Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a 2006 graphic memoir by the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, author of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. It chronicles the author’s childhood and youth in rural Pennsylvania, United States, focusing on her complex relationship with her father. The book addresses themes of sexual orientation, gender roles, suicide, emotional abuse, dysfunctional family life, and the role of literature in understanding oneself and one’s family.
About Fun Home in brief
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a 2006 graphic memoir by the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, author of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. It chronicles the author’s childhood and youth in rural Pennsylvania, United States, focusing on her complex relationship with her father. The book addresses themes of sexual orientation, gender roles, suicide, emotional abuse, dysfunctional family life, and the role of literature in understanding oneself and one’s family. Fun Home has been both a popular and critical success, and spent two weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. In 2013, a musical adaptation of Fun Home at The Public Theater enjoyed multiple extensions to its run, with book and lyrics written by Obie Award-winning playwright Lisa Kron, and score composed by Tony Award-nominated Jeanine Tesori. The Broadway production opened in April 2015 and earned an even dozen nominations for the 69th Tony Awards, winning the Tony Award for Best Musical. Several publications named Fun Home as one of the best books of 2006; it was also included in several lists of thebest books of the 2000s. It was nominated for several awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and three Eisner Awards. A French translation of Fun home was serialized in the newspaper Libération; the book was an official selection of the Angoulême International Comics Festival and has been the subject of an academic conference in France. It also generated controversy, being challenged and removed from libraries due to its contents.
The process of writing Fun Home required many references to literary works and archives to both accurately write and draw the scenes. As a musical theatre piece, Fun Home was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, while winning the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical. For each human figure, Bech del used a digital camera to record her poses for many panels, using a digital reference for a background. She began creating a framework in Adobe Illustrator, which she placed the text and rough figures on. For example, she used a photo of a funeral home as a background to illustrate each page by creating a rough text and placing the text on the page. She later traced her maternal relationship in Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama. She states that she contrasts Bruce’s artifice in hiding things with Alison’s free and open self. She says, ‘I want people to read the images in the same kind of gradually unfolding way as they’re unfolding. I don’t like pictures that don’t have information in them that you have to decode, that you can’t get lost in. Otherwise what’s the point? Otherwise, what’s Alison’s point?” Fun Home is drawn in black line art with a gray-blue ink wash. Sean Wilsey wrote that Fun Home’s panels \”combine the detail and technical proficiency of R. Crumb with a seriousness, emotional complexity and innovation completely its own. It was sort of like living in a trance. \”
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This page is based on the article Fun Home published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
