Alison Bechdel’s very labor-intensive cartooning process

The celebrated graphic memoirist photographs herself striking every pose depicted in every panel of her work?!

Welcome to the latest issue of Subtle Maneuvers. Previously: Duke Ellington’s hungry ear.

---

Alison Bechdel (b. 1960)

Reading a review of the celebrated cartoonist’s new book last week, I ran across the following sentence, in a parenthetical:

Bechdel has often described her artistic process—taking photographs that she copies and recopies—as laborious; the stories themselves proceed in careful iterative squares.

A notably laborious artistic process? Naturally, I had to know more!

A quick search yielded the below video, from 2006—Bechdel in her studio, demonstrating the photography-based method mentioned above. Laborious it is. For each physical pose she wants to depict in her panels, Bechdel gets up from her desk and strikes that pose for a tripod-mounted digital camera on a timer; the resulting photo becomes the basis for her drawing. All artists pour themselves into their work, but this is a whole new level.