Alison Bechdel is famous for her rule about how to evaluate women characters in movies. I didn't have first hand experience of her work, so I picked up Spent from the library. It turns out that this book is part of a series, and you really have a hard time reading it without having read the other books in the series. You can pick it up from context, but with such a large cast of characters I found it really hard to care about most of them. Actually, I found it impossible to care about any of them.
First of all, the book is sort of an autobiography --- the main character is Alison Bechdel, a successful cartoonist whose books got turned into a TV show. She has to struggle with her trump supporting sister who in reaction is writing a book of her own, her partner who's a goat farmer of sorts, and various characters that move in and out of her house.
The book depicts left wing liberal angst to an extreme. I find it hard to believe people actually talk or behave like this in real life (and I consider myself extremely left wing, or at least, anti-right wing). Do people really conflate Marxism with polyamory and all sorts of other things? Is this meant to be funny? If it is, I'm afraid the humor is entirely lost on me. Similarly, there's a lot of angst about money (despite having a lot of success), but given what the characters spend money on it's hard to reconcile that with the plotlines.
The art is OK. Nothing special. The worst thing about the hardback is that it's hard to keep it open to read! The kindle version is probably the one to get just to avoid that problem, but I was too cheap to buy the book and just read it from the library. Good thing I did. I'd be unhappy if I spent any of my hard earned money on a book with effectively no plot and no interesting characters.
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