73 pages • 2 hours read
Alison BechdelA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapter 1 opens on a splash page: a portrait of Bruce Bechdel—shirtless in front of his house, likely working in the garden. The portrait is black-and-white, crosshatched, and heavily detailed in contrast with the simple, cartoony, blue inked-washed comics.
Young Alison plays “airplane” with her father. In the captions, Bechdel identifies airplane as an “Icarian game” and compares her relationship with her father to that of the mythical father and son Daedalus and Icarus. She casts her father as Daedalus due to his skill as a craftsman. However, “[i]n our particular reenactment of this mythic relationship, it was not me but my father who was to plummet from the sky” (4).
Bruce abruptly ends the game of airplane to fix up the house. This is followed by a montage of Bruce’s efforts in historical restoration, with emphasis on his expertise, doggedness, and the deployment of his children as helpers. Bechdel characterizes him as emotionally withholding, blank-faced, temperamental, and intimidating. Despite his passion for home restoration, Bruce was a 12th-grade English teacher by trade.
The Bechdel home was a gothic revival house built in the mid-1800s. It had fallen into disrepair by the time Alison’s parents purchased it. Bruce obsessively restored the house with “dazzling displays of artfulness” (9).
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