"I'm Very Happy to Be in the Reality-Based Community": Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.

This essay historicizes Alison Bechdel's 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home in the context of the presidency of George W. Bush. Bechdel created Fun Home from 1999 through 2005-dates that corresponded with Bush's campaign, election, and presidency. As Bechdel frequently laments in her serialized comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, the Bush presidency posited truth as unknowable, facts as in finitely flexible, and faith as constitutive of reality. Fun Home never mentions the president (nor any historical figure or event after the mid-1980s), but the memoir uses newly available digital technology to resist Bush-era "truthiness." In Fun Home, Bechdel combines digital photography, her body in performance, and hand drawing to create a new form of graphic narrative. This essay draws out Fun Home's political engagement with the Bush administration and simultaneously claims the proliferation of digital photography as a watershed event in the history of graphic narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]