232 FUN HOME
- Th e fi rst part of From Hell: Th e Compleat Scripts was published in 1994 but this
series was not continued.
Th e series has won multiple awards including the 1993 Eisner Award for best
serialized story. Th e collected edition won the 2000 Comic Buyer’s Guide Award for
Favorite Reprint Graphic Album and the “prix de la critique” at the 2001 Angoulême
International Comics Festival. In 2001, a movie adaptation was released, directed by
Albert and Allen Hughes and starring Johnny Depp and Heather Graham, though this
adaptation diff ers substantially from the graphic novel (Booker 2007, 99–107).
Selected Bibliography: Booker, M. Keith. “May Contain Graphic Material”: Comic Books,
Graphic Novels, and Film. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007; Round, Julia. “ ‘Be vewy vewy quiet.
We’re hunting Wippers.’ A Barthesian Analysis of the Construction of Fact and Fiction in
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell .” In Out of the Gutter: Reading Comic Books and
Graphic Novels. J. Goggin and D. Hassler-Forest, eds. New York: McFarland & Co, 2010.
Julia Round
FUN HOME. Th is 232-page autobiographical graphic novel by Alison Bechdel was
published in 2006 by Houghton Miffl in. Bechdel is known for her bi-weekly comic strip
Dykes to Watch Out For , chronicling the lives of a community of lesbians as they cope
with personal and political events. Th is strip has been published since 1983 in alterna-
tive and gay newspapers. Fun Home , in a departure of the work she has done on her strip,
is a meticulously crafted story depicting her childhood and early adult years after the
death of her father, Bruce Bechdel, in 1980. In unraveling the truth of her father’s story,
whose sexual orientation was “outed” to her at the same time of her “coming-out,” Bech-
del constructs an important, award-winning story about her search for father and self.
Told in seven chapters, Bechdel intertwines the journeys of the mythic Greek
inventor, Daedalus, and James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom. Like Daedalus, Bechdel’s father
has created a maze of documents and memories which Bechdel seeks to uncover. She,
herself, toys with diff erent roles in relation to her father. Is she Icarus, doomed to fall
because of her father’s invention or Stephen Dedalus, seeking a father fi gure?
Bechdel masterfully reveals all the secrets of her father’s life to the reader in the fi rst
two chapters of the story, turning and twisting the story like the famous Greek labyrinth.
After initial depictions about her emotional distance from her father and the stifl ing en-
vironment of the Victorian décor about her, she reveals that her father is gay on page 17
and then at the end of the fi rst chapter, she mentions that he has died—most likely a
suicide. In the second chapter, she discloses that her house was actually a funeral parlor
and her father a part-time mortician. Th ough these events have larger ramifi cations on
her formative years, they are mentioned casually, almost like an afterthought. Despite the
confessional nature of the autobiographical genre, Bechdel’s text is guarded and reserved.
Self-consciously literary, Bechdel creates a character of herself that interacts better
with text than with people. In her own coming-out story, unsurprisingly, she fi nds
answers to her feeling through textual evidence from Wilde, Colette, and other literary
fi gures. It is only then that she can create a public persona to interact with her friends
