Spent
Alison Bechdel
Mariner Books
We can start this review with a confession: I’m a bad queer cartoonist. I have never read Dykes To Watch Out For, the cult favorite comic strip created by Alison Bechdel. Luckily, the famed cartoonist's newest graphic novel, Spent, requires no background reading to enjoy. It’s a funny, charming reflection on liberal contradictions in an empire on the brink of fascism and climate chaos.
Spent’s opening chapter immediately hits two themes that are close to home for me. One is a feeling I only started having in earnest this past year- a distinct sense of futurelessness. The other has been my constant companion since I became politically aware: the compromises of attempting a career in the arts in the heart of the empire.
It’s that second theme which is the main focus of the book. Spent follows Alison Bechdel, a cartoonist turned pygmy goat farmer, as she works on her new book “$um” and navigates a rapidly changing world with a tight knit community. It’s nearly auto-biographical, though many of the details are exaggerated or altered. We are introduced to a cast of characters who are all a bit silly: an empty nest couple experimenting with polyamory; adult roommates; the young, radical, non-binary, asexual queer who is always asking their dad for $50; the Trump-loving sister who makes art out of seeds; and the one-time counter-cultural cartoonist who lives off of the TV adaptation of her life’s work. There is love in all of these depictions, but Bechdel is quick to poke fun at all of these people first, before you can.
This reflexive self-criticism might be familiar to anyone who has access to a certain amount of material privilege and has attempted to grapple with it. Through Spent, Bechdel struggles with the complicated feelings she holds around her access to wealth and security in a world that is slowly sliding out of control. I don’t know how this book might land to someone with less privilege, but it does feel honest.
One thing Spent does well is illustrate a specific mood from the past few years: this low, constant hum of trouble. Bechdel takes us through the COVID lockdown, a climate catastrophe, the repeal of Roe, the war on Gaza (albeit briefly), and an impending second Trump term, all while Bechdel herself navigates the mundane ways in which her own life interfaces with the power structures which caused these events. Bechdel floats off of money from the Amazon TV adaption of her book and she chooses to sell her new book to a publishing company owned by conservative billionaires undermining democracy.
Spent is a meditation on the way that capital compromises our values in quiet, insidious ways, making a mockery of our deepest held beliefs by underlining the inherent inconsistencies of our lives. If this all sounds very serious, that’s not exactly the tone of the book. Bechdel leans into the absurdity of these tensions and takes aim at the frequent frivolity of her life and concerns.
Bechdel never offers a resolution to the contradictions of her own modern existence. At the end of the first chapter, the character Alison Bechdel lays out a bold plan for her next graphic novel: “I’ve got to write a really good book about the corrupting influence of money. If I can do that honestly and rigorously enough, truly examining my own privilege and complicity… I might just put the final nail in the coffin of late-stage capitalism!” Bechdel is aware of the futility of this exercise; it is presented as patently ridiculous.
If Spent offers a remedy, it has something to do with community. The book forecasts a dark, uncertain future, but it also finds hope and resolve in Bechdel’s close, intergenerational group of friends. You get the sense that these connections are the thing she is most proud of in her life — even if she is quick to point out their failings alongside her own.
Read a second review of "Spent" authored by another Midbrow reviewer — Jenn McKee — on our site here.
