“My anger problems became a success” – Artist Diane DiMassa on the Collection of her Classic Underground Comic

“My anger problems became a success”

– Artist Diane DiMassa on the collection of her classic underground comic

By Alex Dueben

Diane DiMassa is an artist who lives in the Black Rock neighborhood of Bridgeport. Born and raised in Connecticut, while living in New Haven in the 1990s she made one of that era’s iconic underground comics. “Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist” ran for 21 issues and has just been collected by the New York Review of Books in a volume introduced by Sarah Schulman.

It’s a very punk rock project for such a literary institution, and what’s impressive is how visceral and angry and relevant the comics are decades after they were made. “I was going to therapy, and this therapist didn’t like open-ended therapy, so she had her patients come up with goals, something that you wanted to work on,” DiMassa said in a recent conversation. “I said anger and a creative block. She said, why don’t you do some art around anger? So I went home, turned on the TV, and I got really upset within twenty minutes over whatever was on. I picked up my journal and I drew what are now the first four pages of issue number one.”

Looking back on how it started, DiMassa seems amazed at how everything fell into place. “I was working at an independent book distributor at the time,” she said. “I brought the four pages to work to pass it around. We all laughed, and I brought it home and I didn’t really think much about it. Then my girlfriend comes over and sees it and says, what is this? You have to finish a whole comic book. I’ll find a printer.”

Her then-girlfriend, Stacy Sheehan published the comic and others. “My boss said, we’ll distribute whatever you do. Stacy found a woman-owned printer in New Haven. It all just fell in my lap,” DiMassa said. “Issue one took off. Issue two. It snowballed.”

“I’m telling you; it just came from above. I never knew what the next panel was going to be. It’s like it was given to me panel by panel. It’s crazy,” DiMassa said. “It took me forever to do one panel, but I like that. I want you to be able to look at a panel and chew it up, and really look at the art.”

“It was a little pre-email. We used to go to the mailbox every day,” DiMassa said. “It would be packed with letters and drawings and presents and gifts and just this outpouring of enthusiasm. ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe you’re saying this out loud. It’s exactly how I feel.’ In the beginning, I was kind of like, isn’t everyone thinking this?”

She said that the book was about women and about queer women, but she had readers from all kinds of backgrounds. “Any marginalized person or any white cis male with any ounce of astuteness,” DiMassa said. “Any oppressed minority. People who needed an anger outlet,” she said. “People who are just like in mental anguish over society and what’s happening to your people, or who you consider your tribe. Or people you like and accept and don’t have any kind of prejudice towards, you know? I like to say our side and the other side. Anyone who’s on our side sort of got in touch with Hothead.”

The new book also fell into place with an out of the blue email from editor Lucas Adams who collects DiMassa’s comics, as well as letters people wrote in and other material. “I thought they were just going to reprint the comics,” DiMassa said, but the publisher was so surprised that she and Stacey had kept everything and had it organized, they scanned it all. “I’m blown away,” DiMassa said, amused but in awe.

DiMassa said that with some amusement, but she also read everything that was sent to her, listened to the stories people told her about how the comic resonated with them, how it helped them. After all these years, she still knows many of those stories, and remains amazed by them. “I don’t think I ever completely got my head around this,” she said, after repeating some of the decades-old stories that have stayed with her, about people who shared how the comic helped them through difficult times.

“We do this stuff in our head all the time,” DiMassa said. “You want to get violent, but, you read a comic book instead…and understand that you’re not alone in your thoughts. That’s the most healing thing.”

I mentioned one letter in an issue of the comic, where the reader wrote in to say: “I, too, am a Hothead Paisan (’Tis better to be homicidal than suicidal.)” which I said was a sentiment that sums up the book so well. “Be angry at the fucking world. Don’t take it all out on yourself,” DiMassa said. “I got responses from men and women, gay, straight, everything. But the women—a lot of women were never allowed to be loud about their anger. You know, smile, be pretty. Probably less now, but when I was growing up, it was very much like that.”

“I was in AA for a really long time. I’m still sober. Going there and hearing everybody else who had all these experiences that you had, you get this almost energetic connection,” DiMassa said. “That to me is what a tribe is. That shared being on the same page kind of mentality about being in the world. And having a hard time with it. We really got together and bonded over being fucked by society.”

The moments of violence when Hothead attacks Nazis or anti-abortion protestors may be what people remember, or Hothead arguing with God, who she asks at one point “is Earth hell?” It’s angry in a way that time was not diluted, a righteous anger at the state of the world and at what has been done to her. But the comic also demonstrates the only way the character can live in the world, her relationships with Roz and Daphne and her cat Chicken.

The comic came out during the zine explosion of the 80s and 90s, and I pointed out that just as a community coalesced around the comic, by making the comic she found an artistic community and in the interview included in the book and the acknowledgements DiMassa talked about the many artists and writers and creators she met and who were so important to her. “I had no idea when I started Hothead about the timing,” DiMassa said. “It just became part of the whole thing.

“It was huge in San Francisco and bigger cities, and it was happening in New Haven too,” DiMassa said. “I’d go to Kinko’s at one in the morning and my friends would be in there copying and stapling. Some of them were great. Some were cartoons. Some of them were rambling poetry. It was like the rock scene; it was anything. It was really fun.”

DiMassa lived in San Francisco and in Northampton for year, and we talked about how Connecticut has changed since she grew up here. “It’s really different,” DiMassa said. “When I was in high school, there was no LGBT. Nobody said bisexual.”

“The world is very, very different around gays, around trans people, and people of color. But as they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The more progress we make, the more violent backlash comes along with it,” DiMassa said. “Black people are still getting shot by cops, by white cops, for no reason, even though there have been serious advances in civil rights and acceptance. I do think a lot more people are waking up, but there’s still that dark side.”

Over the course of 21 issues, the comic changed even if it never mellowed, which is a good way to think about the years since. And why despite being very grounded in the 1990s, the comic has aged well and is still angry and meaningful today.

“Things change in a lifetime. It’s incredible,” DiMassa said, before pointing out that some of the same problems persist. “The shit is still happening, and people are still pissed off about the shit that’s happening,” DiMassa said. “People need an anger release. How frustrating things can be and how furious you get when someone you love gets murdered because they’re trans or gay, or they got gay bashed.”

“I think there’s still plenty to get your claws into.”