Ari Karpel

Back in April 2011, Keith Ablow — a mystery novelist and forensic psychiatrist whose hate-spewing distortions are regularly presented by Fox News Channel and its website as the perspective of a legitimate mental health professional — was blogging about that day’s choice of topic: J. Crew’s Jenna Lyons, who, as creative director of the retail clothing company, had recently done a playful photo shoot with herself and her son, Beckett, who had his toenails painted hot pink. Mon dieu!

Alison Bechdel’s first graphic memoir, 2006’s Fun Home, about her coming out, her father's sexuality and his presumed suicide, was incredibly difficult to write. But in retrospect it was the easy one. Easy, that is, in comparison to the follow-up. “My father had been dead for 20 years,” Bechdel explains. echdel explains that the negative one was written by Dwight Garner, a critic who had previously praised a collection of her cartoons, Dykes to Watch Out For.