Alison Bechdel and her new comic novel “The Secret of My Superpower”
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I’m putting Alison Bechdel next to literature on the shelf. The book would also be in good hands with the comics, somewhere between philosophy, sociology and gender studies as well. In bookstores, it will probably be more common on the LGBTQI+ tables these days.
This ambiguity is a quality that has led to a number of things happening at the same time, especially in recent years. Her first book, Fun Home, about her gay father, becomes a Broadway musical. At the same time, her Bechdel test (which ranks films according to how many women appear in them and whether they talk about anything other than men) rose to prominence thirty years after its “invention”. She is awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant, while zealous moral guardians want her comics to be banned from school libraries. Welcome to Trump’s America.
For her new work, Bechdel weaves her personal sports biography with the ubiquitous fitness obsession (“pacifists pay for boot camps, feminists learn pole dance, geeks balance tractor tires”), Jack Kerouac and the transcendentalists of the 19th century.
The romantic-naturalistic ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the feminist Margaret Fuller, who is little known in this country, are the stuff from which marketing agencies tinker the superstructure for new trend sports. After all, it is always about overcoming the ego, salvation from our miserable worldly existence and harmony with nature.
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Bechdel literally hikes up Kerouac and drinks no less than the Godfather of Beat. Ain’t no runner’s high high enough. Nevertheless, “The Secret of My Superpower” is pervaded by a subtle lightness that is underlined by Holly Rae Taylor’s coloring. She lets the comic shine in delicate, if you will, transcendental pastel tones.
By Birgit Schmitz