Few graphic memoirists have had the far-reaching cultural impact of Alison Bechdel. Born out of an underground comix movement with her prolific strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which ran from 1983 to 2008 in Funny Times, she’s since landed squarely in the mainstream. In 2014 she was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” grant; a year later, her perennial bestseller Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) was adapted into a Broadway musical; and throughout the aughts, the Bechdel Test, which she’d detailed in a 1985 DTWOF strip, became well-known even in households without a single graphic novel on their bookshelves. 

Bechdel, who is now sixty, is often credited with expanding readers’ appetite for comics, creating truly literary graphic work and providing an entrance point to readers previously-unfamiliar with panels and dialogue bubbles. It’s a designation she dismisses—right place, right time, she insists. Yet if you ask casual readers if they’ve ever read a graphic novel, you’re likely to hear Bechdel’s name. (I can attest that Fun Home is one of the first books of comics I ever read, and that it changed the trajectory of my life, which I now spend editing comics for this very magazine.)