During the 2025 Hanson Lecture, Bechdel, writer and artist behind “Fun Home” and the Bechdel test, and Northeastern faculty and students examined how comics are a powerful tool for truth-telling and empathy.
At their best, books are more than just a bound collection of paper and ink –– they are a revelation.
In “Fun Home,” the landmark graphic novel memoir, cartoonist Alison Bechdel depicts the moment she stumbled on “Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives,” a collection of interviews with gay men and women where they candidly talk about their lives and decision to come out. Reading through that book at age 19 helped the pieces finally fall into place for Bechdel and have the long-simmering epiphany that she is a lesbian.
For Meg Cassidy, an undergraduate English student at Northeastern University, “Fun Home” was that book.
“It introduced me to this new, exciting world and let me know what kind of life was possible for me,” Cassidy says. “Reading about people who felt how you felt, the narrator being able to find words like ‘lesbian’ in the dictionary, these things mean something. You have a word for what you are, language for who you are. They are reminders that you are not alone in this world.”
Bechdel, who spoke to a packed, standing-room-only crowd during Northeastern’s 2025 Hanson Lecture, has made a similar mark on countless others through her graphic novels and comics that depict not only queerness but the need to search for truth in every story and humanity in every person.
“It’s a fundamental aspect of the human condition that it’s difficult to really see other people, to see others, to really empathize with them, to understand that they have as much of a right to their space, to their autonomy, as we ourselves do,” Bechdel says.
“I wanted to tell the truth about my life and these people like me,” she adds. “Although I did feel deep down that if people could see us, then how could they help but love us.”
Bechdel, who is releasing a new graphic novel, “Spent,” this spring, first came to prominence in the 1980s with her comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For.” Running until 2008, it charted the daily lives, love lives and political lives of a group of characters, mostly lesbians, living in an American city.
In 2006, “Fun Home” helped pave the way for the world to see graphic novels as a cultural force. The autobiographical graphic novel delved into her childhood, experience coming out and relationship with her father, who she learned was a closeted queer man shortly before he stepped in front of a truck and died at the age of 44. It was hugely successful and was later adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical.
However, she is perhaps most widely known for the so-called Bechdel test, or Bechdel-Wallace test. First mentioned in a strip of “Dykes to Watch Out For,” the Bechdel test proposes a method of determining how well women are represented in fiction. If a story has at least two women who speak to each other about something other than a man, it passes the test. It has since escaped the pages of her comic strip and become a common metric in conversations around pop culture.
Bechdel admits that the message behind the test and much of her work is basic –– “that women are human” –– but that it became viral because of the power of comics.
“When you’re able to use both words and pictures, you’re getting at people on multiple levels and something magical can happen,” Bechdel says.
Paraphrasing another quote of Bechdel’s, Hillary Chute, a distinguished professor of English and art and design at Northeastern who has known Bechdel for decades, says “if you can triangulate between words and images in the space between them, then maybe that’s where the truth lies.” Add humor to the equation, as Bechdel often does, and you have a powerful vehicle for storytelling.
“One of the reasons her works are so rich and so appealing and compelling is that even in the most serious of her works about death, about discrimination, there is always an undercurrent of humor,” Chute says. “Comics present that in a way that doesn’t make it overpowering but can make it a thread that runs throughout the story.”
For Bechdel, starting “Dykes to Watch Out For” in the early 1980s wasn’t about starting a career. It was about using that unique combination of words and images to celebrate, and humanize, the community of people she had found after coming out.
“I didn’t see people who looked like me or my friends reflected in the culture around me,” Bechdel says. “I felt this almost craving to see an accurate representation of these amazing people. While I didn’t feel like much of an activist, I could draw. So, I just started making that reflection myself.”
Decades later, that message resonates for a new generation of queer youth who are finding their own way to improve the world around them.
“People talking about their sexuality was a shock to me, and this was years after the comic had finished its run,” says Benji Rosenfeldt, an undergraduate English student at Northeastern. “Alison Bechdel wrote about real experiences that ring true in a way that many other stories can kind of feel hollow and fall flat.”
Bechdel broke down the barriers between memoir and graphic novel with “Fun Home,” its follow-up “Are You My Mother?” and fitness-meets-spirituality focused “The Secret to Superhuman Strength.” Woven through all these works are a need to find and share truth and, in the process, bring people closer together in their shared humanity, Bechdel says. Empathy is not just a luxury; it’s a necessity.
“Our self-interest necessitates other interests,” Bechdel says. “It’s only by cooperating and working together that we will survive as a species. … Let’s try to overcome our stupid little differences and work together because [some] people would rather destroy our complex, interdependent, multicultural, pluralistic democracy than share it.”