Love Quote by Alison Bechdel

Bechdel’s admiration for Jules Feiffer lands with the casual certainty of someone naming a formative virus: once you catch it, your whole sense of what comics can do changes. The second sentence is the tell. “I didn’t discover him until I was a little older” isn’t just a timeline detail; it’s a quiet narrative about access, gatekeeping, and the delayed permissions that shape an artist’s voice. Feiffer’s work - anxious, talky, politically alert, allergic to sentimentality - rarely gets handed to kids as “fun.” You come to it when you’ve developed a taste for discomfort, when you can recognize a joke that’s also a diagnosis.

The subtext is mentorship at a distance. Bechdel, whose own comics turn self-interrogation into plot, is signaling lineage: the cartoonist as essayist, the gag as argument, the panel as a place where neurosis and ideology share oxygen. Feiffer made room for smart, unhappy, verbose characters who think too much; Bechdel built cathedrals out of that inheritance.

There’s also a cultural confession embedded here: discovery is contingent. Certain artists circulate through classrooms, libraries, and family bookshelves; others are encountered through detours, by readers who’ve already been taught - explicitly or not - what counts as “serious” art. By naming her late arrival, Bechdel hints at what she had to outgrow to find him: the infantilizing idea of comics, and maybe the subtle exclusions that keep a young queer cartoonist from seeing her future on the page.