In this episode, Curt and Kevin put aside their capes and cowls to discuss a different kind of comic book story: Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.
In sketching a portrait of her life growing up in a small Pennsylvania town, Bechdel examines her complicated relationship with her father, Bruce, a funeral home director and high school teacher whose passion for restoring the family’s Victorian-era home underscores his emotional distance from his wife and children.
When Alison comes out to her parents as a lesbian, she soon comes to learn of her father’s own homosexuality, which lands him in legal trouble and perhaps even contributes to his sudden death at the age of 44, which Bechdel considers to be a suicide.
Can Alison come to terms with her father’s death, his past, and his detached relationship with her? And can her award-winning memoir make its own way in the world, to that obsessively decorated “fun home” known as … The Comics Canon?
Things Discussed in This Episode:
- Fun Home: the Broadway musical
- The Mighty Hercules and The Addams Family
- From Hell
- Thinking about your parents having sex
- Timely references to both sports and politics
- Does this podcast pass The Bechdel Test?
Join us in two weeks as we don our superhero tights once again and return to Gotham City to discuss Batman: The Killing Joke!
Until then, please rate us on iTunes, send us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook, and we may read your comments in an upcoming episode. And as always, thanks for listening!