Customer Reviews

The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For

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Whether you've been anxiously awaiting the next installment after Invasion of the Dykes to Watch Out For, or have lost track of our favorite lesbian heriones and want to get caught up, this is the book for you.

Hardcore fans will be delighted to see that we have an entire new book's worth of fresh, unpublished comics to get us up to date. I looked at how many comics each of the previous books has had, and we have an equal amount of new content in this one. But, for only a little bit extra, you get this thick, glorious retrospective which takes us through the entire series, giving us clips and the best highlights from over the years.

If you missed the last couple books - no worries - this will catch you up enough to enjoy the latest comics at the end. And if you've read everything and just want the latest book - you won't be disappointed with everything else included. I've read every book multiple times, and I enjoyed reading the entire thing as a lead-up to the new comics at the end.

Bechdel is my number one favorite cartoonist ever, and I'm not even a lesbian - I just find her characters are so human and so interesting that I connect with their lives deeply.

So if you read Fun House and aren't sure if you might like to move on to this series, I'd encourage you to pick up this book and give it a try.

And there they are on pages 76-77, the first DTWOF strips I ever saw. They were in a student run women's paper in the Fall of 1991, I had just arrived at the university and my life was about to change for the better. Therefore, it's impossible for me to be completely objective when I talk about this strip and its brilliant creator (channeler?), Alison Bechdel. At first I didn't know what to make of the strip - I feel like I walked through my first two decades in a haze because I was not used to a comic strip dramedy. It didn't take me long to fall in love with it. I bought all the collections that were available at the time (three books!), saw Bechdel's slide show when she came around to my school and even wrote her a letter - and she responded. I still have that letter.

It's great to see so many strips reproduced here, forming a running narrative of twenty years in the lives of the characters. Not all of the strips are here nor are the nifty little supplements that the older books included but for the first time reader, I don't think they'll feel the loss. They can also go and seek out some of the older books for completion.

This is one of the best graphic arts collections of the year.

Some books you read and pass along; some books you read and keep; the best books are those that you read, keep, and buy copy after copy of to ensure that EVERYONE you know reads them too.

You may not have been there all along, grabbing the fortnightly alternative paper from the top of the jukebox and leafing through it to see if a new episode of DTWOF had appeared - reading it with glee whilst ignoring the offer of the strikingly good-looking (YOUR GENDER HERE) to buy you a drink - but now you have your chance. Catch up. Read it straight through, or dip in again and again. It's the counterculture FRIENDS: You'll never get tired of DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR.

Buy at least two copies, all right? And make not just your own but also someone else's Yuletide gay.

You can run out of superlatives trying to do justice to this compilation, just wonderful ! ...buy it

Excellent! If you are a fan of Alison Bechdel, then this book is essential. Although some of the strips are not included, you can still follow the Adventures of Mo and her friends. It is definitely THE book to buy. Hardcover and only US$[...]. The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For

I'm halfway through Essential Dykes and looking forward to the reading every evening. I'm totally hooked on the lives of Mo, Toni, Lois and the others. Laughing a lot, especially about Clarice's and Toni's struggling with motherhood, since I'm in the middle of it myself. As a non-American, I'm happy to follow most of the American politics stuff, it is not too detailed. I started reading Bechdel's Fun Home and friends recommended Essential Dykes. The only thing that is bothering me is the thought of all the material I'm missing, buying this compilation. Probably I will end up with all the eleven separate volumes as well...

Alison Bechdel, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008)

