"But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu"
About this Quote
The point isn’t to confess lowbrow taste; it’s to reclaim an origin story that polite culture tends to erase. When Alison Bechdel name-checks Richie Rich and Little Lulu, she’s invoking a childhood canon that’s both supposedly “minor” and massively formative. Those titles carry a built-in tension: Richie Rich is capitalism as bedtime story, a fantasy of endless resources and frictionless innocence; Little Lulu is mischief, social maneuvering, gendered expectation played for laughs. Put together, they map an early education in how power works and how kids learn to perform roles before they have language for it.
Bechdel’s larger project has always been about the politics of everyday life: how identity gets built from small scenes, private rituals, and the stories you absorb when no one is watching. The subtext here is a quiet refusal of the literary ladder that says serious artists are forged by serious books. Comic books are often treated as training wheels, especially for girls, as if visual storytelling were an unserious detour. Bechdel flips that hierarchy: the “kid stuff” is the seedbed of craft, sensibility, and critique.
Context matters, too. Bechdel comes from a medium that spent decades fighting to be taken seriously, and from a queer feminist lineage that’s constantly had to argue that domestic life and pop culture are legitimate subject matter. By planting her flag in Richie Rich and Little Lulu, she’s telling you exactly where the sharpness starts: in the panels you were taught not to count.
Bechdel’s larger project has always been about the politics of everyday life: how identity gets built from small scenes, private rituals, and the stories you absorb when no one is watching. The subtext here is a quiet refusal of the literary ladder that says serious artists are forged by serious books. Comic books are often treated as training wheels, especially for girls, as if visual storytelling were an unserious detour. Bechdel flips that hierarchy: the “kid stuff” is the seedbed of craft, sensibility, and critique.
Context matters, too. Bechdel comes from a medium that spent decades fighting to be taken seriously, and from a queer feminist lineage that’s constantly had to argue that domestic life and pop culture are legitimate subject matter. By planting her flag in Richie Rich and Little Lulu, she’s telling you exactly where the sharpness starts: in the panels you were taught not to count.
Quote Details
| Topic | Book |
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