What They Did to Princess Paragon

How the world's greatest comic-book artist, Brian Parrish, a 38-year-old gay man from Manhattan, ends up trapped in a food plant ``in the middle of some piddly little college town two hours outside Chicago'' is part of the delight of Rodi's new novel. Brian's scheme is to rejuvenate the faltering sales of American comic-book icon Princess Paragon by turning her into the first gay super-hero. His design is modified at every turn by a cast of outrageous characters: Perpetrial Cotton, an African American feminist lesbian whose favorite T-shirt reads ``Ferraro for Veep''; Jerome T. Kornacker, a deranged fan upset at what is happening to his longtime fantasy girlfriend; and Heloise Freitag, Brian's chain-smoking publisher. Tightly plotted and consistently amusing, the novel is more farce than satire: Rodi's characters are as cartoonish as his superheroine. ``This is real life,'' Brian says to Jerome as Rodi attempts to inject some pathos into the dialogue. Nothing about the book suggests real life, however, which is exactly the point. Real life is seldom this funny. This is another campy, breezy read from a gay comic writer ( Fag Hag ; Closet Case ) who is quickly developing his own cult following. (May)