so much of her memoir trying to understand. Bechdel also uses the comic to provide dual-media puns between the written words and the accompanying panels. Bechdel's description
of her reading about lesbianism and homosexuality in college is described as “stimulating but solitary” (76). The innocent, bland sentence is given a much funnier meaning by the accompanying visual double entendre, a panel of Bechdel masturbating to Delta of Venus. After describing a scene from Proust's Remembrance of Things Past where a girl sits “surrounded by jasmine, verbena, and pansies”, a caption over her father planting dogwoods puns on pansy saying “if there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust” (93). Another visual double entendre happens when a young Bechdel and her brothers stay at the Gryglewicz's for two days. A Bechdel, playing a cop, yells “Spread 'em, punks!” while behind her hangs “one of Dr. Gryglewicz's many interesting paintings of Dr. Gryglewicz” spreading her legs (160). The depth that the comic book medium brings to Fun Home is best appreciated by thoroughly analyzing a single sequence. Take for example the three pages in which Bechdel attempts to connect herself to her father's death. She is trying to find a connection, however she knows that it is mostly wishful thinking. The lack of connection is betrayed in the following three page sequence. She starts the sequence by stating “The idea that I caused his death by telling my parents I was a lesbian is perhaps illogical. Causality implies connection, contact of some kind. And however convincing they might be, you can't lay hands on a fictional character” (84). This is accompanied by a panel of Bechdel at the library door calling “dad?” to her unseen father. The use of “fictional” to describe her obviously real father is jarring. It implies many things – that he led a fictional life as a heterosexual, that he faked his role in her life and in their family, and that he interacted with people best through novels. It could also be a self referential comment that her father is no longer alive except as a fictional character in her memoir or that her supposed connection to his death is fabricated. The image reinforces this. Her father is unseen, unable to be contacted in any way. Being unseen leaves him up to interpretation. While we have no confirmation on what he is doing, we can imagine whatever suits our purpose. Throughout the rest of the three page sequence, Bechdel's narration compares her father to Fitzgerald. She explains the use of “fictional” saying “Gatsby's pristine books and my father's worn ones signify the same thing – the preference of a fiction to reality” (85). Her father, appropriately, is
