a lot, a little, scratching the surface.

i felt fascinated and at times overwhelmed by the ways bechdel transforms certain literary devices into artistic ones, making the art read as texts, in a certain way. it was really interesting to me in this graphic memoir how bechdel uses specific visual cues continuously as sort-of visual metaphors throughout. we continuously see things like the pledge can, the sunbelt bread logo, the quisp cereal, obelisks, crystal liquor bottles, the grease stain on her grandma's bed, etc. many of these (the obelisks and pledge can in particular) also seem to act as visual synecdoches (the pledge can standing for the whole of her father's obsessive attention to cleanliness and order. the obelisks standing for his secret homosexuality and fixation on men). the sunbelt bread, not so much a synecdoche, but a foreshadowing strategy-- bechdel's dad eventually gets hit and killed by a sunbelt truck. also, it occurred to me that these obsessive, small inclusions cycle back to the way sense memory works. though she can't "describe" a smell and chooses not to write out that the sunbelt bread was always in the house-- she shows/draws the pledge spray, which i'm sure her house reeked of, she shows/draws the quisp cereal and brand of bread they used. she conjures the sensory presence of these items, drawing things that cue our senses to kick in. these visual cues/metaphors/etc set the scene for this life (or these intersecting lives) in this home. while the written text is meditative, retrospective, speculative, explanatory, the visual text holds the craft of making, in a way. maybe the only way she could possibly attempt to show EVERYTHING and hint at the convolution of EVERYTHING coming together was through the interplay of the written and the visual. she was, in this way, able to embed so much more and plant so many cues to the way things were or would come to pass.

it was also so interesting to me how she uses the visual to represent textual metaphors and textual comparisons to the literary. books litter the pages of this memoir. she references literature via image. often not stated in the text, just shown in the drawings. she doesn't always explicitly explain how the books she depicts in her images corollate back or weave a more complicated portrait of her father or herself, she just plants the seeds. anna karenina, the nude by kenneth clark, the stones of venice, a happy death by camus, the tin drum, the addams family, grimms fairy tales, the myth of sisyphus, sappho was a right-on woman, the sun also rises, portrait of a lady, the great gatsby, zelda, remembrance of things past, etc etc. all of these are chosen to particularly relate to the specific moment we see the characters in. the specific books she chooses often delineate a particular time in the character's life and seek to reinforce something about their life and how they are influenced at that particular time. of course bruce would be handing a copy of gatsby to roy when he is first beginning to court him. of course sappho was a right-on woman would be strewn across alison's dorm room floor as she talks to her mom on the phone re: her coming out letter.

i also was interested in how she often drew newspaper front pages to contextualize and set us in a specific time, while also changing perspective. these headlines gave us insight into the textured world swimming around this particular family's history, how they all both are and are not interacting with the wider cultural/political/national atmosphere. i also was interested in the choices she made with this, what headlines she chose to highlight. the southwest heatwave w/ "wheat in trouble" on pg 27 (another loose connection to sunbelt?) and the hyde amendment passing along with headlines concerning nixon and bush... though we are mainly existing in the realm of this house and the small radius of life they had in pennsylvania, she's retroactively going back and situating us within the outer environment that is most definitely helping to shape their existence.

perspective is really interesting throughout this memoir, also. for the most part, though you would probably call the written text "first person," the visual text's point of view often is from far away, looking in at the family, observatory and at a distance, rather than existing right alongside the characters. we get a lot of panorama-type shots, a lot of aerial ones.. we even zoom out as far as the maps on page 30-31. we often see bruce in frames observing and overlooking the family, as if he is observing his work, his art (page 12-13, 21). he is presiding over everyone/everything, much like sandell's father in the impostor's daughter. in these scenes, he's often in dark silhouette.

something about the perspective is a little jarring at times... because she often moves us to experience events in the time that they are occurring, along with the character that is experiencing it, yet there's an upsetting dissociative feeling that accompanies the representation. an instance of this in particular is the scene in bruce's mortician's office when he calls her in (page 44). something about the angles bechdel draws these frames from/ the way that she is in silhouette in the first frame, then there's a closeup of his compartmentalized body (just the torso and genitals) then a shot coming from behind bruce's head, then the handing over of the scissors over his body, then back to a shot coming from behind bruce's head as alison leaves... alll produce this disconnected/dissociated feeling, which coincides with how she actually experienced the event emotionally, but still... disturbing effect. it makes sense, though, given bechdel's admission of emotional detachment and desensitization, a trait that exists in reappears in many of the characters of this family. she also continues to replay scenes from different angles and perspectives, often when she is coming to different possible conclusions about the event. this happens with her dad's death. we get the scenes of him just before getting hit by the truck and a few days prior to his death from various angles, peppered throughout the book. each time it is different and each time she is unpacking another possibility or link to what could've happened.

wow, this is only me expanding on about half-a-page of my notes (so many more pages of notes!!) and i've barely said anything about anything.

one thing i wanna broadly mention/kinda touch on before i sign off... bechdel constantly draws (literally DRAWS and also makes) comparisons and divergences (between herself and her father, between her mother and father, etc). i was sooo intrigued by what was going on visually/textually on pages 94-101 re: their inverted queer identities and transposed masculinities. the framing and perspective in these scenes are particularly interesting. on 94 in the 3rd panel, we have this broad view of roy entering the scene (with a small smile), alison in the middle excited to see him, and her dad on the far right with her brothers, almost turned away, expression unclear. so interesting to see her pitted in the middle of them because it says a lot about her own relationship to masculinity. she is pulled in both directions-- to roy's somewhat sweet burliness and her father's effete sissiness. "butch" is the middle...? the next page, too, draws corrolations between roy and the rugged cowboy simply by way of the two frames existing next to each other (alison admiring roy on the left and alison admiring the cowboy on tv on the right). then we get this split scene on the bottom of alison looking over to her dad fiddling with flowers in the other room as she watches a cowboy shootout. SO MUCH GOING ON AROUND MASCULINITIES. and also so much convergence. because all of these hegemonic representations of (hyper)masculinity are also often really homoerotic. and lgbtq folks claim/queer "all-american" cultural reps of men all the time (cowboys, musclemen, etc etc).

ummm, also, i think there's just sooo much going on around bruce's gayness in this. i feel like, in some ways, bechdel moves us to think critically about his identity in connection to his time and placement. in a sense, his world was his home and then the school he worked at. she kinda leads us to ask...in his rural context, what were his options for cruising? not to excuse the fact that he preyed on teenage boys, obviously. but he did pass judgment on/draw a line between himself and the chickenhawks... more on this later.