Broken Frontier

I just finished rereading The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel, which collects most of the strips from her classic comic of lesbian culture and politics. It is a tale full of wit and insight of how the lives of a group of gay women and the community they belong to changes over the course of decades.

Unlike many other drama strips, Dykes to Watch Out For strips rarely take place directly after each other. Often they are self-contained snippets from the characters' lives. Problems certainly cross- over, but the strips often take place days or even weeks apart. Because of that, time passes for the characters at around the same speed as in the real world and reading the strip is like flipping through a scrap book, musing over particular events, gazing at individual photos, though in this case they also have speech bubbles attached.

It is an experience only possible with comic books. Novels lack the visual elements to produce such a “scrap book” experience that appeals to the eyes, and movies and television lack the ability to reliably dwell on particular images or flip back and forth between scenes, as the “rewind” and “pause” buttons are often too unwieldy for such an exercise. It creates an intimacy of experience, a compassionate voyeurism from studying and sympathizing with the private moments of individuals, also seen in other comics such as Bechdel's own Fun Home, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, and the works of Chester Brown.

Each storytelling medium has its own strengths and weaknesses, and the comic book's ability to juxtapose images and words can create potent experiences for the reader and allow them to touch the lives of characters in a way not otherwise available.