On publication in 2006, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home was hailed as one of the masterpieces of the graphic form. Time magazine chose it as the best book of that year and critics on both sides of the Atlantic praised it for its emotional complexity and the seriousness of its writing. Nick Hornby called it 'as satisfying a literary experience as you're likely to have this year'.

Long before Fun Home, however, Alison Bechdel had been chronicling the lives of a small universe of cartoon characters in her strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which is syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers in the USA and has been published in eleven volumes. Now, at last, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For gathers the best of those volumes, together with sixty of the newest strips.

Settle into this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it 'half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel') of the lives, loves, and politics of a cast of characters, most of them lesbian, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis.

Bechdel(s brilliantly imagined countercultural band of friends - academics, social workers, booksellers - fall in and out of love, negotiate friendships, raise children, switch careers and cope with ageing parents. The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For fuses high and low culture - from foreign policy to domestic routine, postmodern theory to hot sex - in a serial graphic narrative 'suitable for humanists of all persuasions'.

'[Fun Home is] unquestionably the best graphic novel I have read so far...Graphically, she is genuinely innovative...She is also a gifted storyteller.' - Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times