After two decades in the salt mines of cartooning, Alison Bechdel has finally found her spot in the sun. Dykes to Watch Out For , her bi-weekly strip, had been appearing in alternative newspapers for 23 years when her comic autobiography, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, became a bestseller in 2006 and shot to the No. 1 spot on TIME magazine's "Best books of 2006" list — not best graphic novel, best book. Bechdel's success is richly deserved, and Fun Home is a scattered, obsessively detailed retelling of her childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, rendered in beautifully simple inks and watercolor washes. At the center is the author's relationship with her father, a high-school English teacher, manic interior decorator of their old Gothic revival house, and deeply repressed gay man. Bechdel uses her father's stunted sexuality as a key to unlock the mysteries of her family, and as a lens through which to examine her own fully embraced lesbianism.

Fun Home is a comic that's in love with literature, and Bechdel explores how the image of her father's meticulously arranged library can be a key to opening his personality, and her references to Joyce, Fitzgerald, Camus, and Proust fill the book's pages with his ghost. Death subtly pervades the book as well, expressly manifested in her father's eventual suicide and the family funeral-home business (the titular and ironic "Fun Home"), but a sly wit and humor serve as a balance, ensuring that the story never becomes morbid.

Structurally, Bechdel moves backward and forward through time to unravel her story, illustrating how secrets revealed force a reexamination of earlier assumptions. For Bechdel to make the leap from a short, weekly strip to a long-form book must have been daunting, but her storytelling and pacing are impeccable. Anecdote by anecdote, she carefully pieces together the complex relationship between herself and her father. The final picture isn't complete, but what's missing is just as powerful.

-Andy Warner