Panels in "Fun Home"

Out of the entirety of Alison Bechdel's graphic novel "Fun Home," there were two pages towards the end that really stuck out to me apart from the others. Pages 220 and 221 depict Bechdel and her father in the car, discussing their sexuality. What initially stuck out to me was the format of these two pages: every panel is even in size and distance from the others, and there are twelve on each page.

Throughout the rest of the book, the pages have roughly the same amount of panels, but they'd be laid out in different arrangements and set apart by narration in the gutters. On pages 220 and 221, there is no gutter narration, only dialogue between Bechdel and her father, and a small bit of narration within the panel, discussing the moment.

What this layout does is prolong the scene. It makes the moment stretch for a while, forcing the reader to take a moment of their own to look at each panel. Reading these two pages myself, I was struck by how often Bechdel and her father mirror each other with their body language. This seems particularly important because it's the first time Bechdel seems to really connect with him in a non-literature driven way.

But we also get to see how fragile this moment is, in that Bechdel decides that as soon as her father starts opening up, she should keep "still, like he was a splendid deer [she] didn't want to startle." And then we see that the moment she allows herself to get excited when he says something she could connect to (how he used to dress up in girl's clothes), he shuts down and the conversation ends.

The paneling here, despite being so different from the rest of the text, really works in showing us this moment of connection. The very last panel on 221 even states that the moment ended too soon. Perhaps Bechdel wishes it could have gone on longer, and that's why she used this paneled layout to drag out the scene. To spend maybe a little more time with her father, connected and understanding of one another.