"Dykes to Watch Out For," Alison Bechdel Collections

Alison Bechdel

Book

Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For volumes, 1990 to 2005, comprising five collected installments of the strip across fifteen years of publication by Firebrand Books and Alyson Publications. The books preserve successive stages of Bechdel’s serial treatment of lesbian social life, relationships, work, parenting, bookselling, and political culture through an expanding cast of recurring characters. The publication history recorded inside the Firebrand volumes also charts the strip’s growing circulation: the 1990 collection states that Bechdel’s cartoons appeared regularly in more than two dozen newspapers and magazines in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain; the 1992 volume gives more than forty publications in the United States and Canada; and the 1995 volume gives more than fifty. By 2003, Bechdel could introduce a new collection “On the Occasion of the Twentieth Anniversary of ‘Dykes to Watch Out For,’” looking back to the first strip she drew in 1983.
Five oblong trade paperback books, 1990 to 2005, ranging from 118 to 155 pages.
[1] Bechdel, Alison. New, Improved! Dykes to Watch Out For. Ithaca, New York: Firebrand Books, 1990. First printing.
[2] Bechdel, Alison. Dykes to Watch Out For: The Sequel. Added Attraction!! “Serial Monogamy” A Documentary. Ithaca, New York: Firebrand Books, 1992.
[3] Bechdel, Alison. Unnatural Dykes to Watch Out For. Ithaca, New York: Firebrand Books, 1995. First printing.
[4] Bechdel, Alison. Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life-Forms to Watch Out For. Los Angeles: Alyson Publications, 2003. First edition, October 2003. The introduction, headed “On the Occasion of the Twentieth Anniversary of ‘Dykes to Watch Out For,’” situates the collection within two decades of the strip’s history and looks back explicitly to 1983, pairing early panels with Bechdel’s retrospective commentary on the political and social settings through which the characters had moved. The volume marks the series’ transition from Firebrand to Alyson while maintaining the horizontal format and serialized ensemble structure of the earlier collections.
[5] Bechdel, Alison. Invasion of the Dykes to Watch Out For. New York: Alyson Books, 2005. Trade paperback original, second printing.
The sequence records the change within Bechdel’s principal comic project before and after its twentieth anniversary. The three Firebrand volumes show the strip’s expansion through lesbian and alternative periodical networks during the early 1990s, while the 2003 and 2005 Alyson books present an established ensemble narrative whose characters carry accumulated relationships and histories from one volume to the next. The books document that growth from the rising number of periodicals carrying Bechdel’s cartoons to the 2003 anniversary introduction and the explicitly serialized opening of the 2005 volume. Light shelf wear and rubbing; retailer barcode and QR labels to the 2003 and 2005 volumes, with additional barcode labels on their spines; interiors clean in the pages examined. Overall very good condition.

Item #23941

Price: $385.00