Jokes and the Unconscious: A book review

Jokes and the Unconscious: A Graphic Novel by Daphne Gottlieb

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
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 the grieving process, then the experience is well worth the read.
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Meeting Allison Bechdel

As she read from her memoir, publicly displaying the lascauxian creation myth of herself as a queer artist, she peered out at us from beneath her brow furrowed in uninhibited anxiety. It had made an irrevocable impression on me how she had defined her past into discrete panels of reflection. Her persona was more awkward than funny, her comic more tragic than funny. I could relate to the dry, absurdist tendencies of my own malformed humor.

There was a fastidious quality that permeated her voice as she recounted episodes of OCD that made up her artistic process. Apparently it involved posing and taking pictures of herself for every character she draws before embarking on creating the panel detailed in minutia. That’s thousands of pictures over the course of the entire graphic novel. Then there were a series of layers drawn by hand and on the computer, super imposed over one another and melded into a painstaking whole. It comes out to several hours per square inch. “There went a whole weekend” she would joke, flipping through sketches of the Victorian wallpaper endemic in her childhood home. I could so clearly imagine her silhouetted in a lonely house etching the images that her (understandable) resentment had seared into her psyche. What is the difference between the compulsions that enhance our humanity and those that detract from it?

The familiarity of her fidgety and uneven breathing escalated during the q&a period when she as she squinched her face up into a lost expression as she told us she didn’t understand why she did what she did. She almost seemed to plead to the audience to validate her compulsion. Her openness was uneasy on both sides. She seemed pretty desperate about the manner.

How do the stories we tell shape who we are? How do they limit or expand the ways we can understand ourselves? The way we can relate and connect? How does making sense of the world and oneself in relation to it lend justification to our existence? Is there any such thing as credibly and authenticity when one tells one’s own story? How do we prove to ourselves that certain stories belong to us? Why do some people need to share?