Career
Bechdel moved to New York City and applied to many art schools but was rejected and worked in a number of office jobs in the publishing industry.
She began Dykes to Watch Out For as a single drawing labeled "Marianne, dissatisfied with the morning brew: Dykes to Watch Out For, plate no. 27". An acquaintance recommended she send her work to Womannews, a feminist newspaper, which published her first work in its June 1983 issue. Bechdel gradually moved from her early single-panel drawings to multi-paneled strips. After a year, other outlets began running the strip.
In the first years, Dykes to Watch Out For consisted of unconnected strips without a regular cast or serialized storyline. However, its structure eventually evolved into a focus on following a set group of lesbian characters. In 1986 Firebrand Books published a collection of the strips to date. In 1987 Bechdel introduced her regular characters, Mo and her friends, while living in St. Paul, Minnesota. Dykes to Watch Out For is the origin of the so-called "Bechdel test". In 1988, she began a short-lived page-length strip about the staff of a queer newspaper, titled "Servants to the Cause", for The Advocate. Bechdel has also written and drawn autobiographical strips and has done illustrations for magazines and websites. She became a full-time cartoonist in 1990 and later moved near Burlington, Vermont. She currently resides in Bolton, Vermont. Bechdel is the Mellon Residential Fellow for Arts and Practice at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center at the University of Chicago.
In November 2006 Bechdel was invited to sit on the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.
Read more about this topic: Alison Bechdel
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