When I got The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel, it’s so huge I thought it would be the kind of thing I would occassionally dip into. Uh-uh! This long-running lesbian soap opera is so addictive I stormed through the entire book start to finish in a week, denying myself food, water and sleep for ‘just one more page’. Or twenty. It’s a pretty famous strip so I won’t go into great detail, but this is a really great collection that brings the strip from it’s beginings in the 1980s to the modern day (it ended in 2008), with a comic foreward by Alison. I love being able to see how an artist’s style has evolved over the years; it’s difficult to notice a change in your own work until one day you find an ancient comic in the bottom of a drawer and think ‘what the hell, I used to draw like that and think it was GOOD?!’ (Not that I’m saying the early DTWOF were badly drawn, just different!)