Bechdel's FUN HOME Name "Best Book of '06" by TIME

Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home has been named by TIME magazine, in its Person of the Year double issue, as the best book of 2006.

While this should certainly be seen as encouraging by those, myself included, who have long advocated the potential of the sequential art, or comic book, medium, the writers of the list, Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo, treat Fun Home as some sort of fluke, calling it "The most unlikely literary success of 2006..." They write, "Oh, and it's a comic book," as if before reading Bechdel's work they'd never considered that such a lowly, degenerated medium could be capable of conveying anything beyond the endless fight scenes of super-hero comics or the lame, warmed over daily gags of most newspaper strips, and even now don't quite believe it.

Nonetheless, Fun Home's perch atop a list that includes volumes by Cormac McCarthy and Dave Eggers is quite a public relations coup for this least respected of art forms, and, together with the article earlier this in PLAYBOY on the rise of the graphic novel, represents a great leap forward in the graphic novel's slow march to respectability.