Split-Level Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel

Big changes are set in motion in Split-Level Dykes To Watch Out For when many of Alison Bechdel's best-loved lesbian gals find themselves on the move. As they come up with plans to shift their living arrangements, their stress-test ratings careen off the charts.

Unwilling to end years of often contentious communal domesticity when their rented house is put up for sale, Ginger, Lois, and Sparrow decide to stay together and make a purchase offer. Jezanna has a man move in – relocating her father to live with her after her mother dies. Mo, ever desirous of righting the bad behavior of others, considers the cost-saving benefits of cohabitation with Sydney.

And all homophobia breaks out – not to mention other “isms' – when Clarice and Toni head for the suburbs with their son Raffi.

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The thousands of devoted readers who follow the weekly chronicles of Bechdel's cartoon heroines--Lois, Sparrow, Ginger, Jezanna, and Mo, among others--probably already know that the strips read best in book form, where Bechdel's sly observations of lesbian life in the 1990s can blend with her ongoing narrative into something like a sketchy but provocative novel. Split-Level Dykes, the eighth collection in the series, is no exception. Its two dominant story lines--politically correct Mo commits herself to the brainy and self-absorbed Sydney, while Clarice and Toni, lesbian moms of color, nearly break up over their move to the great white suburbs--keep the reader enthralled and anxious, easy prey to the comic relief of Sparrow's heterosexual panic and the dating foibles of the swashbuckling Lois. With an anthropologist's eye for social detail, Bechdel fleshes out her two-dimensional world into something you could consider either the best kind of beach reading or the stuff of doctoral dissertations. --Regina Marler