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Alison Bechdel

Film

The Gay Bechdel Test: Why Hollywood Needs to Expand Its Representation of LGBT Characters

By Tyler Coates on

For years, I’ve enjoyed putting popular films through the Bechdel Test. Named after cartoonist Alison Bechdel, the test was introduced in her long-running comic Dykes to Watch Out For. Named “The Rule,” what became known as the Bechdel Test had three requirements: a film had to feature two named female characters, those characters had to speak to each other, and the subject of conversation had to be about something other than a man. Sounds pretty simple, right? It’s pretty astonishing how many movies fail the pretty easy test — especially in 2013. (A website that keeps track of movie releases and whether they pass the test already lists at least 38 films from 2013; only 21 pass the Bechdel test.) It got me thinking: could there be a similar test about gay characters, and how many movies would actually pass it? … Read More

Books

10 LGBT-Themed Novels That Every Student Should Read

By Emily Temple on

The California Department of Education’s new recommended reading list, which was released last week, is causing some controversy because — gasp! — it includes a handful of books with LGBT themes. Though the list, which contains over 7,800 books, recommends only 32 that fall into the “gay-themed” category, several conservative critics are saying predictably nasty things. Never mind that this list has included books with gay and transgender characters for the past ten years. Between this news and the Supreme Court marriage equality hearings, we figured it was a good time to throw in our two cents: ten novels with LGBT themes that we think every student should read. We tried to suggest a range of books, from classics to YA, but since there are so many and we can’t list them all, add your favorites in the comments. … Read More

Web

In Case You Missed It: From Famous People's Business Cards to the Next Bechdel

By Caroline Stanley on

This week on Flavorwire, we were a little more obsessed with famous people than we usually are around these parts, examining everything from their fascinating business cards to their final photographs to the evolution of their private jets. We met the people who hang out at New York’s public libraries and eight worthy successors to Alison Bechdel. We got an interesting look at some lovely burlesque performers both costumed and in the nude. … Read More

Books

8 Worthy Successors to Alison Bechdel

By Emily Temple on

So you love Alison Bechdel, but you’ve read everything she’s ever written. What’s a graphic memoir lover to do? Well, read some more, of course. Today marks the release of Nicole Georges’ engaging first graphic memoir, Calling Dr. Laura, and to mark the occasion, we’ve put together a list of worthy “successors” to… Read More

Comics

What Your Favorite Comic Says About You

By Emily Temple on

Yesterday, at long last, the paperback edition of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes hit stores. As far as we can tell, there is a certain kind of person who really goes gaga for Calvin and Hobbes — the person who as a kid loved to tromp through the forest all day and come home to read on the couch with a fat hot chocolate at night, who maybe saw things a little differently than those pesky grownups — and that got us to thinking. While being into comics already gets you into the first stage of nerdery, the stories the form brings us range from the serious to the goofball, the superhero to the realist, so there’s no real way to lump comic fans all together. So what does your favorite comic (or graphic novel, just to be inclusive) say about you? Find out after the jump — and let us know if we’ve hit the nail on the head or if you’re plotting our demise in the comments. … Read More

Theatre

Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’ Musical to Premiere in New York

By Judy Berman on

Finally, some news for fans of musical theater and comics who weren’t impressed by Julie Taymor and U2′s endless Spider-man disaster: Alison Bechdel’s genre-defining 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is about to make its stage debut. For those who aren’t familiar with its plot, the book — which happens to be one… Read More

Television

10 Graphic Novels That Would Make Awesome TV Shows

By Emily Temple on

To our delight, we recently found out that one of our favorite graphic novelists, Daniel Clowes, is working on a pilot for HBO. Though Clowes’s new TV show is apparently an original, the news got us thinking about great graphic novels that we think would be absolutely perfect for television. Note: for simplicity’s sake, we’ve excluded graphic novels that have already been made into movies (Clowes’s Ghost World, Persepolis, Watchmen) or are best known as series (Sandman, Tintin). Click through to check out which graphic novels we desperately want to see for six seasons and a movie, and then let us know which ones you’d watch on the small screen in the comments. … Read More

Books

The Books That Make Guys Swoon

By Daniel Roberts on

A couple weeks ago we posted about the books that might make you undateable — at least in the eyes of those who might, perhaps, yes, judge your romantic appeal based on the book you’re reading. (Sorry, but this is a thing that happens.) We were inspired by a Paris Review blog post about the books guys should read to attract girls. But what about the inverse? What kind of books might make a girl appealing to guys? Culled from a number of anecdotal conversations with young men that read, collated by us, here’s a sampling of books the ladies might consider sticking their noses into if they’re hoping to catch that special literary fly guy’s eye on the subway, at the bus station, in the library or around the copier room. … Read More

Books

The 10 Best Books of the Year (So Far)

By Emily Temple on

As you may have noticed from the boiling temperatures, it’s the last day of June, which means we’re pretty much halfway through the year. To mark the year’s midpoint, Amazon put together a list of their picks for the best books of the year so far, but of course we have our own ideas about which books have made the biggest splash so far. It’s been a great six months in the book world, but we’ve got some heavy-hitters coming up this fall (new books by Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, Junot Diaz and Paul Auster, just to name a few), so we’ll be interested to find out which of the books below hold on to their rankings when the year-end lists come around! Click through to read our picks for the ten best books of the first half of 2012, and let us know which you would have chosen in the comments. … Read More

Books

10 of the Best Memoirs About Mothers

By Emily Temple on

This week saw the release of cult cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s second work of non-fiction, Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama, a graphic memoir that investigates her relationship with her mother in all its fraught, tender weirdness. We’ve loved Bechdel ever since we read her 2006 memoir Fun Home, about her father’s suicide, and her newest work doesn’t disappoint — it’s at once poignant and goofy, alarming and sweet, and filled with vignettes of mother-child relations that will have you squirming with recognition, no matter who you are. After we zipped through the book, we felt a hankering for more memoirs about mothers, so in case you feel the same way thanks to a certain holiday on the horizon, we’ve collected a few of the best examples in recent memory here. Click through to check out our list, and let us know if we missed your favorite mommy memoir in the comments. … Read More