Alison Bechdel has been chronicling the lives of a small universe of cartoon characters in her comic strip "Dykes To Watch Out For," which has been syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers in the USA and has been published in eleven volumes. For this first time, this collection gathers the best of those volumes in one book.

Bechdel's brilliantly imagined counter-cultural band of friends — academics, social workers, booksellers — fall in and out of love, negotiate relationships, raise children, switch careers, and cope with aging parents. These comics will make you think and laugh and fall in love with this imaginary community of people. The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For fuses high and low culture — from foreign domestic policy to domestic routine, postmodern theory to hot sex — in a serial graphic narrative 'suitable for all humanist persuasions'.