Alison's world The graphic novelist faces up to midlife in this playfully fictionalised memoir

Alison Bechdel emerged in the 1980s with Dykes to Watch Out For, a groundbreaking weekly strip that featured a group of mostly lesbian friends. Since then, her acclaimed graphic novels have focused mainly on herself and her family.

- James Smart

Fun Home in 2006 (exploring her closeted, funeral-director father's suicide and her coming out) was followed by Are You My Mother? (psychoanalysis and her relationship with her mother) and The Secret to Superhuman Strength (her compulsive exercising).

These three erudite, pensive and observant works spend most of their time looking back. Where the modern Bechdel is present, she is mostly sketching, editing and narrating her past, and contemplating how everyone from Jack Kerouac and Virginia Woolf to paediatrician Donald Winnicott can help her shed light on it.

In Spent, by contrast, we meet an Alison Bechdel who lives largely in the present. She writes and draws in rural Vermont, campaigns for progressive causes and hangs out with her friends and her wife, Holly. Yet this book-Alison is not quite the real Bechdel. In Spent, Alison's father was a taxidermist, not a mortician; Bechdel's two brothers have been replaced by a Maga-loving sister. In our world, Fun Home has been made into a Tonywinning musical and is being (slowly) developed into a movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal. The equivalent in Spent is Death and Taxidermy, a graphic memoir whose very loose TV adaptation (dragons and cannibalism feature, alongside Aubrey Plaza and Benedict Cumberbatch) is on to its third season.