I didn’t even know what a graphic novel was until I started hearing about Alison Bechdel’s highly-lauded 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. 

Bechdel creates a comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For, but this was her first foray into longer works.  Featuring comic strip-style pages, Fun Home is Bechdel’s autobiography and focuses on her relationship with her closeted gay father, an English teacher and funeral parlor owner, in Pennsylvania. The book is darker than any comic strip allows—it focuses on Bechdel’s mother’s ruin because of her husband’s homosexuality, her father’s trial for an inappropriate relationship with a young boy and Bechdel's father’s eventual suicide.  With this book, Bechdel redefined the gravitas of the genre.