Sunday round-up

December 17th, 2006

Instead of using my reprieve from my strip deadline to do all the other work I have to do, I seem to have plunged into a blogging frenzy. But I have a few more things I want to post about, mainly a whole bunch of Fun Home stuff.

• The Times (London) said Fun Home was one of the 10 best books of 2006—books! Not “graphic books,” not “memoirs” (not that there’s anything wrong with that), just Books. Crikey! Sarah Waters’ Night Watch is number 3. Fun Home is number 10.
• Salon has posted an excerpt and an interview with me.
• Time and Entertainment Weekly have both included Fun Home in their ‘best of the year’ round-ups. I think they’re on the newsstands now.
• Medusa…I mean Amazon.com has picked FH as one of the Top 50 Books of 2006 (it’s #44 on the list), and one of the 10 best memoirs.

On another note, I finally got around to reading some of the coments on episode 501, and have a few remarks.

1. I see that Pjeannechild had my sabbatical under discussion on the blog before she emailed me about it. Sorry I missed that.
2. The library in #501 is indeed an old Carnegie library. It’s based on the Franklin library in Minneapolis. I found it on google image search, and liked the look of it. I.e., it seemed easy to draw.
3. Raffi didn’t say FTW, he said WTF. Which as far as I know means What The Fuck. (But doesn’t FTW mean “fuck the world?”) And ‘tool’ in my book is a synonym for ‘dick.’
4. I love syd’s insight about Mo’s new boss at the library perhaps being a Gay Librarian Bear.

I need to get on the threading project so your instructions for zesting oranges don’t get all buried in the theological discussions about original sin, or the nostalgic reveries about ancient computers (and ancient languages). Though I kind of like everything all mixed up together. I love the comments on this blog. If I do say so myself.

And hey, did anybody notice what happens when you push the ‘play’ button on the “Buy Alison’s Art from PSAW” button? Gahlord the webmeister made this cool little pan & zoom quasi-animation.

more Fun Home news

December 12th, 2006

Okay, I’m feeling a little perkier after finding out that Fun Home just got two really nice end-of-year mentions. One in NY Magazine–I’m on their top 10 books of 2006 list. My name occurs in the same sentence as Alice Munro’s! Really! Look. “Alice Munro came up with a new kind of memoir, and so did Alison Bechdel.”

And Salon called it one of the best debuts of 2006.

Not too shabby.

a hat and a review

December 8th, 2006

I’m still hanging out at my mom’s. We just went up in the attic to retrieve a hat from her collection. She’ll wear it tomorrow when she greets people at the County Library and Historical Museum as part of the town’s Victorian Christmas shindig. She wouldn’t let me take a picture of her until she has her whole costume on. I’ll do that tomorrow, but for now here’s a preview with me in the hat. Read the rest of this entry »