‘Don’t just pick a cheap paperback’: new textual encounters in the 2022 republication of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

Publishers often release new editions of books to attract fresh audiences, especially when these works have recently been adapted into other media. However, these new editions not only make such books visible to new readers but also shape their reception. Nowhere is this truer than in comics, a medium whose materiality is central to its interpretation. This paper examines the effects of republication on comics’ reception through a comparison of the two physical editions of Alison Bechdel’s critically acclaimed 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, currently available on the UK market: the Vintage mass-market paperback (2022) and the original publication by Jonathan Cape (2006). It examines how material and paratextual differences between the editions influence who reads Fun Home and lead to two different textual encounters that shape the comic’s meaning.