Biography

Alison Bechdel was born on September 10^th 1960 in Lock Haven Pennsylvania. She lived there with her father, mother and two brothers. Her family owned and operated a funeral home or what her and her brothers would call the “Fun Home.” She graduated from Oberlin College, which is a liberal arts college in Ohio and then moved to New York City. There she applied to many art schools but was rejected and finally found work in various publishing houses. She always loved drawing but never really saw it as a career.

Alison grew up reading MAD Magazine, which she said was a huge influence graphically, but it wasn’t until she started reading about other gay and lesbian cartoonist who were writing about their own personal experiences that she realized that she could do that too. So in 1983 Alison started writing her own comic strip called “Dykes to Watch Out For,” at first that comic strip didn’t have an ongoing storyline or characters until 1987 when she created Mo and her friends and to this day she has been continuously writing comic strips about them. Toward the late nineties was when she started to write her autobiographical tragicomic “Fun Home” and seven years later in 2006 it was published. Currently Alison lives in Vermont and is working on her another graphic memoir, which focuses more on her relationships and she also is active on her on website titled after her comic strip, Dykes to Watch out For.