Short Reviews: Gilbert Hernandez, Ed Piskor, Steven Cerio

Garden Of The Flesh, by Gilbert Hernandez. This notebook-sized comic with an etched cover made of something like suede, is simply Hernandez turning highlights from the Book of Genesis into straight-up, hardcore porn. There's something about this book that touches a nerve far beyond it simply being porn. In a way, it's a distillation of Robert Crumb's adaptation of the whole Book of Genesis, which played up the truly seedy nature of so many Biblical stories, using that distinctive cross-hatching as a way of creating that filthy atmosphere. Hernandez' approach is different: it's drawn in his typical style, but it's also in full color. Hernandez picks up on the erotic qualities of the Bible (especially the story of the Garden of Eden and the fall), qualities that always seemed heightened to me as a child when I read picture book versions of the Bible. The concept of forbidden fruit and Adam & Eve's first encounter with shame are highly charged, and Hernandez both takes these ideas to their logical conclusion and utterly spoofs the ways in which religion shames sex and nudity. Hernandez also seamlessly overlays the structure of pornographic films onto the episodic structure of the Bible. That is, new characters in new situations were constantly being introduced in the Bible in the same way that new actors appear in porn to offer variety to the viewer. Hernandez brings the lust implicit (and often explicit) in the Bible out into the light while putting it in a format that still has an air of mystery, of something forbidden. In that way, he has his cake and eats it too, playing on how things that are forbidden offer a charge but then doling out as much explicit sex as he possibly can in a tidy hundred pages.

Sunbeams On The Astronaut, by Steven Cerio. This is a collection of short, dense and psychedelic pieces by Cerio, whose style veers from rubbery & cartoony to a deeply immersive series of patterns. The sheer density of the pieces and the use of greyscale instead of color made a number of stories difficult to parse, and the insertion of text instead of hand lettering was distracting and took me out of the reading experience. This book seemed to beg for color to help delineate the forms and add some clarity, but what I could parse was fascinating. In depicting what appear to be otherdimensional experiences, Cerio does so with a relentless sense of optimism and adventure. He's created his own mythological pantheon of characters, some darker than others, but each of their stories carries new possibilities. Tonally, the stories veer from whimsical & silly to darker & portentous as he draws from sources like old folk tales and songs by the Residents.

Hip-Hop Family Tree, Volume 4, by Ed Piskor. The latest volume of Piskor's epic, hugely successful historical series of brief, interconnected vignettes about hip hop's origins reaches a logical resting place for the series by the end. After working on the project mostly non-stop for nearly four years, Piskor declared he was going to focus on other projects for a while after the publication of this volume. It's a move that makes sense, considering that the amount of material that he has to cover has grown exponentially from volume to volume. He had the luxury of taking his time in the earlier volumes and making connections between hip-hop and other forms of African-American culture, as well as the fine arts scene, and for spending most of his time concentrating on the New York scene. In volume 4, Piskor focuses on the next generation of rappers in New York, the expanding LA scene, the small but energetic Philadelphia scene, and even what Luke Skywalker was up to in Miami. This volume also goes into some deal with regard to the way Hollywood tried to exploit what many perceived to be a fad, with films like Breakin', Beat Street and Krush Groove.

Russell "Rush" Simmons is still at the center of everything as the most respected and best-known managerial figure in rap. Now in a full partnership with ambitious college student Rick Rubin, their Def Jam records starts to make real money behind Run-DMC and their new star, LL Cool J (who was just sixteen when his first record was released). One thing that Piskor repeatedly emphasizes is how young so many of the key players were, as they went from rapping in front of their lockers in high school to performing live and getting on records. KRS-ONE was a kid living in a homeless shelter when he hooked up with DJ Scott LaRock, whom he knew as a social worker who would stop by the shelter. Salt 'N Pepa were working at the local Sears when a friend suggested they start their careers as battle MCs recording dis tracks. This is a fascinating period because of the intersection between the still wild west quality of rap and the introduction of real money into the equation. While that certainly led some young rappers to go as pop as possible in order to get on the radio, it's interesting that some refused to go soft on principle, even if hurt their chances at success. For the rapper Schooly D, that stance wound up creating gangsta rap, because he wouldn't soften his lyrics for recording.

