The misleading description of Fun Home 3/31

When I first opened Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, I naturally read the summary and description of it found on the inside cover. That opening sentence told me that Fun Home would be "A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books." I became genuinely excited after reading this description because I absolutely adore graphic novels and comics, and not the typical Marvel and DC superhero ones, but dark, twisted, comedic, and undeniably gothic works from cult famous authors. When I began to read Fun Home, I quickly began to see that it was NOTHING like the other works I had mentally compared it to, and in that respect i became automatically disappointed by it. 

My favorite comic of all time is Johnny the Homicidal Maniac by Jhonen Vasquez (who is most famous for being the creator of the cartoon Invader Zim). The comic follows the extremely violent and incredibly humorous adventures of Johnny, a gothic artist who becomes a serial killer after supernatural forces invade his mind and begin to drain him of his sanity. 

An Image from Johnny the Homicidal Maniac by Jhonen Vasquez

I would like to state that I never expected Fun Home to be anything like Johnny The Homicidal Maniac, (mostly due to the fact that any comic like this would never be appropriate to teach in an english class) The only reason I mention it at all is because to me, this is the prototype of what "gothic" graphic novel is that deals with "angst" and death. 

The title Fun Home itself is deceptive to me. Without even reading the comic I understood that "fun" was short for "funeral" (so it was not that I was expecting this to be a cheery positive book) But the funeral home itself is not greatly mentioned in the story. The funeral home's greatest significance is that it is the reason Bechdel's father left Germany to return home, so he could take over the business after his father died. Bechdel herself mentions how her and her brothers used to play in the funeral home as children (and they certainly did seem to have fun there) but since the title of the book was Fun Home I expected the building itself to be much more prevalent to the story. It hardly mentions that her father even works as a mortician in the funeral home after chapter 2. I expected the story to focus much more on his duties as a mortician, or possibly that his children would grow to inherit the business from him, but nothing like that ever happens. By the end of the book the funeral home is virtually unmentioned, and for this reason it does not make sense to me why Bechdel would select this as the title of her novel. The house that she actually grows up in has much greater significance to the story itself than the funeral home does. I just find the title Fun Home to be incredibly misleading because this is not the story of people who live or work in a funeral home. (That is just a very small piece of thier lives that is not deeply explored.)

Also i never saw any "gothic twists" in this novel at all. What was gothic about it? The fact that her family owns a funeral home (which as I just stated isn't frequently mentioned) the fact that the live in an old fashioned house? Or perhaps its the fact that her father commits suicide, which I would certainly consider a dark element, however it is not a "gothic" one. The most "gothic" thing about this entire comic would be the two pages in which Bechdel compares her family to The Addams Family and includes illustrations from Charles Addams comics. Perhaps this novel could have looked more gothic if it was drawn in black and white, but in a very non-gothic contrast it contains shades of a blueish green color. The addition of this color gives the entire novel a lighter appeal than black and white artwork would have. I am still wondering where the "gothic" is in Fun House and I do not think I will ever see it. 

The last thing in the description that I did not find much of was "sexual angst." Yes, there is a lot of sexuality, and questions of sexual identity and orientation, however the little sexual "angst" that we find comes from Bechdel's father, and none of this angst is actually stated, only inferred by the reader. The closest we come to hearing sexual angst is in chapter 6 when he tells Alison "I'm bad. Not good like you." but as a reader we only know he is referring to shame of his sexuality because it has been mentioned elsewhere in the book, and that statement alone would not reveal that to us. 

Although Fun Home was not what I had initially expected it to be, I did genuinely enjoy the book. It was an interesting story of the sexual identity of a father and daughter and how the express and handle their sexuality different based on the times that they live in. Something like that should have been used as the description for the book instead of emphasizing on the funeral home and all of the gothic twists that it does not contain.