Spent: A Comic Novel (Advance Review)

Spent: A Comic Novel By: Alison Bechdel (Coloring: Holly Rae Taylor,  Shadowing: Jon Chad

Publisher: Mariner Books  (HarperCollins Publishers)

Publication Day: May 20, 2005

Spent – HarperCollins

Advamced Review Copy provided by Publisher thorugh NetGalley

Spent: A Comic Novel marks the return of  an Alison Bechdel To Watch Out For.  This fictionalized version of the celebrated cartoonist is exhausted by catastrophic breaking news, frustrated by the corporatization and Hollywood distortion of her deeply personal comic memoirs, and grappling with how she, her loved ones—or any of us—can find meaningful renewal in a world that feels increasingly compromised and contentious. Familiar characters—grayer and still gayer—like Sparrow, Stuart, Ginger, Lois, and Naomi reunite with Alison as they navigate this chapter of their lives.

The enjoyment of Spent may hinge on how deeply readers relate to Alison’s prognostications and tribulations and how well the humor lands. As expected, the doomscrolling, aggrieved Alison of Spent finds herself at the center of the very obstacles she faces. While she fumes over a fantastical and wildly unfaithful streaming adaptation of Death & Taxidermy—a tongue-in-cheek lampooning of Fun Home's literary legacy—she struggles to write her next book. Meanwhile, other characters explore creative outlets, grapple with the challenges of long-distance relationships, or navigate shifting sexual dynamics.

At times, Alison stumbles in her interactions with non-binary and trans concepts and characters. In these moments, she is rightfully called out for not making a greater effort to stay attuned to evolving realities. Spent, and Bechdel as its author, do not endorse Alison’s continued awkwardness; rather, the inclusion of these missteps is one of her character's out of sync frictions. However, some may find that these scenes muddy the satirical focus, raising fair questions about whether such moments—invoking outdated gender binaries and generational misunderstandings—are better left off the page.

This generational divide is apparent throughout the novel. The newer wave of queer activists is met with a mixture of confused suspicion and cautious admiration. Alison and her contemporaries struggle to reconcile the efficacy of this fresh activism with the shifting paradigms of relationships and identity. Still, continuity exists between these moments and the original Dykes to Watch Out For comic strips of the 1980s, where Alison and her friends railed against capitalist compromise while standing in the unemployment line, sharing a bowl of signature curry. There have always been both incrementalists and radicals in periods of political pressure. Bechdel’s slice-of-life cartooning has long captured the tensions within queer communities—no one is spared embarrassing moments or personal missteps, as each character stumbles toward a better understanding of themselves and others. However, this approach carries a risk: some moments may read not as warm, playful ribbing among a diverse constellation of interconnected groups, but as a perplexed critique of relationships, identities, and generations to which Alison—and Bechdel herself—do not belong.

The brilliance of Spent is grounded in Bechdel’s exceptional cartooning. She expertly engages the reader’s eye—text bounces within and even bleeds through panel borders to direct movement across the page. Background elements, from mischievous cats to wandering goats, infuse panels with motion, ensuring that even the most text-heavy sequences remain visually dynamic. Clever background gags appear in billboards, supermarket checkout lines, and street signage. Bechdel knows when to disrupt the grid, invert perspective, or elongate a panel to heighten emotion. She sometimes arranges characters in fluid, circular cascades that create a sense of connection and motion. And she plays with subtlety—zooming in on a character’s face just enough to emphasize the bewilderment of a bulging eyeball, striking the perfect balance between exaggerated cartooning and expressive realism. Scenes unfold in shadows, through windows framing dinner-table discussions, and even on rooftops, lending visual variety to mamy scenes and interactions.

Bechdel’s artistic vision is enriched by the contributions of her collaborators: Jon Chad’s meticulous shading and Holly Ray Taylor’s dynamic coloring. Chad’s shadows lend depth to every wrinkle and crease of middle age, making even sparsely illustrated backgrounds feel dimensional and lived-in. Taylor’s bold, Crayola-like hues pop off the page, a striking contrast to the watercolor softness of The Secret to Superhuman Strength. This choice suits the comic-strip aesthetic well, evoking the consistency of high-quality newspaper strips while reinforcing the work’s intentional artifice—reminding readers that these characters are cartoons, crafted to provoke laughter, joy, and familiarity.

