The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25

Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For has been the preeminent chronicle of contemporary lesbian lives for more than 25 years. From its initial existence as a roughly sketched single-panel cartoon, the strip has developed into a finely tuned, intimately detailed series which has articulated the angst, passion, and politics of the dyke world for an entire lesbian generation. Through syndication and small-scale commercialization, Bechdel has been able to support herself in recent years as a cartoonist, an almost impossible feat as an artist. Her tenure as cartoonist of note has ensured that her work will forever be the documentation future generations of queers turn to for proof of how we once lived and loved.

Although her works have been collected in separate volumes over the years, a respectful retrospective such as The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For has long been overdue. It comes on the heels of Bechdel's 2006 publication of her graphic novel Fun Home. That book, the story of Bechdel's childhood growing up under the influence of a repressed gay father, earned many accolades, including being honored as one of the New York Times' Notable Books of 2006. After years toiling primarily in the gay ghetto, Bechdel has burst onto the mainstream literary scene as a seeming overnight success. This has its ironies for the artist, but also its rewards, of course, and Bechdel is currently hard at work on her next contracted graphic novel. As a result of these newer projects, Bechdel has decided to put her long-running strip on a self-imposed sabbatical. Whether this will be permanent or not remains to be seen, and there are certainly loose ends that should be tied up for readers to have proper closure. Still, fans should look past their own sense of possible abandonment and rejoice that one of our community's most loved artists has found a new outlet for her talents. Just back from a national tour to promote the Essential DTWOF, Bechdel found some time to talk with the B.A.R.

Rachel Pepper: Alison, tell me what you are doing today.

Alison Bechdel: I spent the morning desperately trying to get back to my writing after almost a two-week interruption. I sort of found my place again, but made no progress. It's such a battle defending my work time. Just now, a guy delivered a cord of wood. And my girlfriend has arrived with a carload of boxes – she's moving in. And I had a phone interview with a newspaper in Montreal. I should try and get some drawing done this afternoon, but now I have this interview with you – it's always something, Rachel!

Is it a winter wonderland in Vermont these days? What do you like most about being in Vermont?

It's hard to say what I love about Vermont without getting all sentimental and maudlin. It's beautiful. It's human-scale. I can work here. I love the long, cold winters. I concentrate especially well with a deep, quiet snowpack all around me.

Overdue congrats for Fun Home being named a best book of the year, and for making the "Approval Matrix" grid in a recent issue of New York magazine. How does all this mainstream success feel?

It feels very good, but it's hard letting it in, and it necessitates a certain rearrangement of my self-concept. I'm used to feeling like a sort of invisible, underrated underdog. Now I worry about being overrated.

So what does being on "cartoon sabbatical" from DTWOF really mean? Is it truly over?

I really don't know. I don't mean to be coy. While I'm not feeling particularly motivated right now to get back to the strip, I'm very reluctant to foreclose the possibility of it continuing. There are a lot of factors involved, from the financial to the creative to the hormonal. It just occurred to me that I started this sabbatical at right about the time I began skipping periods and sliding into perimenopause. I find that kind of fascinating, that I churned episodes of the strip out every four weeks for the past 25 years, just like little eggs – and maybe now I'm done.

Putting the book together was hard for me for a couple reasons. One, I didn't really know for a long time whether the book was actually going to happen or not – there was an extraordinary amount of trouble getting reprint permissions. So it was hard to commit myself to it or get properly excited. Two, as I re-read all the material, I could see how I used to pour myself completely into this work. I realized that I wasn't doing that any more, that I have other things I'm more passionate about. Gradually, I made the very difficult decision to suspend the strip, as of the last episode contained in The Essential.

Tell me about the new project you are working on.

I'm working on a memoir called Love Life. On the surface, it's about various relationships I've been in. But I'm using the autobiographical material from my own romantic career as a specimen, putting it under a microscope and using it to find something out about the nature of subjectivity, why intimacy is so difficult, whether there really is a self at all – stuff like that.

A lot of people may unknowingly feel that comics have made you rich and famous. Can you talk a bit about how you have managed to support yourself over the years?

It's kind of remarkable to me that I managed to support myself from DTWOF for so long. For the first seven years I did the strip, I worked full-time, then part-time, gradually weaning down the time I spent at other jobs. When I was 30, I took the leap to doing my own work full-time. By self-syndicating the strip, publishing books, traveling and speaking, selling T-shirts and mouse pads, selling my originals, and doing freelance commissions, I managed to eke out a living.

But that was getting increasingly unworkable as time went on. I was getting older, and just needed more income than I used to. Plus, the LGBT cultural infrastructure started to disappear, and along with it, my income. As newspapers and bookstores folded, then LGBT websites folded, things got pretty scary. If it weren't for the success of Fun Home, I couldn't have continued Dykes as long as I did.