SPENT: A Comic Novel
by Alison Bechdel
Mariner Books. 272 pages, $32.
OVER THE PAST two decades, Alison Bechdel has become something of a cultural phenomenon, not just because of the spectacular success of her 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home, which was adapted into a blockbuster Broadway musical, but also due to the media litmus test she created to assess how well women are represented in film and fiction. The bar to pass is quite low, yet when she created it in the mid-1980s, many commercial creative endeavors failed miserably. Passing The Bechdel Test requires a work to contain two female characters who discuss anything other than a man. Needless to say, her new graphic novel, Spent, passes with flying colors.
In Spent, her fifth semi-autobiographical graphic novel, Bechdel has a successful TV series based on her previous graphic novel Death and Taxidermy, which is streaming on Schmamazon (after Amazon, of course). The latter takes wild, absurd liberties with her life story, incorporating cannibalism, dragons, and hamburger-eating (Bechdel is a vegetarian). She’s also working on a new graphic novel with an attractive offer from a conservative media conglomerate in the vein of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire called Megalopub, which causes her significant moral angst. In her personal life, she co-owns and co-runs a pygmy goat sanctuary with her wife Holly in Vermont.
Her friends, based on characters from Dykes to Watch Out For, her weekly comic strip that ran from 1983 to 2008, envy her success, and everyone, even Bechdel, frets about their finances and the horror-show that is American politics (the book takes place in 2022, eerily forecasting the return of Trump). Troubled by the rise of fascism and the decline of both civilization and the environment, she imagines writing a book about late-stage capitalism, using her own privilege as an example. But soon she starts to see herself as a sellout. She berates herself for ordering almost everything on Amazon and gently pokes fun at her eccentric, hippie circle. It’s as if she sought to both revel in and subvert every cliché and stereotype the Right has of the Left as being hypersensitive, delusional tree-huggers. The book is a potent response to the disparagement of “leftist elitists,” and by that Bechdel means teachers, journalists, activists, librarians, community organizers, and nonprofit workers. “I feel like as I age, I’m somehow getting both more complacent and more hopeless,” she sighs.
Bechdel spins her wheels trying to come up with a socially conscious reality TV show to help people resist the capitalist grind of consumer pressures. I frequently found myself questioning whether Bechdel’s social consciousness was a product of guilt for her commercial success or a genuine existential dread. But then she establishes her leftist credentials, making it clear that even before she became a famous author and artist, she pledged ten percent of her earnings to charity. When she tells J. R., the nonbinary adult child of a friend who’s living in her yurt, about her plan for an anti-capitalist reality TV show, the young activist says: “I might be a college dropout but at least I know you can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.”
Badger, J. R.’s girlfriend, responds to Bechdel’s reality TV ambitions by pointing out that it was another reality TV show that got the country into its current predicament: “A populace so distracted by capitalist entertainment products that they can no longer have serious discussions about the existential problems facing humanity.” J. R. chimes in: “If it weren’t for The Apprentice, we might be solving wealth inequality and the climate crisis instead of sitting around watching democracy die.”
Bechdel’s relationship with her sister, a teacher who supports Trump and gets caught up in the book-ban craze, becomes increasingly fraught. She tells her sister: “The G.O.P. is working you into a lather over race and gender and abortion and immigration so you won’t notice they’re screwing you too!” Her sister relents, but then Bechdel realizes it’s only a dream.
As Bechdel wrestles with a host of internal conflicts and concerns, hilarious antics ensue among her friend group centering on polyamory, Covid, and sex fantasies gone awry. It all comes to a self-reflexive crescendo when Holly becomes Internet-famous after posting a wood-chopping video on YouTube and Bechdel grows envious of all the attention she receives. After being hounded by her agent to post more “content” on Instagram and TikTok to raise her profile and help move sales of her books and TV show, Bechdel is stung by Holly’s overnight celebrity.
In the end, Bechdel learns that to make a difference she doesn’t have to write a book or create a reality TV series; she only has to pitch in with her friends in their efforts to sustain community agriculture and make changes in their immediate circles. On a twilight hike, J. R.’s father Stu displays a tattooed excerpt from Peter Kropotkin’s 1902 Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution across his back: “Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual, and moral.”
The quality of Bechdel’s illustrations match the power of her writing. Like her dialogue, the drawings are energetic, fluid, playful, and quite funny. They are moodily shadowed by Jon Chad and beautifully colored by Holly Rae Taylor. As in her previous efforts, Bechdel’s moral imagination, artistic daring, and social analysis enliven every page. The world may feel like it’s on the brink of implosion, but her creative roadmap to salvation takes some of the despair out of the panic.
Brian Alessandro co-edited Fever Spores: The Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs (Rebel Satori Press).
