By D. Lynn Smith

A while back, Fun Home won the Tony for best musical. And guess what? It’s based on a graphic novel written by Alison Bechdel. Here is what Fun Home is all about…

“In this groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father. In her hands, personal history becomes a work of amazing subtlety and power, written with controlled force and enlivened with humor, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail.

Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the “Fun Home.” It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.”

In this world where superheroes dominate the cinema, it is exhilarating to see a graphic novel about a very real woman in a very real relationship garner so much public attention and accolades. It also lends credence to the fact that graphic novels aren’t just for kids, but are great reading for everyone. However, reading a graphic novel is not the same as reading a prose novel.

The other day, a friend of mine who had asked for copies of Gates of Midnight, but was not a comic book reader, told me he had a very difficult time reading the comic until he remembered what I had told him, the story isn’t told by the words, it’s told by the art. Once he remembered that, he went back and was able to enjoy the comic, though it was a lot slower reading than he expected.

Alison Bechdel is quoted as saying, “It’s very important for me that people be able to read the images in the same kind of gradually unfolding way as they’re reading the text. I don’t like pictures that don’t have information in them. I want pictures that you have to read, that you have to decode, that take time, that you can get lost in. Otherwise what’s the point?”

Graphic novels and comics are an art form that takes time to appreciate. It also takes time to learn how to read them in order to catch every nuance, every bit of storytelling on the page. Whenever I hear someone say that they don’t read comics because they don’t have the depth of story as a short story or a novel, I have to think that they simply haven’t taken the time to learn to read the art as well as the words.

Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Bitch Planet is a great example of the art telling the story. Bitch Planet is a women-in-prison sci-fi exploitation riff. Any woman who is noncompliant is sentenced to Bitch Planet. It also happens to be the place… “…where inconvenient women are disappeared.” It is unapologetically feminist and great fun to read.

In issue #2, artist Valentine de Landro draws three women running and talking. One woman falls behind. The action in the foreground revolves around the two women as they keep running; this is where the dialog happens. But in the background a guard is attacking the third woman. As each panel progresses, there are more guards and more inmates joining the fray. While we get important information from the women in the foreground, a full-blown prison riot erupts in the background.

So if you’re only reading the words, you’ll completely miss the prison riot, which adds loads of layers to the story, and is important in showing just how brutal Bitch Planet really is.

I’m still working on my ability to write layered stories like this. But when I read something like Fun Home or Bitch Planet, I’m inspired to keep working on my craft in order to bring a richer reading experience to Gates of Midnight.

On a side note, I highly recommend Bitch Planet not just for the awesome, in-your-face, no-holds-barred story, but also for the excellent essays included in each issue.