Piskor sticks to the same visual formula that made the other volumes so fun to read. Every page is a complete statement, meant to be read and digested as a whole. At the same time, four volumes' worth of characters and their stories start to build as formerly background characters like the Beastie Boys suddenly take center stage. As always, Piskor is more interested in the facts as he's able to get them rather than the legends, as he's upfront about Ice-T's criminal activities and other less-than-savory facts about some of the rappers. There's no specific judgment--it's just people trying to get by--other than for perhaps "Freeway" Ricky Ross, the man who introduced crack cocaine into America and created an epidemic of addicts. Piskor leans heavily on Jack Kirby-inspired visuals, like Kirby Krackle in some panels, heroic and distorted poses and other trademarks like splayed hands. One can also see some of Piskor's other influences like Robert Crumb sneak into some panels, but moreso Drew Friedman's merciless drawings of celebrities. Piskor loves drawing old, out-of-touch white executives and uses some of Friedman's trademark liver spots for them. Piskor eliminated some of the more awkward character poses from earlier volumes but also doubled-down on others to create an exaggerated style that matched the idealism of early hip-hop with the gritty reality it emerged out of.

D&Q: Gilbert Hernandez

The only person who is Gilbert Hernandez's equal in accurately representing the ways in which children think, speak and act is his brother Jaime. The feeling that Gilbert creates is different from his brother's; it's more Charles Schulz than Hank Ketcham at times. The characters are a little sadder and a little meaner, and the world makes a bit less sense. His semi-autobiographical Marble Season depicted a sort of Kingdom of Summer ruled by the experiences of kids, for good and ill. The sense of wonder and awe with regard to small details was mixed with dread and pain regarding other areas of life, but the mythos of childhood was intact all along, with the numbing realities of adulthood not yet creeping in. His character design is magnificent, with the use of gesture and body language at the center of his storytelling. Keeping certain poses, like the lead character with his hands in his pockets, shoulders slumped, provides not only continuity but a key to understanding the true emotional states of his characters.

His second book for D&Q, Bumperhead, starts once again with the wonder and weirdness of childhood but this time keeps going all the way into old age, following a boy name Bobby and his friends through the prism of music and the ways in which identities tend to become wrapped up in scenes. Once again, this book has autobiographical elements, as Bobby is approximately the same age as Gilbert and listened to the same kind of music, but Hernandez throws in a number of quirks. Never afraid to throw in a bit of magical realism, there's a running gag in the story that warps the reader's perception as to when the story is set. That's because when we meet young Bobby, his friend has an iPad and promises to show him dirty images of the Pope. When the reader suddenly understands that the book shifts to the sixties and seventies, the iPad is suddenly referred to as the "magical predicting machine" and eventually dismissed as merely a child's toy. It's a great gag designed to unsettle the reader out of certain assumptions as well as subverting certain children's lit tropes that set stories in Anytime, Anytown, USA.

Bobby, cruelly nicknamed "Bumperhead" by some bullies who later become his friends because of his huge forehead, is a child not unlike his mother in that he's one extreme or other. He's either grimly pensive with a flatness of affect and energy or else finds ways to crank himself up to extremes. His father doesn't speak English all that well and pretty much runs out on his son the minute he's old enough to take care of himself on the pretext of having business to take care of in Mexico, leading to a life of isolation and disconnection alternating with a desperate desire to find a scene to fit into. That search leads to him identifying with various musical scenes, as he devours rock, pop and glam before settling into early punk. Punk rock was obviously very important to Hernandez himself and one can see how the punk ethos invigorated Bobby in the comic. There is an amazing page with four horizontal panels as Bobby is watching a punk band play and his eyes are wide as saucers with an expression that's beyond joy, beyond excited. It's like he's been electrified with so much juice he can barely control himself, and the dialog reads "I am alive again. No, I am fucking alive again."

The book does not end on that high point, however. It's more of a temporary jolt for a character whose detached nature leads him to ignore his own health throughout the book, as his weight see-saws thanks to habits like speed and alcohol. Bobby gets in a relationship but doesn't find it nearly as simple as his high school relationships, and it in fact comes to a head in paranoia and anger on her part. The joy of the creative possibilities of punk are muted by his lack of ambition and creative outlets; he's a walking example of the dangers of being part of a scene and then finding the scene changing into something one doesn't recognize. When his father returns from Mexico and reveals that he started a second family, it becomes a focal point for Bobby's incoherent rage. It's a rage that's as self-directed and existential as it as against his father. It's a rage against life.

