When you’re on the cover of Kirkus Reviews, an artist draws your portrait. Very cool. To grace the cover of our Graphic Lit Issue, you draw yourself. That’s extra.

“It’s a great honor,” says Alison Bechdel, the Eisner Award–winning author/illustrator of Fun Home, Are You My Mother?, and The Secret to Superhuman Strength, who made her name with the cult-classic comic strip “Dykes To Watch Out For,” which ran in LGBTQ+ and feminist newspapers from 1983 to 2008. A Broadway musical based on Fun Home was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2014.

“I’ve had fun drawing my self-portrait,” she says of our cover image. “I’m definitely putting on an air of grandeur.”

When pressed, Bechdel says the portrait might be inspired by Rembrandt (“I guess, just because he did so many self-portraits”). But I think she’s serving poet Marianne Moore (the stateliness, the hat). Furthermore, I think her new comic novel, Spent (Mariner Books, May 20), should be noted for its “formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit,” which is how the MacDowell Foundation characterizes Moore’s poetry.

“I like that,” Bechdel says of the Moore quartet, when asked what she’d like her work to be remembered for. “I think the formal innovation might be a little questionable, but I could probably come up with an argument.”

So could Kirkus: “Bechdel is such a master of her craft that it might take a little while to appreciate what she does here,” we write in a starred review of Spent, the story of a critically acclaimed, commercially successful middle-aged lesbian cartoonist who lives on a pygmy goat farm in Vermont with her partner. That Alison—based on Bechdel’s actual self, but not actually Bechdel—is at work on her next book. Meanwhile, she’s reckoning with artistic integrity, doomsday headlines, online orders, large animal vet bills, and her friends’ activism and affairs. “Alison and her friends are beautiful and ridiculous and ridiculously beautiful,” we note, calling this witty tale of their travails “incisive, tender, and funny—often at the same time.”

Bechdel spoke with me via Zoom from her home in Vermont. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How’d you get going on Spent?

It was going to be a straightforward memoir of me examining my privilege, culture under capitalism, and a political system that’s been taken over by money. I wanted to talk about money, but then it just really did seem too depressing—and, more to the point, too boring to research. I didn’t want to have to read books about economics. I didn’t want to have to read Marx. I just wanted to make little riffs on Marx. So it turned into a book about someone trying to write a book about money, which was much more fun.

When it comes to acknowledging one’s privilege…?

Look at it, feel the discomfort, and keep going.

What were some of your favorite elements to draw in this book?

It’s funny, because you do have to keep drawing certain things over and over again. I did have a lot of fun with the cats. There’s five cats and six or seven goats, and I had to keep drawing them and keeping track of their patterns and stuff. [She begins flipping through a copy of Spent.] I like drawing—sorry, I’m just now just seeing all the mistakes I made in the book!

You know, it was really fun drawing my old characters from “Dykes To Watch Out For,” who reappear in this book as my friends down the hill in Burlington. I got to imagine how they’d all aged. When I last drew them, it was 2008; now they’re almost 20 years older. I liked figuring out exactly how much weight they had put on, and how gray their hair had gotten.

This book doesn’t shy away from how messed up the world has gotten in the last 20 years: politically, socially, economically, environmentally. In light of this dumpster fire we’re dealing with now, can you tell me why we should keep making art?

Oh, man, I don’t know. One theme of the book is how difficult it is to focus on anything, let alone trying to write or draw. Alison [the character] has this problem concentrating, not just because of all the usual attention-grabbing distractions, but the news, the horrible upheaval that we’re living through, this crazy—I don’t even know what to call it.

I wrote the book before the last election, of course. I didn’t know how that was going to turn out, so I had to sort of leave it open. But whatever happened, I knew: We’re in deep trouble. We have a lot of very intractable problems that we’ve got to figure out how to solve, and we need to do it together. We need to do it in the same room, and we need to stop bickering.

I’ve been trying to think of some uniting force, some idea to rally around. To me, there are the people who think that other people are people. Then there’s another group of people—and I must believe that it’s a smaller group—who think they’re better than other people. Who see others as less than.

I mean, they don’t even see others. I think that’s exactly it: There’s a failure on the part of many people to see others.

I feel really lucky to have turned out to be a lesbian. In my youth, once I became, essentially, an Other to the mainstream, it was like a gift. I could see everyone. I could see the way power was structured, and the way that certain people were left out.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how—in the whole course of my work, from “Dykes To Watch Out For,” through my memoirs about my parents, to this current book—I’m always trying to figure out the relationship between myself and other people on a political level. Looking at the ways people are oppressed on an intimate level, in families and relationships. Looking at the ways we have a hard time understanding other people. How we can make them into projections of ourselves, rather than letting them have their own subjectivity. Rather than having mutuality.

There’s a great fear of other people among a certain segment of the population. I mean, you know, I say that, but—I too just want to go in my room and watch Netflix. Sometimes I don’t want to be around people. People are difficult. People can be a pain in the ass, just as Alison’s friends in the book are. They kind of get under her skin, but she also really loves them and enjoys being with them.

Who do you hope picks up this book?

When I stopped drawing my comic strip in 2008, ironically, I had just started to reach a broader audience, beyond the lesbian or the queer audience. I was starting to get more of a general progressive audience, which was very exciting to me, because—even though, yes, most of the characters are queer—why shouldn’t everyone read this? You know, I’m watching shows about straight people all the time. My great hope for this book is that it reaches as many different people as possible.

Editor at large Megan Labrise hosts the Fully Booked podcast.