Alison Bechdel Spoke on May 28 at the Rio

In partnership with Bookshop Santa Cruz, it was great to have Alison Bechdel speak about her latest graphic novel, “Spent.”

From Lookout. “For the record, Alison Bechdel’s new graphic novel, “Spent: A Comic Novel,” was written well before the second inauguration of Donald Trump. But one of the many lines that nicely capture the book’s thorny themes hits particularly close to home in the annus horribilis of 2025. A progressive writer running a pygmy goat farm in Vermont — conveniently also named Alison Bechdel — tells her wife and goat-farming partner, “Okay, we’ll quit Amazon Prime. Right after I order some goat diapers.”