Aging & Wisdom Quote by Alison Bechdel

Bechdel’s joke lands because it’s both a cartoonist’s shop talk and a sly bit of cultural sabotage. She’s describing drawing her characters as they move through time, but the casual phrase “I’m working on that” turns menopause into an artistic problem she can literally solve with a pen. That control is funny on its face, then quietly radical: in most visual culture, women’s aging happens offscreen, treated as a continuity error or a career-ending plot twist. Bechdel treats it as material.

The line about “little lines under the eyes” is doing double duty. It’s technical craft - the shorthand marks that signal age in comics - and it’s a critique of how age gets reduced to a few sanctioned visual cues. Those lines are tiny, but they carry the whole freight of social messaging: desirability, exhaustion, authority, invisibility. By naming the mechanism, she exposes it. The reader can’t unsee the codes.

Context matters because Bechdel’s work has always been about systems hiding in plain sight: family dynamics, gender scripts, the stories we inherit and then redraw. Menopause here isn’t presented as punchline-as-shame; it’s a milestone that forces narrative honesty. “Age gracefully” is the razor. It’s the phrase society uses to flatter women into disappearing politely. Bechdel reclaims it as a conscious aesthetic choice, suggesting grace isn’t compliance - it’s authorship. She’s not just aging her characters; she’s refusing the cultural airbrushing that says women’s lives peak and then fade.