Throughout Spent, moments of uproarious cartoon slapstick and hijinks balance its more introspective themes. Explorations of gender and sexuality are given room to breathe, punctuated by humor—an extra panel, a subtle camera shift to convey the nervous excitement of intimacy, the joyful audacity of stepping into the unknown.

Perhaps Spent is Bechdel’s deliberate reclamation of chaotic messiness—an intentional departure from her profound, introspective memoirs (Fun Home, Are You My Mother?, The Secret to Superhuman Strength) and a rejection of the forced hagiography surrounding her public persona. Instead, the novel offers a simpler truth: Try your best to care for those within your immediate orbit. Be open to expansion. Absorb critique, embrace the struggles, and accept that collective progress will always come with moments of failure and fury—but that, ultimately, it is worth it.

Meeting Alison Bechdel in Buffalo in 2022 was one of the highlights of my life. To tell one of the greatest cartoonists of any generation that her work made me think, made me laugh, and—in the case of Are You My Mother?—deepened my understanding of Lacanian psychoanalysis more than some of my college courses, was an unforgettable privilege. Reading her newest work ahead of publication and revisiting its predecessors was thrilling. To have an author’s work remain a part of one’s life for so long is the closest thing to time travel—prompting reflection on who we were, who we are, and who we might yet become.

A Little Daylight Left: Poems (Advance Review)

A Little Daylight Left: Poems By Sarah Kay

Publisher:  Random House Publishing Group (The Dial Press)

Publication Day: April 1. 2025

A Little Daylight Left by Sarah Kay: 9780593733707 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

Advamce Review Copy provided by Publisher thorugh NetGalley

Sarah Kay’s A Little Daylight Left seems to promise ruminations on moments of peaceful and quaint effervescence: poems that accord with the gently rising building and the puffy clouds against the blue sky on the cover of this collection. There are moments of this kind: the thrillingly fleeting wonders of sunset, of love, of friends, family, of memory, and of unencumbered childhood encounters with nature, but A Little Daylight Left is always cognizant that the waning daylight can provide rhapsodic moments of illumination as well as moments that reveal searing and difficult truths.

In her portraits of loving partnerships and family connections, Kay presents a rapturous daylight that is so radiant, the unflinching honesty overwhelms. Indeed “Dreaming Boy” is so forthright in presenting the shyly hopeful trepidation present in a partnership exploring unsettled questions of gender, sexual orientation, preference, and roles –everything open, nothing hidden,– that I had a powerfully immediate cry.

With a similarly moving and gentle candor, “Tsubu “explores a kind of generational daylight, family vocabulary. and tradition against the backdrop of Sarah Kay’s aging mother The poem reveals the delicate contingency of life, and family, the precious nature of all shared time and accumulated language. But even this acknowledged mortality, the depleting daylight from which we can’t escape, does not negate the moments of wonder and brightness to be had.

Terrorism and violence, inescapable and pervasive in contemporary life, are perhaps the most challenging and confounding forces with which to contend in the little daylight we all have left. Kay reminds us that even the clear daylight blue skies can become terrorism can be harbingers – as they were during the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York or in Jakarta in 2019. Similarly, glorious post-party slivers of daylight can quickly become spotlights of existential and real terror, if an attacker catches sight of the unprotected and unsuspecting. Still, jokes, poetry, dating, relationships, art, and the onward march of human life continue, not out of a defiant perseverance, but because all the facets of human existence can occur in the little daylight left.

Some readers might find the way in which Sarah Kay represents these convergences to be challenging. Exaggerated font size and stylistic differences often announce the arrival of interrupted memory, of trauma, and other lasting and traumatic experiences.  Sometimes very wry asides appear in passages otherwise contending with serious subjects. And sometimes the unflinchingly and carefully articulated details of isolated longing –in a fertility clinic, for a lost love, for a life not subject to routine unwelcome intrusions– are so memorably illuminated that that starkness is unforgettable.   Still others might find the portrayal of New York City cosmopolitan life to be a little cliché in its revelry and self-aware finitude.   Taken as a whole, however, I think the depth and breadth of the emotional honesty of this collection, the ways in which Sarah Kay insists on witnessing  A Little Daylight Left pack a tremendous wallop.