Described as one of the most important graphic novelists working today, she is known for "Dykes to Watch Out For" and a famous test of gender representation in movies

Alison Bechdel, an American cartoonist and graphic novelist known for her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, will speak on the University of Colorado Boulder campus this month.

“An Evening With Alison Bechdel,” is scheduled for Thursday, Nov. 17, at 7 p.m. in the University Memorial Center Glenn Miller Ballroom. Tickets—which are $2.50 for students, $5 for faculty and staff and $7.50 for the general public—can be obtained at this link.

Bechdel, who has been described as one of the most important graphic novelists working today, is also the creator of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, The Secret to Superhuman Strength and the now-famous “Bechdel Test.”

The Bechdel Test emanated from a Dykes to Watch Out For strip and is a measure of the representation of women in movies. In the strip, a character says she will watch a movie only if it has at least two women who talk to each other about a topic other than men.

Later, that metric became known as the Bechdel Test, yielding lists showing that, for instance, Breakfast at Tiffany’s fails the test, whereas movies gaining a passing grate include Frozen, Hidden Figures and Mad Max: Fury Road.

Bechdel’s Fun Home is described as a graphic memoir of her coming of age with a closeted, gay father. The work was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it won the Eisner—the most-prestigious award in the comics industry—for best reality-based work. Fun Home was adapted as a musical that won a Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015.

Bechdel’s visit is supported by CU Boulder’s Department of English, Graduate School, College of Arts and Sciences, and College of Engineering and Applied Science.