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In 1991, a New Haven artist named Diane DiMassa<\/a> got so fed up with the rampant homophobia, misogyny, hypocrisy, social injustice and just plain rudeness she was seeing every day and poured her frustrations into a wild adventure of cartoon vengeance perpetrated by an axe-wielding take-no-prisoners provocateur named Hothead Paisan<\/a>.<\/p>\n The self-published comics were extreme, explicit, riotous and hysterical. They fit the hardcore punk attitudes bubbling up in the counterculture of radical feminism at the time. They sold well in book stores, underground bookshops and comics shops throughout the country.<\/p>\n \u201cI had no idea there was a zine explosion going on,\u201d DiMassa said. She just knew she needed to vent her feelings through her art. In the back of the first issue of \u201cHothead Paisan,\u201d in a section of the comic that in future issues would be overflowing with effusive comments from devoted readers, DiMassa editorialized: \u201cBy the way \u2026 how come all you very talented queers aren\u2019t doing more cartoons? Huh? No excuses!! Just do it!!! It\u2019s important! It\u2019s cathartic! It\u2019s not easy! You get neck criks and baggy eyes and the pay sucks and the cat jumps on it with dirty feet but if you don\u2019t do who will?\u201d<\/p>\n Taking her own advice, Dimassa filled 20 more issues with Hothead\u2019s extroverted exploits over the next decade. Most of that work, plus selected examples of the character\u2019s leap into other media such as stickers and candy bar wrappers, has been collected in a new book. \u201cHothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist\u201d which was published by the prestigious New York Review Comics imprint of New York Review Books.<\/p>\n DiMassa will be discussing her work and signing copies of the new book on Sept. 25 at 6:30 p.m. at Real Art Ways in Hartford. It\u2019s one in a series of readings she\u2019s giving around New England to celebrate the new collection.<\/p>\n DiMassa said New York Review Comics editor Lucas Adams reached out to her out of the blue and said they want to get Hothead Paisan back in print. \u201cI pulled out everything I had and they were blown away. Then they got even more jazzed when they asked who owned the rights to it and I said \u2018I do!’\u201d<\/p>\n The publisher has amplified the collection with a long interview with DiMassa, an afterword by the artist herself and a few pieces that were published outside of the original comics. There is also an introduction by the celebrated writer and activist Sarah Schulman, whose dozens of books include the novels \u201cPeople in Trouble\u201d and \u201cRat Bohemia,\u201d the plays \u201cCarson McCullers\u201d and \u201cThe Lady Hamlet\u201d and the nonfiction works \u201cMy American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan\/Bush Years\u201d and \u201cLet the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993.\u201d Schulman is an ideal person to comment on the continued impact of DiMassa\u2019s work.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen Hothead turns on the TV, the screen clearly spells out the message \u2018You don\u2019t exist, freak,\u2019 This self-proclaimed \u2018homicidal lesbian terrorist\u2019 might seem to be locked in the past \u2014 when rage was visible and we had our own presses, so our true feelings could be expressed and circulated \u2014 but a reread shows Diane DiMassa to be acutely prophetic. She predicted a world beyond the gender binary long before the language had even cohered,\u201d Schulman wrote.<\/p>\n New York Review Comics is dedicated to republishing significant graphic narrative art that\u2019s long been out of print. Previous collections include work by Black 1960s cartoonist Charles Johnson (\u201cAll Your Racial Problems Will Soon End\u201d), Mark Beyer\u2019s post-modern depressive saga of Amy and Jordan (\u201cAgony\u201d), Belgian artist Dominique Goblet\u2019s cartoon memoir \u201cPretending is Lying,\u201d existentialist 1940s New Yorker cartoonist Abner Dean\u2019s \u201cWhat Am I Doing Here?\u201d and long forgotten graphic novels such as William Gropper\u2019s \u201cAlay-Oop.\u201d<\/p>\n DiMassa is not the first Connecticut artist to receive a New York Review Comics reprint. Ernie Bushmiller\u2019s \u201cNancy & Sluggo\u2019s Guide to Life\u201d and Mort Walker\u2019s \u201cLexicon of Comicana\u201d are also among the dozens of titles in the press\u2019 catalogue.<\/p>\n The book runs over 450 pages but is not quite a complete collection of all the Hothead Paisan comics. Issue No. 20, which was a comical lexicon of words and phrases associated with Hothead rather than a conventional comics story, is being saved for a future collection, as are random drawings and illustrations from beyond the comics. There were also several Hothead Paisan calendars which weren\u2019t represented here.<\/p>\n A more complete single-volume collection of Hothead Paisan comics came out in 1999 from Cleis Press, which had previously published two separate collections. The Cleis Press editions were the last major anthologies of DiMassa\u2019s work. While those books were impressive in other ways, the print quality was not as good as it could be and the reprints were done in a format that was much larger than the original comics. The new New York Review Comics edition has excellent reproduction and its size is closer to that of the original comics, which measured 8 1\/2 by 5 1\/2 inches.<\/p>\n The comics were originally published and distributed by DiMassa\u2019s then-girlfriend Stacy Sheehan. The couple broke up but continued to work together for a while. \u201cI moved to San Francisco for a few years,\u201d DiMassa said \u2014 a thriving environment for counterculture cartoonists in the \u201890s \u2014 \u201cthen Northampton, then back to Connecticut. I was tattooing for a while.\u201d The ending of Hothead Paisan came quite naturally. As she says in the exhaustive 15-page interview with Jay Graham at the end of the book, DiMassa own life became more stable and less chaotic. She longer needed the Hothead Paisan character as an emotional release.<\/p>\n When her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer\u2019s disease, DiMassa said she helped care for her and \u201cwas too exhausted to do anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the pioneers of LGBTQ+ comics is pleased that \u201cthere are so many queer cartoonists now,\u201d and that the comics are taught in university courses in Queer Studies and Feminism. She\u2019s been sent a lot of dissertations and term papers analyzing her Hothead comics over the years. Once a high-octane distraction on the newsstands, Hothead Paisan is now in the history books.<\/p>\n \u201cI apparently hit a raw nerve,\u201d DiMassa said. \u201cThirty years later and it\u2019s still as relevant as ever.\u201d<\/p>\n The booksigning event for \u201cHothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist\u201d is on Sept. 25 at 6:30 p.m. at Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor St., Hartford. The event will also feature DiMassa being interviewed by writer Alex Dueben. Admission is free; books are available for purchase at $35. realartways.org<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n