A Family Tragicomic

It took an afternoon locked out of my apartment to get me to walk the twenty minutes to Quimby's. I'm glad I did because I happened upon Alison Bechdel's new comic Fun Home.

Here's a little blurb about it from Publisher's Weekly: This autobiography by the author of the long-running strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, deals with her childhood with a closeted gay father, who was an English teacher and proprietor of the local funeral parlor. Fun Home refers both to the funeral parlor, where he put makeup on the corpses and arranged the flowers, and the family's meticulously restored gothic revival house, filled with gilt and lace, where he liked to imagine himself a 19th-century aristocrat.

It is amazing. The art, my god, the writing. I'm totally in love with it and am taking my time with it, pouring over every panel, gesture and word balloon.