Dykes to Watch Out For

Print communities often take the form of “imagined communities,” where individual readers imagine themselves as one part of the audience for a particular piece of writing. They are confident this community of readers exists, though they remain unaware of the identities of anyone else in the community because reading is a solitary activity[1]. Alison Bechdel’s use self-syndication to publish Dykes to Watch Out For allowed her to remain in touch with her readers, and make the “imagined community” surrounding her work a little more real[2].

The top image shows an early print version of a DTWOF strip, which laid the foundation for the comic’s publication and the print community that eventually formed around it. Though this community is much more hierarchical than online communities, in that Bechdel’s primary communication was with the editors of the periodicals that published her work, who in turn communicated with the readers themselves, it remains similar in that it connects the author to their audience and audience members to each other. Bechdel was able to leverage this community in order to raise money to fund the comic, much in the same way that webcomics creators leverage the community around their comics to raise funds through sites like Patreon.

Bechdel has recently released some new, special edition strips of DTWOF, even though she finished the comic in 2008. Her blog, pictured in the bottom image, helps bring DTWOF into the digital age by creating a digital community around the comic in the comments section and letting fans interact with each other directly, in contrast to the print community discussed above. The presence of over 100 comments on the above post alone demonstrates that the DTWOF community is still relatively large and active, even eight years after the comic officially ended[3].

In many ways, DTWOF laid the groundwork for the coming of webcomics by creating a real community around her work and using comics as a medium of expression for marginalized audiences.

1. Anderson, Benedict. “Apprehensions of Time” in Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 2006.

2. Galvan, Margaret. “‘The Lesbian Norman Rockwell’: Alison Bechdel and Queer Grassroots Network.” American Literature 90, no. 2 (June 2018): 407–38. doi:10.1215/00029831-4564358.

3. Dover, Yaniv, and Guy Kelman. 2018. “Emergence of Online Communities: Empirical Evidence and Theory.” PLoS ONE 13 (11): 1–17. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0205167.