Graffic Traffic
by Ryk McIntyre
illustration by Greg Prindeville
It hasn’t been a good start to the year, comically speaking. With the depressing news of no more Calvin & Hobbes, and just one more issue each of Sandman and Love & Rockets… it just makes y’wanna go hmm. Add to that the fact that the only two Marvel Comics worth half a fuck are either losing the writer that made it worth it (Doom 2099 #39 is Warren Ellis’ last) or in complete confusion (is The Incredible Hulk canceled or what? Even Peter David doesn’t seem to know), and there’s talk of, get this, Marvel licensing characters and concepts to Image Comics. Maybe we should check Hell for snowballs.
If it wasn’t for the good ones we’d have none at all. And from Cleis Press comes one of the best, the second trade paperback collection of Diane DiMassa’s The Revenge of Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. If I said this collection was “the balls” you would know what I meant, but I’d have to be shot for using such a male term in connection with this work. Needless to say, it’s unique, individual, utterly fearless, and, as a whole, is unflawed as a total piece of work.
I once said that Roberta Gregory’s Naughty Bits should be required reading for high-school age males, so as to let them in on what a women’s world even reads like. That would make Hothead Paisan the equivalent of the Scared Straight program. This stuff is entertaining, but it is really angry. And it’s right.
A while ago in this column, I reviewed the first compilation of Diane DiMassa’s work and I told you then that you should go out and buy it. Don’t make me repeat myself. Now if you’re a woman (or womyn, or grrrl) fan of Hothead, then you don’t need me to tell you. But if you’re a guy, and you’re anywhere on the scale from “Fuggin-A boy” to “Sensitive Male, Suck My Dick,” this book has your name on it, you hear me? It knows you. It’s angry with you. Even if you’re neither of those people, shut up. Read. Learn something. I was tempted to call this collection “The long, dark night of Hothead’s Soul” as the purer comic tone in the first collection (first 10 issues basically) is often supplanted by a lead-heavy kick-in-the-teeth look, not what makes Hothead a homicidal terrorist, but even scarier, what defeats her, fills her with dread, makes even her wanna give up. You want to see what our (you guys and me) world looks like to women, gays, outsiders, those who are all three? Read this. Shut up. Learn something. And give Diane DiMassa your money so she can keep doing this kind of thing.
It’s hard to think of what to recommend, my comic pile seems to be shrinking (sounds like a personal problem) and not a lot of new stuff seems to present itself. Obviously, I need to look harder, farther and wider. Any suggestions on what I should review? Maybe your self-published thing? Contact me c/o this magazine which I’m sure you bought or subscribed to, and aren’t just reading gratis on the newsstand, right?
On the other side of the world, in so many ways, we have another trade paperback, this time from that House of Used Ideas, Image Comics, in which we ask the question again, “Should I buy everything Alan Moore writes, even if it’s Violator vs. BadRock? I may not be qualified to answer that point as, after discovering what a great writer the ol’ bearded prophet was, I ran out and even bought Green Lantern Corps. Quarterly or Detective, just because it had an eight-page Alan Moore back-up story. Good Christ, there were even a couple of Omega Men comics I just had to have.
Maybe it’s just having a kid that cured me of being such an anal completist. I’d like to think I didn’t really need a mule to kick me in the head.
Violator vs. BadRock wasn’t that bad for an hour’s read. It actually approaches that statement Image Comic founders made way back at the beginning, “We just wanna make the kinda comics we liked as kids…” True, it’s the sub-moronic world of Image heroes (a world that makes Marvel and DC look like Libraries Of Rational Story Telling), but I have to admit, Alan Moore can even make these characters interesting… to a point. The story: Bad Rock is hired to be security at a test lab that wants to explore Hell for Comparative Biologies… and maybe Mineral Rights. The obsessed science-babe makes Pamela Anderson pale and sag in comparison and if it weren’t for Mr. Moore’s ability to turn a phrase, rake a witticism, or invert a cliché, it would just plain fall flat. As it is it’s a nice goofy story that I wouldn’t sweat buying a protective plastic cover for.
