There is no greater thrill in Vermont journalism than driving for miles to the end of a dirt road for an interview with a stranger — followed, 10 minutes into the conversation, by a thought bubble: This could well be the most interesting person I’ve ever met.
That was my experience as one of the lucky arts writers who tracked down and wrote about Alison Bechdel soon after she moved here from Minneapolis in the early 1990s. The creator of “Dykes to Watch Out For” had already cultivated a nationwide following among lesbians, and she spent her days drawing and also mailing merch related to her biweekly comic strip.
But at that particular moment in 1994, before smartphones, cars equipped with GPS, or Seven Days, the rest of the world was just catching on. The paper I worked for then, Vermont Times, had already published at least one feature about Bechdel. Mine would be for the alumni magazine of her alma mater, Oberlin College.
When I knocked on her door in Duxbury, Bechdel was funny and self-deprecating in a way that immediately made me feel at ease. I remember how seriously she considered my questions and answered even the dumb ones with mind-blowing insight and honesty.
Thirty years later, that’s still her MO. Whether I run into her at the YMCA, City Market or gatherings of mutual friends, she is always thoughtful and also charmingly tortured by the superficiality of it all. Neither of us has time for small talk! Despite her success — a MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant,” a guest professorship at Yale, a cartoon cameo on “The Simpsons” and her first graphic memoir, Fun Home, being made into a Tony Award-winning musical — she is as authentic as the day I met her.
As generous, too. Over the past three decades, as she has been building global fame, Bechdel has never said no to Seven Days, which published “Dykes” from July 16, 1997, until she stopped doing the strip altogether, in 2008. She’s drawn covers and comics for the paper, as well as cards and custom birthday art for staffers, like me, who have become friends.
There are at least three visual references to the paper — including a full-on appearance by video journalist Eva Sollberger — in Bechdel’s new book, Spent: A Comic Novel. She perfectly captures the Vermont bubble, from the farmers market stand selling maple CBD beard oil to the hipster neighbors who escaped Brooklyn during the pandemic. It’s a feast for the eyes.
Similarly, New Yorker cartoonist Harry Bliss has been contributing to Seven Days for almost the entirety of our existence. The late, great Ed Koren tipped us off that a colleague was living in Vermont and suggested that he might be persuaded to do some work for us. Koren, who had the highest technical standards, grudgingly admitted that Bliss could draw.
And how. The first cover he contributed, a Shiva-inspired illustration for the Women’s Issue, was in February 2000. Two years later we started running his single-panel cartoon, “Bliss,” which has reliably made me laugh every week since April 17, 2002. I loved his Men’s Issue cover on June 9, 2004, depicting a liberated caveman vacuuming while holding a baby. For the Death Issue, on October 26, 2022, he drew the grim reaper raking autumn leaves, his scythe leaning against a tree.
Last year, he helped us revamp our Fun Stuff pages by pitching his fellow New Yorker freelancers.
Bechdel and Bliss both have new books out. So culture coeditor Dan Bolles — who has written extensively about Bliss over the years — decided to mark the coincidence by asking them to interview each other for our annual Cartoon Issue. As usual, they agreed. Their freewheeling discussion is this week’s cover story.
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While writing this column, I’ve been fact-checking with the two of them. When I reached Bliss, he had just gotten off the phone with comedian Steve Martin, his collaborator on two books. Bechdel was newly returned from a gig in Switzerland.
Even jet-lagged, she found the time to look through her journals to answer one of my questions. Then she sent a follow-up email recounting the first time she and Harry met, “just in case this is helpful for your column about us.”
“I was copying my strips at Kinko’s — remember Kinko’s??” she wrote. “And this guy came over and looked very closely at what I was doing, then said something nice about my drawing. He introduced himself, and I had just learned about him … maybe it was around the time he moved here. And you might have just written about him in 7D. Anyway, I was very excited to meet an actual New Yorker cartoonist.”
When I reminded Bliss of the Burlington encounter, he replied: “Yes! Alison, first met her at a Kinko’s around 11 o’clock at night on Main Street, and she was making copies next to me or behind me.”
As her strip rolled out of the copier, “I was taken aback,” he recalled, “because they were beautifully drawn, really good stuff. I had no idea who she was, knew nothing about her strip, but that’s typical of me, fairly unaware of what’s going on in my own field most of the time.
“But I knew Alison’s art was terrific, and I said something to her to that effect,” he continued. “I actually recall leaving the Kinko’s after we met and feeling happier because it’s always nice to see another cartoonist that good and in such close proximity.”
Nice, indeed, for all of us.
The original print version of this article was headlined “When Harry Met Alison”
This article appears in The Cartoon Issue 2025.
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