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An overcast sky. On the inky waters of the Patapsco River in Baltimore's inner harbor, a fuzzy teacup-sized duckling paddles distractedly far from shore with no mother in sight. What if its mother were never to return, I worry, on my early morning walk.
René Magritte's surreal painting La réponse imprevu of 1933, recently on view at New York's Museum of Modern Art (The Mystery of the Ordinary 1926–1938, September 28, 2013–January 12, 2014), portrays a wooden door that has been opened not by a polite twist of its knob but by its having been smashed. Through the irregularly shaped, vaguely humanoid hole that results, we see darkness. Alison Bechdel uncannily draws a similar hole on a page of her 2012 memoir Are You My Mother?, hers formed by an angry kick. With just such a metaphoric hole, Art Spiegelman, in 1986, broke through our assumed links between comics and comedy. In his now-classic, ever disquieting graphic memoir of the Shoah recalled by Vladek, his Polish-born Jewish father, Spiegelman broke open the way for a stream of other gifted artist-authors to explore their lives in terms of this hybrid genre. MAUS does it with a parallel double-time narration: an ongoing dialogue between Spiegelman's curious, youthful alter ego and his churlish survivor father. Shifts in framing revivify the latter's story and animate the story-telling as it unfolds in the father–son relationship. One thinks of Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes strip, with its trenchant takes on child versus adult fantasy, and of Spiegelman scions like Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis [2003]) and David Small (Stitches [2009]), among others. Yet, whatever she owes others or brings to them, Alison Bechdel marks out her unique territory.
Bechdel's work, specifically her two memoirs,†Fun Home (2006) and Are You My Mother? (2012), could not have been published before our time, even as their human anguish feels timeless. Searching for her father Bruce in the first and her mother Helen in the second, and hers