Fun Home

Born September 10, 1960, Alison Bechdel is one of the most important cartoonists in the field. Her long running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For gave birth to the Bechdel-Wallace test for gender bias in film, and her award-winning graphic memoir Fun Home was adapted into a musical in 2013. Her focus on personal moments within her own life and the lives of others in the lesbian community brought feminist queer stories to the mainstream.

The 2013 queer coming of age movie Blue Is The Warmest Color, directed by Abdellatif Kechiche and starring Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, has been acclaimed as one of the most emotionally complex and compelling movies of recent years. A beautiful story about two women's love for each other, and their eventual heartbreak, it's based on the graphic novel by Julie Maroh. The movie is available to watch on Hulu and Netflix, so if you've seen it once, there's a chance you've seen it two or three or four times. If you're thirsty for more sorrow, love, or troubled adolescent relationships, here are some creator-owned or independent comics that you can check out next.

Hot on the heels of being named a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, cartoonist Alison Bechdel has revealed through her publisher the subject of her third comics memoir; her lifelong obsession with health and fitness. The Secret To Superhuman Strength does not mark a radical career switch for Bechdel into superhero comics. According to an announcement in the New York Times, the book will focus instead on both Bechdel's personal relationship with exercise and the history of fitness fads in America.

Graphic novels and comics are the focus of this year's Banned Books Week, which starts up September 21, and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is getting a head start on the festivities with its new handbook for the occasion, which features a cover by Bone writer/artist Jeff Smith. The CBLDF's Banned Books Week Handbook not only offers up a list of a few comics that have been banned in US schools and libraries -- including Bone, Fun Home, Watchmen, Sandman, Blankets, and Persepolis -- and the reasons why, but also debunks some of myths surrounding banned books.

Each weekday, ComicsAlliance brings you a carefully selected variety of links from around the web about comics and comics-related media, including movies, video games, toys, and whatever else might be worth noting. Quite frankly, these are items you may just need to know about to have a productive day. Take a look at today's hand-picked links after the jump.

We are not the mainstream. That's a truth understood by anyone who identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered or in any other way queer. We are not the audience. We are not the market. We are not the people. It's also a truth understood by a lot of people with a passion for comics...

Mixing: KitchenAid is offering a classic-style (non "New 52") Wonder Woman stand mixer in Brazil. Musicals: A musical based on Alison Bechdel's autobiographical Fun Home graphic novel is currently in development by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori...

This week is Banned Books Week, when we celebrate the fact that we live in a country where we are free to say, write and read what we choose -- and the importance of being vigilant against those who would try to erode those rights and make those choices for us...

Day one of the sixth annual Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art festival (MoCCA) in NYC was great fun, with a significantly increased amount of exhibitor space than I recall from past years -- including a swank "skylight" room on the 7th floor of the Puck building...

Props go to John (and Robert A. Heinlein) for lending me the title of this post, for today was my first foray into the world of Indie comics as I traversed through MoCCA 2007. As a relative newcomer to comics, my experience thus far has kept me in the Marvel/DC superhero realm of comic books...