The best thing about The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, a compilation of, well, a whole lotta years of Bechdel's groundbreaking comic strip, is watching it grow. Bechdel's intro gives us insight into the very early days of the strip, back when it was still vague and unformed, then the book itself kicks in once the strip has settled on its original main characters: the neurotic Mo (and if you ever wondered how autobiographical Mo is, you'll wonder afresh after seeing the similarities between Mo in the later drawings and Bechdel's self-portraits in the intro), promiscuous co-worker Lois, and Lois' roommate Sparrow. At the beginning of the book, it's still a pretty straight gag strip, but by the time we hit page fifty, it's morphed into what it's been for the past twenty years: a serial about these (and many other) characters. Bechdel went, in the space of a few years, from "hey, a comic strip about lesbians would be pretty cool" to "hey, this should be a comic strip about lesbians". (For those of you reading this on Amazon, who still refuse to allow HTML in reviews, the "about" in the second set of quotes there is italicized.) And then... magic happens. Our characters start becoming more fleshed-out. Previously minor entities (like Mo and Lois' boss) start getting storylines of their own. And most importantly, the characters start changing with the times. (And anything more I say about that would, obviously, be spoiler-laden.)

This is a chronicle of a darn good comic strip. I would have preferred a complete, instead of an essential, probably broken into two volumes, but what's here is very well worth reading, especially if you've never been exposed to the strip before. It's great stuff. *** ½

I came to this work after becoming a fan of Bechdel from her fantastic graphic novel: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. The talent in that book did not come forth in a vacuum, but instead the author honed her skills over many years of writing the comic collected here. In the 'Essential' anthology, a large percentage of the entire run of the DTWOF is pulled and presented in serial order. The reader is treated to seeing the main character, Mo, and her circle grow and change over twenty-five years of existence.

It is a treat, as I said, since Bechdel represents lesbians not as some exotic other for heterosexual consumption, but as real people. As I told my wife when I was reading it, "It's like the L word but in cartoon form, and with real people." The characters are real people, encountering life without the prime identifier of their identity as 'lesbian'.

Unfortunately, even with the success of her memoir, the strip that Bechdel cut her teeth on and told her story with seems marginalized. It is a shame because her work is smart, left-leaning, insightful, well-written and engagingly drawn. The only knock on the stories is that sometimes, in a cover-to cover read, the main character can become too neurotic for this reader and another character, Sparrow, seems underdeveloped. Otherwise, it is a wonderful universe to visit.

Beginning in the mid-'80s, long before creating the pivotal work Fun Home, Alison Bechdel began chronicling the lives and loves of a group of lesbians in a groundbreaking comic strip. Distributed mostly to gay newspapers around the country, Dykes to Watch Out For became a sensation. It can be described as a soap opera, but it's more reality-based than that. In fact, it's about as true to life as a comic can get, although it's decidedly fiction.

Dykes to Watch Out For centers around Mo, a delightfully funny and painfully observant witness of the human condition. Her group of friends includes Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, and Clarice. That cast changed and evolved throughout the series' two and a half decades, much as the landscape did. Therein lies the most compelling strength of The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. Read through it and see an epic documentary of gay life in the United States unfold. Some things have changed greatly over the years, and some not so much. But watching the characters live and age in real time is both fascinating and perplexing.

Like many comic strips, Dykes to Watch Out For is interesting to read in its entirety, especially considering how it lends itself to sporadic reading, which is essentially what this collection entails. This volume culls some of the best moments and storylines from the strip's entire history. Watching the characters go through so many commonplace events, sometimes as banal as switching jobs, is fascinating in Bechdel's hands. She's got a masterly touch, which she demonstrated in Fun Home. Her talent lies in her rich subtlety, sometimes so understated it's heartbreaking. (To be sure, there's plenty of over-the-top fun in Dykes to Watch Out For as well, and it can be bawdy and raunchy with the best of 'em.)

Mo and Co. are a delightful group to get to know and spend a lot of time with. They didn't stick around for 25 years for nothing.

-- John Hogan

Unlike most other comic-compilations, this shouldn't be flipped through in one sitting. There's simply too much: politics, relationships, psychology, emotions, and more. Pick a page, read, then give yourself time to digest; you'll enjoy it once it's percolated awhile. And that's the HUGE difference between this comic and most other mainstream strips. These are characters who REALLY think! (and in Mo's case, way, way too much). Intellectual, political, philosophical, and of course analytical, you'll be thinking, as well as laughing, for days after reading a single strip. About your own relationships, about how the wold could be different, about how different yet alike people are. But again, it's definitely a collection to be "sipped" rather than "gulped".