DTWOF: The Blog

PlanetOut is behind in posting the strip. Episode 464, which is all about the judicial filibuster hullaballoo, should have gone up on April 21st, and they're still on 463. This frustrates me. It's hard enough keeping the strip timely when it only comes out every two weeks, and Jon Stewart has already made every possible joke there is to make before I even sit down to write. But to have it run a week or more late is maddening. That's all. Just had to vent. Thank god I have a blog, or I would have been doing something constructive in the ten minutes it took me to compose this.

Just found out that tomorrow, Allison J. Kelaher Young, a professor in the College of Education at Western Michigan University, is presenting a paper about Alison's comics during a panel at the American Educational Research Association conference in Montreal. The paper's called "Presentation of Self in Not-so-Everyday Comics: Curricular Implications of the Comics of Alison Bechdel," and it's part of a panel entitled, "The Performative Discourse of Identity in Queer Studies." This isn't actually the first time somebody's written a paper about Alison's work. We know of a few others, including "Humour in Alison Bechdel's Comics," a thesis penned by Finnish student Tuula Raikas in 1998. Anybody know of some we should add to our list? We also know that sometimes professors put Alison's books on their syllabi. Anybody ever take a class where they had to (got to) read DTWOF? I want to compile a list for posterity.

I recently did an interview for a Swiss lesbian magazine called "Skipper." The interviewer translated my answers from English into German. One of her questions was, "With regard to the re-election of Mr. George W. Bush, I wish to extend my condolences to you and the entire homosexual community in the United States of America. Do you not get nervous and suffer sleepless nights in light of your continual criticism of the Republican Party?"

I answered, "Thank you for your condolences. Thank you, in fact, for letting an American sully the pages of your magazine. I would still rather believe that the election was rigged than that a majority of voters here are idiots, but either possibility is pretty horrifying. Surprisingly, I don't lose sleep. My comic strip is a very good catharsis for all my anxiety. Without that outlet, I would go start raving mad."

I just received the issue in the mail, and although I don't speak German, I could make out enough to tell that she'd deleted my comment about "letting an American sully the pages of your magazine." Maybe she thought I was joking.

Genia V. Stevens posts a new interview with Alison on her site, SistersTalk. Genia, a professional blogger, writes for Blogs By Women and for a site run by the The Wisconsin State Journal. Blogs by Women looks interesting. It's a directory of, you guessed it, blogs by women. Add your site for free. We're gonna add ours.