First reader/ Respondent Fun Home (week15) -Alexa

Responding to Nathalie’s question if Fun Home could function as a straight up novel? I think it could. I thought the text she wrote, as well as the dictionary definitions, letters, and maps could have been displayed in a novel and it wouldn’t have changed their effect. I found most of the images being secondary to the text- which hasn’t been the case with other texts we’ve come across this semester in Eng493. The inclusion of so many literary, textual references could have worked in a novel as well.  Most of the images throughout Fun Home could have been easily depicted with vivid imagery. If it was a novel, I probably would have imagined her dad as being way more handsome than Robert Redford, even thought he looked pretty attractive in the picture we saw in the clip online and he looked dorky and creepy in the graphic novel. Whatever.

As to why it’s #1 in Time…maybe it’s seen as being original because she’s telling such a unique and crazy story. How many families do you know work with a funeral home (although it’s such a small part of the plot…at least to me) and have a mostly closeted gay dad and a lesbian daughter? I guess that makes it unique. I don’t know if it was the first…only….last graphic novel written by a lesbian about her own life, but I’m pretty sure there aren’t a lot of graphic novels like these. I guess it tests the norms of graphic novels. Maybe that’s the reason Fun Home was so widely recognized. It also tests the norms of graphic novels by having so many literary references. At times, I felt like Alison Bechdel was trying to brag about how well read she is. I was overwhelmed by literary references…except when they were about mythology and The Great Gatsby.  Overall, I’m not trying to be so hard on Fun Home. I really enjoyed reading it. Once again, it was a very different type of graphic novel. It was more intellectually stimulating to me than some of the others- probably because I’m not much of the graphic novel type…but I have enjoyed sampling a little bit of everything in this class this semester.