Wednesday’s New York Times contained a rave review by Dwight Garner of Alison Bechdel’s newly published collection, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For ($25), a 384-page collection of her weekly comic strip. The strip is syndicated in more than 50 alternative newspapers, and has been popular enough that more than 250,000 Dykes to Watch Out For collections are in print. 

Garner starts his review by contrasting this new collection with Bechdel’s searing coming of age memoir, Fun Home, and finds that the comic strips in this collection “offer greater consolations—they’re looser, more funny, and they offer a chance to watch a group of very appealing women grow and change (and struggle to have better sex) over the course of two decades.”  Garner compares Dykes to Watch Out For to a “Doonesbury—with regular references to sex toys,” and notes that it is “political in a feisty, lefty, Greenpeace meets PETA meets MoveOn.org kind of way—Ms. Bechdel’s lesbians wanted to impeach the first George Bush.”

Bechdel clearly adores the characters she has created for this comic strip, and she definitely sees them as an antidote to common cultural stereotypes of gay women, but she’s not afraid to satirize aspects of their sometimes knee-jerk counterculture proclivities such as reading volumes with titles like The Wheat-Free Guide to Creative Visualization in Co-Dependent Past-Life Relationships.