Fun Home

Title: Fun Home - A Family Tragicomic
Pictures and words: Alison Bechdel
Published: 2006 by Mariner Books
Genre: Biographical comic
Pages: 232


Another comic by Alison Bechdel, one that I've been wanting to re-read for a while, and did so after finishing The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. Fun Home is a more compact book, a memoir of Bechdel's, from early childhood to college years. This books' won several international awards, not to mention the three pages worth of praise included. And it's all well-earned.

Bechdel's family used to run a funeral home, or fun home, as they called it themselves. Her father was the funeral director, as well as an English teacher. Fun home is as much about him as it is about Alison herself; two very different people living under the same roof, and not realising how similar they were after all until it was too late.

Bechdel's art is at its best, and the subtle colouring brings yet more life to the pictures. The story jumps constantly from one time and place to another, but she carries the story so well that the reader doesn't get lost.


"I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture. My own decided preference for the unadorned and purely functional emerged early. I was Spartan to my father's Athenian. Modern to his Victorian. Butch to his nelly. Utilitarian to his aesthete. I developed a contempt for useless ornament. What function was served by the scrolls, tassels, and bric-a-brac that infested our house? If anything, they obscured function. They were embellishments in the worst sense. They were lies."


Alison Bechdel's blog, her comics and a lot of stuff on them can be found on http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/

There's also a lot more on Fun Home, said better than I could.