August 11, 2006

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

eveningsout

Lazy Summer Day? ·

Not your mother's Hothead Rent a Bike!

by Anthony Glassman

The one form of literature that has taken the most strides forward in the last twenty years must be the graphic novel.

Sure, the graphic novel still hears as it's walking down the street, "What's up, comic book?" But the slight, real or imagined, doesn't sting for too long.

Graphic novel understands that the Europeans took the format and made it something for adults, and a surge of British writers and artists working for American companies in the 1980s and '90s spawned a similar evolution here.

Graphic novel knows that Art Spiegelman's Maus, a two-part novel in illustration, forever established the art form in this country, and the spawn of Spiegelman and those Europeans are running across the countryside, writing and drawing and chronicling their lives in sketches.

One of the newest releases is Jokes and the Subconscious by performance poet Daphne Gottlieb and cartoonist Diane DiMassa (Cleis, $17.95, trade paperback). DiMassa is, of course, known far and wide as the creator of Hothead Paisan, Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, the manic, frenetic tales of a labyris-wielding lunatic who avenges wrongs against women in general and lesbians in particular. Many a mighty male fell to her powerful battle-axe.

Wow, did that just sound way too Dungeons and Dragons for its own good.

Anyway, DiMassa illustrates and Gottlieb writes the disjointed tale of Sasha, a young woman whose father has just died. He got her a job in the billing office of a hospital, and she spends her days going into people's rooms to get paperwork corrected.

Sasha also delves into the computer for the medical records of friends and foes alike, finding such gratifying tidbits as her exboyfriend's treatment for genital warts.

In between episodes in her life, DiMassa and Gottlieb put in jokes-off-color jokesillustrating the connection to the work by Sigmund Freud that spawned the book's title, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.

On the page before the story begins, there

Jokes and the Unconscious

is an illustration of Freud and Groucho Marx, complete with the psychoanalyst's quote from his book: "The idea of comic relief has been present in everything from the Greek theater to Shakespeare, and we all understand that laughter is a great way to release pent-up emotions. This same phenomenon is the origin of 'off color' or 'tasteless' jokes-laughter mediates between us and our discomfort with mortality, sexuality, ethnicity or any other touchy subject."

In the next hundred or so pages, the creators go on to, ahem, illustrate that point with some pretty funny jokes and some very poignant interludes.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is seeing the evolution of DiMassa's work. This is not the same art that filled Hothead Paisan. This is less spastic, more mature, which is a likely consequence of growing up. While her older work was fun, this work is thought-provoking and intriguing.

Together, the slam poet and the comic artist have done the format proud.

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