You can read "Fun Home" in a sitting, or get lost in the pictures within the pictures on its pages. She has obviously spent years getting this memoir right, and it shows. Big words, too! In 232 pages this memoir sent me to the dictionary five separate times (to look up "bargeboard," "buss," "scutwork," "humectant" and "perseverated").Ī comic book for lovers of words! Bechdel's rich language and precise images combine to create a lush piece of work - a memoir where concision and detail are melded for maximum, obsessive density. But "Fun Home" quietly succeeds in telling a story, not only through well-crafted images but through words that are equally revealing and well chosen. Very few cartoonists can also write - or, if they can, they manage only to hit a few familiar notes. Generally this is where graphic narratives stumble. Crumb with a seriousness, emotional complexity and innovation completely its own. It is a pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics and memoir) in multiple new directions, with panels that combine the detail and technical proficiency of R. If the theoretical value of a picture is still holding steady at a thousand words, then Alison Bechdel's slim yet Proustian graphic memoir, "Fun Home," must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced.
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