Read two stories from The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For:

Have Yourself a High Def Little Christmas

Notes on Camp

YOU MIGHT recognise Alison Bechdel's name because her graphic memoir Fun Home was the surprise hit of 2006, winning prizes and praise on both sides of the Atlantic. Or you might know her as the most skilled and intelligent female cartoonist of her generation, creator of the syndicated strip Dykes to Watch Out For. This beautifully drawn, long-running soap opera about American lesbians has previously been collected in such mini-volumes as Spawn of the Dykes to Watch Out For (in which Toni and Clarice become mothers) and Post-Dykes to Watch Out For (where Lois experiments with drag) and now, finally, the whole lot is available in one handsome book.

The strip is radical because it's about the way lesbians really live. Not all man-hating and head-shaving, but quite a bit of shopping, gossiping, child-rearing and fun-having, and this is what makes it so palatable to non-lesbians. Although palatable is an understatement - to read some is to embark on an immediate and desperate hunt for more. Quite simply, her characters and the town they live in, with its independent bookshop, silly vegan restaurant, housing co-op and university, are addictive. I started on the strips 15 years ago as a teenage lesbian manqué, and now I watch my sensible lawyer husband stay up until 2am, unable to stop reading them. And that's not because there's anything there that might be titillating to straight men. Far from it. The dykes' sex lives are as fraught with tiredness, boredom, incompatibility and infidelity as the next person's. And when they do get it on, the chances are that things will come to an abrupt halt when one of their children walks in.

You see, lesbians are normal. Even Stuart, the partner of bisexual-lesbian Sparrow is, in his way, an ordinary member of the tribe. He's not the only man in Dykes but the main characters are, of course, women, and they've been together through thick and thin, weathering all the changes that not only the gay scene but the world at large has been through since the strip began in the 1980s.

As much as this imagined community is a refuge for many of Bechdel's readers, it is anything but escapist. Everyone in it is concerned with current affairs (and no, they're not all Democrats), and the one who has emerged as the protagonist, Mo, is so tortured by the wrongs of US foreign policy, women's rights, the environment, carnivorism and a whole lot else besides, that even her super-cerebral professor girlfriend, Sydney, has to tell her to shut up sometimes (especially when she's busy preparing a paper on The Phallus Unzipped: Clinton's Dick and the Detumescence of Oppositional Subjectivity (1998) or Critical Foreplay and the Seduction of Theory (2007)). And as it comes right up to 2008, there's plenty of Obamamania too.

Dykes is so much more than a comic strip. It is a lovingly crafted archive of the seismic changes that have been wrought in Western society over the past two decades. Wars, elections and battles for equal rights have been fought on its pages. The homogenisation of the high street is writ large in the closure of Madwimmin books in the face of competition from “Bunns & Noodle” and “medusa.com”. Yet through it all, the support and good humour of a pack of friends and lovers who have known each other since college holds everything together. These women - Mo, Lois, Ginger, Sparrow, Toni and Clarice - are real American heroines. They are kind, thoughtful, flawed, funny, fat, thin, black, white, sexy, tired, happy, sad, healthy, sick people trying to do their best in a brave new world. They are true pioneers and so is their incomparable creator. No one comes close to Alison Bechdel and any chronicler of women's lives, gay or straight, would be a fool to try.

The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
Jonathan Cape, £16.99 Buy the book

Read Alison Bechdel's blog and see the strips at www.dykestowatchoutfor.com

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