Story and Medium

Fun Home is, as I am sure most readers have noticed by now, a graphic novel. This decision is natural given Alison Bechdel's background as a comic artist, but I think it is interesting to consider how its nature as a graphic novel influences how we experience these moments from Bechdel's childhood and adolescence. 

The fact that this book is a graphic novel made it challenging to engage with at first. Fun Home, while being a graphic novel, is still a very intricately worded book, and when combined with the wealth of visual information in every scene (so much important detail in this book is shown, not told, which is awesome), this makes it kind of overwhelming on the first read. Every page just contains so much that I found my self doubling back, rereading, and noticing details that I missed the first time I looked at them. But, I think the blending of narration and images allows the story to come together in a really unique way.

The most emotional moments of the book are able to hit harder because they are presented in the graphic novel format. My favorite example of this is the moment in which Alison discovers the photo of Roy after her father's death. This scene pushes the graphic novel to its limit. Two entire pages are taken up by one image. There is no frame or border surrounding it. The photograph is presented as if you are seeing it through Alison's eyes as she pick it up. Unlike the rest of the imagery in the book, the photograph is drawn in extreme detail. The scenes narration is scattered between textboxes that pop up all around the central image, as if you are reading Alison's own disjointed thoughts as she uncovers this part of her father's life. The scene is startling, personal, and surreal, and it uses its imagery effectively to convey the emotion of the moment.

Another scene which which I think uses the medium of the graphic novel very well is Alison's conversation in the car with her father in chapter 7. In this scene, the usual layout gives way to a grid of small, square panels. Every image is drawn from the same angle, and the entire sequence focuses on one conversation. This arrangement does something interesting with the pacing of the scene. While the normal setup of a graphic novel jumps from moment to moment, capturing the key details of the story, this scene seems to proceed at an even tempo, allowing you to feel the pauses and the timing of the conversation. This, along with the tiny panels, make it feel that you are boxed in the small car with Alison and her father. 

These scenes work because they utilize the graphic novel format in creative ways to draw the reader into the story. They use visual illustrations to convey the mood and pacing of a scene. This book has a great narrative which I think could stand on its own without the visual element, but I think it is Bechdel's illustrations that really give the story its impact.


Comments

  1. ShannaApril 7, 2026 at 7:43 AM

    Hi Will, I like how you focus on the graphic novel format as something that actively shapes how we experience the story rather than just presenting it. Your example of the Roy photograph is especially strong, with how you show the lack of borders and detailed image pull the reader directly into Alison’s perspective. I also agree with your point about the car scene, where the uniform panels slow the pacing and make the moment feel more confined and tense. Both scenes show how Bechdel uses structure and layout to control emotion in a way a traditional novel could not. Great work!

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  2. MitchellApril 7, 2026 at 2:24 PM

    If anyone has doubts about the graphic-narrative form as a medium for a complex, multilayered narrative, _Fun Home_ should put those doubts to rest. You do a great job of tracing the complexity that surrounds each image, and this complexity only increases as the book unfolds, and we revisit the same scenes and settings with new information, often information that Alison herself is unaware of in the moment being depicted, so we are looking at HER looking back and revising her own memories of these events and people. And yet the visual medium always brings with it a kind of narrative authority (and this is especially true when the drawings clearly depict photos, which we take to be a more "transparent" reflection of reality)--we SEE what the living room at Fun Home looks like, even if we're aware that it's filtered through the author's memories and years of conflicting information. When, on the very last page of the book, she depicts what she imagines to be something like her father's final visual glimpse of the world--the onrushing truck--of course we have no real evidence that this would have been his point of view. If he "jumps back like he saw a snake," as the truck driver testifies, then how could he be *facing* the oncoming truck? And yet this panel is so potent as a reflection on Bruce's death, whether or not it relates "realistically" to the "actual events." It's an image in Alison's fictional rendition of her family history, and it's entirely related to her subjective interpretation of events, as is everything in the book. And yet drawings don't *feel* like they come from a particular point of view--they seem to just depict/record reality as it happens (or happened).

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