Daily Inspiration Quote by Alison Bechdel

Calling yourself "pretty illiterate" is a sly bit of self-positioning from an artist whose entire career disproves it. Bechdel drops the line with the casual candor of someone used to being treated as both insider and outsider at once: celebrated as a defining figure in contemporary comics, yet often cordoned off into a special category (queer memoirist, literary cartoonist) that implies she arrived from somewhere other than "real" comics. The humility reads as armor. It disarms purists before they can swing the gatekeeping bat.

The word choice matters. "Illiterate" is provocatively absolute, almost comic in its overstatement, especially coming from a medium built on the marriage of text and image. Bechdel is fluent in that language; what she’s claiming to lack is a specific canon: the lineage talk, the trivia, the orthodoxies of superhero eras, underground legends, and who-influenced-whom mythology that fandom can treat as initiation rites. By framing it as a literacy gap, she exposes how comics history often functions less like history and more like credentialing.

There’s also a generational and gendered subtext. For decades, "comics history" was policed as a boys’ clubhouse of reference points. Bechdel’s work expanded what comics could contain: domestic life, queer community, intellectual self-interrogation. The line quietly argues that you can remake a medium without first worshipping its shrine. It’s an admission, but it’s also a refusal to perform belonging on someone else’s terms.