Jokes and the Unconscious, a collaborative graphic novel written by performance poet Daphne Gottlieb and graphic artist Diane DiMassa (of Hothead Paisan fame) is a brilliant, sometimes savage, sometimes heartbreaking story about coming to terms with death, sexuality, and living in a horribly imperfect world filled with pain, cruelty, callousness, lack of understanding and empathy, ironic co-incidence, and sometimes love and tenderness and just enough transcendence to make it possible to keep on

While i was interested in the collaboration between these two authors, i found that at most points the prose & the drawings didn't rely on each other. The drawings served mostly as illustrations when i would have liked to see a firmer meld. I think this book is a good piece of social history: it frames a modern aesthetic regarding how the current artistic generation relates to beauty and pain, the detached romance of self-harm & the meaningfulness of meaningless acts.I was glad to see DiMassa's

I read this book in a bathroom in Tokyo, during a 100-degree heatwave, while trying to stay awake long enough to finish my shift doing personal-care work. I've never been closer to stoned in my life, and I don't do drugs. Need I even say I highly recommend it?

Daphne Gottlieb is a pretty awesome writer-poet and Hothead Paisan creator Diane DiMassa is a pretty awesome artist-cartoonist, so the pairing of the two just feels right. I was impressed with Gottlieb’s book of poems Final Girl, and her voice in this meditation/memoir on grief is powerful and assured from start to finish. As far as DiMassa’s drawings are concerned, it is very difficult as a cartoonist to take on already-written prose – as several readers pointed out below there are sections her...

I generally find that anything this author writes is worth picking up, and I'd been curious about this one for a while. So, when I found it at the library, I checked it out. This was a good book: a pithy and often poignant mediation on grief and the many ways that bodies and hearts betray us. The documentation of the process of mourning a person you have alternately loved and feared rang especially true. The artwork acts as an integral component to the story; you couldn't have one without the ot...

I liked it. There were lots of cool concepts in there and lots of things to keep you thinking. I will think about this from time to time, I'm sure. That being said, it read a lot like it was written by a slam poet. There was a certain lack of an overarching plot arc which, while totally cool in poetry, is a little off putting in a novel (even a graphic novel). I didn't feel like I knew how it all came together, and there weren't the moments of clarity that some writers give you when they make th...

Well, this was a surprise hit! I bought it on amazon over a decade ago when I started reading more graphic works. Over the years I skimmed through it once or twice but finally read it last month. The art was choppy in some parts but it's a very nuanced memoir on grief and self-reflection. My favorite part was the development between the author and her then (or current, unsure) partner. My least favorite part was seeing how toxic her relationship with her "best friend" was and coming to the reali...

A morbidly dark, dark, dark (did I mention dark) graphic novel centered around a young woman's search for meaning in her father's death as well as her sexuality. 19 year old Sasha spends her summer working as a clerk at the same hospital her father worked as a doctor. Along the way she encounters a motley cast both in the hospital and in her life. The vignettes get a few stars for creativity; however, the tale is so fragmented and disconnected as to leave the reader with a big MEH at the END. I'...

Lately I haven't felt like reading anything substantial for the first time in what seems like in a while. But I've been reading bits and pieces of this, and I finally finished it last night (coincidentally today I went to a wake). It was a little disjointed, but altogether I found it to be really good. The jokes were TERRIBLE, though.

I just started reading this and it's really tasteless. Ugh.

2.5 stars - Not bad but not good.The jokes weren't funny and I'm not sure if they were meant to be, because I don't really understand the appeal of black humour, I don't get black humour. In art-style this reminded me a little of Blue is the Warmest Color and the main character Sasha is bisexual (or maybe pansexual), so it included a similar theme. All in all I wouldn't necessarily recommend this graphic novel. I liked the idea of it but it didn't fulfill its potential. Lemony Snicket was wrong

unfortunately it gets constantly compared to 'fun home', because of the father-death lesbian thing, but it stands on its own. hothead paisan is a little too much for some people, but this is pensive, imaginative, serious, and wonderful.

i read this in one sitting when i woke up yesterday, which was maybe a bad idea. i loved the idea of a collaboration between these two authors, but the book came together like trying to take a picture of a wide landscape by taking several exposures & lining them up -- the edges don't match. i think it might be worth observing that so many people describe gottlieb as a "darker" version of michelle tea (for her poetry) or alison bechdel (for the lesbian/dead father graphic novel thing). i liked th...

Wonderful book. It's a first person account of a woman who is experiencing the death of her father. She works as a biller in the hospital as well. She's also bisexual. And likes morbid jokes. A nice well-rounded tour of emotions and psyche, with mortality, sickness, jokes, random flings and serious relationships. The art is comicky and morbid and makes it a very interesting read.

(8/10) I just finished rereading this, and I liked it even more the second time around. Jokes and the Unconscious is a collaboration between two unique voices that nevertheless has a strong identity and artistic sense of its own. The story mixes black humour and the everyday horror of death and disease into a narrative about death, family, and love. Humour here is both a form of relief and a bitter mark of hopelessness. The style is a jumble of digressions and temporalities, but like the works o...

Excellent graphic novel. Hard to encapsulate what it is about; a combo of a narrative punctuated with various vignettes. Diane diMassa is a wonderful artist, and Daphne Gottlieb's storytelling hits right in the solar plexus.

I did NOT like this book. While it is true that there is a lot going on here -- subtle allusions to Freud's works, explorations of humour, trauma and mental illness ect-- this memoir is far too morbid, a-linear and dragged out to be enjoyable. I commend both Gotlieb and DiMassa on this joint effort, but it really falls flat. I think perhaps what hurts this book the most is that it feels like a cheaper version of Bechdel's Fun Home: A Tragic Comedy. Both books deal with gender dysphoria, mental i...

I read this for DiMassa's art, being a big fan of Hothead Paisan. Much of the art is darkly imaginative, simple and moody. Generally, it suits the text well. I hadn't read Gottlieb before, and this was an engaging intro to her content and style. Lie and death and love and desire tangle and weave, and I enjoyed the troubling voyage through a short time in the young woman's life. Weaknesses to me were limited to a self- indulgence often found in confessional graphic novels. Less pith and power tha...

I liked the story, and I thought some of the drawings added to it, but it mostly feels like an illustrated book instead of a comic (the writing is both dialog and description, and was probably written first). I also think I would have been more inclined to read it in the first place if I had known it's about a girl working in the payment department of a hospital.

This book isn't your typical graphic novel. It takes the mundane: a college aged girl loosing her father, and twists it into the surreal. The story itself reads largely like a written novel with the art adding layers more than detail.Paced by uneasy jokes, this graphic novel pushes its tale forward with all the pithy desperation of fight club complimented by haunting artwork. If you're looking for Allison Bechdel, you won't find it here, but if you're up for a somewhat nihilistic walk through th...