Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

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Recommended: Graphic and literary devices used in Alison Bechdel's Fun House

Alison Bechdel’s specific, artistic and organized design of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is her method of explaining and expressing her sentiments towards her unique transitioning from childhood through to adolescence and onwards into adulthood. Elements such as specific colour use, mise-en-page, panelling, and exploiting the gutter are each examples of how Alison Bechdel communicates her development throughout life and the hardship that came with it. Bechdel’s memoir was written to mirror her life in a way so that the reader is completely encompassed in her story, her artwork and her use of language and words.
The distinguishing uses of colours, hues, and shading that are illustrated in Fun Home are one manner in which Bechdel somberly relates …show more content…

Aspect to aspect transitions include regarding all the different elements in a scene order make up a certain emotion or mood. Bechdel’s scene on page 11 uses the feature of the fight between Bruce and her brother to mirror the film, “It’s a Wonderful Life”, and its depressing mood, for the reader to more easily compare Bruce to the film’s protagonist, George Bailey. Bechdel uses the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” as a way of indicating how her childhood could have resembled; a mother and father who love each other and who fix up an old mansion for them to raise their family in. This demonstrates both correlations and significant differences when the panels and specific transitioning (aspect to aspect) juxtapose an ever-angry Bruce opposite to the character of George Bailey as he is going through his life-changing revelation. Both characters are the heads of their households, trying to create a beautiful picture perfect home for their seemingly picture perfect lives. Finally, both characters exhibit haphazard fits of temper. What is interesting about this comparison between Bruce and George is that each of the pieces to the puzzle are there, the reader simply needs to be aware of them. Robyn Warhol, in her article “The Space Between: A Narrative Approach to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home”, says, “Bechdel herself, in discussing her art, talks about the “words and the images” as two separate but complementary entities. Bechdel’s elaboration on the structure of her own cartooning, however, suggests an opening into further dimensions less easy to articulate than the verbal or the visual. As she explained in a 2007 lecture, ‘“What I loved about cartooning was what I had learned from Charles Addams, that the space between the image and the words was a powerful thing if you could figure out

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