Alison Bechdel’s Next Step

In the early aughts, Alison Bechdel was a struggling cartoonist. She’d been writing and drawing her comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For—about a group of mostly lesbian friends and lovers—since 1983, building a cult following in the process. But in the 2000s, the business model that had sustained her for decades started to unravel, as the advent of the Internet reshaped the entire media landscape. Bechdel had long syndicated the series in alternative newspapers (queer ones and the humor publication Funny Times), but they began to shut down; then the lesbian feminist publisher of her collections of the strip went bankrupt in 2002. When her agent tried shopping around a Dykes collection, editors at other houses mostly passed, saying, “People don’t need this work the way they once did.”