Fun Home - Comic Review

By Contributing Writer on Sunday, November 30, 2008 - 16:51

by Comicgirl - Contributing Writer

(Author: Alison Bechdel, Editor: Houghton Mifflin; available in English)

A couple of weeks ago it was my birthday. I got one of the best presents I had ever gotten: Fun Home. A family tragicomic of Alison Bechdel. My best friends wife (in Belgium gay people can get married) brought it back from her trip to America. I was ecstatic; I had read about Alison Blechdel’s work but I had never read any of it.

Fun Home is an autobiographical story about the Bechdel’s youth. It deals mainly with her life as a child, growing up with a closeted gay father. A father who had an obsession with decorating the house and, as she later finds out, with teenage boys. A father who treated his children as furniture and his furniture as children. Fun Home however doesn’t focus solely on her childhood years. Bechdel also tells about how she found out she was gay, how she came out, how she found out her father was gay… And she tells about the death of her father. Her father was killed in an ‘accident’ a few weeks after she came out of the closet. Blechdel however suspects he killed himself and that her coming out was the catalyst for the event.

Fun Home could have been a very heavy and depressing comic book. It could have focused solely on her childhood problems. It could have been a way for her to judge her father and to ask sympathy from the reader. Bechdel; however, managed to find a good equilibrium between the various aspects of the stories she’s telling. On the one hand she shows a lot of compassion for her father and she injects a lot of humour in the story (I laughed out loud a couple of times). On the other hand I really felt for the girl who grew up in a house without love. I was particularly touched by the fact that at a certain point in her life she kissed all of her stuffed animals goodnight before going to bed, because it had been a long time since anybody gave her a kiss goodnight.

The fact that Bechdel manages to write an autobiographical comic book with as many layers as it has makes it not only a lesbian classic, but also a classic that should be enjoyed outside the gay community. Fun Home is a comic book that deserves all the critical acclaim that it has received. In my opinion, it deserves a place in the autobiographical comic books section next to Maus (Art Spiegelman), Palestine (Joe Sacco) and Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi).