Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home uses family photographs and fictional techniques to interpret her relationship with her father. Bechdel employs techniques like crosshatching, bold lines, and stark black and white to convey intimate moments and the duality of her father's personality. The juxtaposition of photographs and comics allows Bechdel to make truth claims about her family history and survival. Like Bechdel, Art Spiegelman also used photographs in his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus to symbolize hope and human connections between the past and present.

1. Looking at
Photographs:
Memories
Open for
Interpretation

2. “Comics echo the way the brain works. People
think in iconographic images, not in holograms,
and people think in bursts of language, not in
paragraphs”- Art Spiegelman
• Born February 15, 1948
• Studied art and philosophy at
• Harpur College before becoming
part of the underground comix
subculture of the 1960s and 1970s
• 1965-1987 created Wacky
Packages and Garbage Pail Kids
• 1980 founded RAW magazine with
his wife Francoise Mouly
• Maus originally serialized in the
pages of Raw
• 1992 won the Pulitzer Prize for
Maus
• 2004 In the Shadows of No Towers
• 2011 won the Grand Prix at the
Angoulême International Comics
Festival

3. “ I employ these allusions to James and
Fitzgerald not only as descriptive devices,
but because my parents are most real to me
in fictional terms” – Alison Bechdel
• Born September 10, 1960
• 1981 graduates from Oberlin
College with a B.A.
• 1983 creates Dykes to Watch Out
For a comic strip that ran for 25
years in a variety of alternative
newspapers
• 2008 anthologized in book form
entitled The Essential Dykes to
Watch Out For
• 2006 Fun Home: A Family
Tragicomic published
• 2012 Are You My Mother? A Comic
Drama published
• 2014 awarded the MacArthur
Fellows “Genius” Award
• 2015 FunHome debuts on
Broadway
• Earns 12 Tony Nominations
• Wins 5 Tony Awards

4. “Elements omitted from a work of art are as much a part of that work as
those included” (McCloud 82)

6. Bold and Solid Lines
Visual starkness
Dark bold lines
Emphases on characters in the
foreground of the frame
Use of closure

7. A Happy Death
Truth can be open to interpretation through juxtaposition of two images

8. Recreation of Family Photographs

9. Family
Photographs

10. Conveying an Intimate
Moment
Crosshatching
bold lines
large horizontal panel
One side of his face is darkened by
shadow another by light
The duality of her father’s
personality

11. Bold Dark lines Stark Black and White

14. Photos create emotional connections

15. Juxtaposition
Using real photographs to make a
truth claim about survival
Human connections to the past and
the present
A symbol of hope

17. Works Cited
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: First Mariner Books, 2006
Chute, Hillary L. “Materializing Memory”. Graphic Women Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (2010) : 95-134.
Dean-Ruzicka, Rachel. “Mourning and Melancholia in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic”. 2013. 2 May
2015
Elmwood, Victoria A. “Happy, Happy, Ever After: The Transformation of Trauma between the Generations in Art
Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale”. Biography (2004) :691-720.
Hirsch, Marianne. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory”. Gender and the Politics of Subjectivity
(1992-1993): 3-29
Lemberg, Jennifer. “Closing the Gap in Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home”. Women’s Studies Quarterly (2008): 129-140.
Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus. New York: Pantheon, 1973