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Comics For Adults
Assume Nothing: Evolution of a Bi-Dyke by Leanne Franson. Hove, UK: Slab-O-Concrete Publications, 1999, 77 pp., U.S. $9.95, Can. $13.95 paper. ISBN 1-899866-04-3.
Teaching Through Trauma by Leanne Franson. Hove, UK: Slab-O-Concrete Publications, 1999, 84 pp, U.S. $9.95, Can. $14.95 paper. ISBN 1-899866-27-2.
Comics for adults have become a staple of our literary diet. Nowadays the library shelves are filled with graphic novels, grown-ups flock to comic book stores for the latest issues of X-Men (or in my case, Batman), and the local gay paper wouldn't be complete without two or three strips chronicling the life and times of gays and lesbians in America. Leanne Franson's two volumes of "mini-comics," Assume Nothing: Evolution of a Bi-Dyke and Teaching Through Trauma, are a welcome addition to this graphic meal, although Franson (along with her character) lives not in America but in Canada, inhabiting a world more like Europe than L.A.
Leanne Franson's semi-autobiographical character Liliane is your average thirty-something lesbian, albeit drawn without a nose. She is an "everywoman," navigating the gain and loss of love, the joys of puppyhood, and the mysteries of hamster ownership. Of course, "lesbian" doesn't really accurately describe her. She calls herself a "bi-dyke," a bisexual that looks like a dyke, acts like a dyke, but is actually a healthy, happy bisexual with a refreshingly positive attitude toward sex and men.
In fact, the world that Liliane inhabits is anything but average. Those of us who feel compelled to use our life as literary metaphor (and those with less narcissistic urges) will appreciate the complexities of the world drawn and written by Leanne Franson. In her two volumes of "minicomics" she navigates in black-and-white line drawings the mire of everyday...