Just as Hernandez doesn't end the book on the climax of discovering punk rock, he doesn't end it on that note either. Instead, Bobby simply gets older and finds it harder and harder to tap into that kind of anger. Walking with a cane after having a couple of heart attacks, old age is simply about acceptance. Even when he confronts his father on a daily basis, it's almost a routine by this point. He knows what answers he will get and isn't prepared for anything else. Music, Bobby's identity nexus in the other chapters, is hardly mentioned in the final chapter. Music for Bobby was a way of expressing things he couldn't say, giving himself a voice he couldn't otherwise articulate. In old age, he found himself needing to express himself and his anger less and less, and so did music fall by the wayside--with the sole exception of hating on the jazz music of someone he'd known and despised for years. Though unspoken, that conflict said a lot about Bobby. He hated his rival's garage music and later jazz stylings, in part because he saw them as technique unattached to real expression. His rival hated punk because he saw it as posing without talent and saw non-musician Bobby purely as a scenester. It points directly to the difference between Bobby and Hernandez himself, as Gilbert was part of a scene but was inspired by its DIY ethos to actually put in the effort to create something. Punk is not about not working hard, but rather it's about working hard on something you care about and finding ways to get it out there as directly as possible. Bumperhead is a meditation on a number of roads not taken and a number of paths that Hernandez no doubt so arrayed ahead of him. With the benefit of hindsight, Hernandez is not too cruel to Bobby, because he could have been a version of Bobby. Bobby made a lot of bad choices (when he wasn't drifting along), which Hernandez emphasizes doesn't make him a bad person. In the end, it makes him a human being, no better or worse than those people he grew up with.

The Complete Clough On Comics at Cicada

I just wrapped up a year's worth of reviews over at Cicada, the literary magazine for teens (and cousin of the more famous Cricket). Here are links to every one of my columns:

1. May/June 2014: Margerite Dabaie, Ed Piskor, Gilbert Hernandez
2. July/August 2014: Nicole Georges, Rutu Modan
3. September/October 2014: Max Badger, Isaac Cates
4. November/December 2014: Liz Prince
5. January/February 2014: Farel Dalrymple
6. March/April 2014: Renee French

Cracked Lenses: Love and Rockets New Stories #6

If Love & Rockets New Stories #5 saw Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez retrenching as they built storylines around new characters, then #6 is the first powerful realization of that idea. Both brothers often talk about certain characters and following them around to see what they'll do, to see if they can figure them out. Both talk about certain characters as unknowable for a variety of reasons; loose cannon Hopey has always been Jaime's unknowable character, while Gilbert has enjoyed writing Fritz for the opposite reason, that she has no real agency of her own and thus can fit any number of ideas or storylines. In Gilbert's cracked-lens return to Palomar, his new central figure is Killer, the daughter of Guadalupe and granddaughter of Luba. After last issue's hilarious interpolation of a film about Palomar starring Fritz with Killer meeting everyone for the first time, this issue delves into Killer trying to figure what she wants to do with her life. In particular, she wonders if she should give up being an actress.

After last issue's splashy stories, this issue is a bit more low-key with regard to Killer and her story, preferring to lay some narrative pipe and give the characters a bit of room to breathe and interact. The essential narrative arc to be found here is whether or not Killer is pregnant, a story that's fanned by media interest and that excites her father, Hector. When he learns this is not the case, there's a devastating scene where he cuts her down and she walks away. Killer, the "Sad Girl", who inspires story titles like "Willow, Weep No More" is perhaps the most stoic of all Hernandez's characters, rarely betraying any signs of negative emotion. She's guarded but not impossibly so, like Luba (or Maria, for that matter). She's flexible but is learning to exert agency in this storyline, unlike Fritz. Gilbert also drops a lot of other familial tidbits in this story as a way of connecting the toxic communication styles that plagued Killer's family for years. We see Maria (her great-grandmother) expressing guilt about giving away Luba, then denying her existence, then in a flashback where they cross paths without knowing it in America. This is connected with footage from the Maria M. movie popping up, something which means little to Luba (who hardened herself against the existence of her mother years earlier) but which endlessly fascinates Killer. We also see flashbacks to Fritz trying to curry her mother's favor with regard to the film, with an offer to appear in it even as Fritz plays her. Killer represents a chance to do things differently in this family saga, to be someone who manages to dodge the same kinds of tragedies and horrors that her older relatives endured. Guadalupe was always the most stable and happiest of Luba's children, and Killer represents a child who has her mother's stable nature but who is still teetering on the edge of dealing with fame. The end of the book, where she encounters Doralis' ghost and suddenly gets the urge to act again, has the potential to set some interesting stories in motion.

It's amazing to see how Gilbert continues to approach this family in new ways to get at different emotions and experiences. Luba may now just be a sideline character and Fritz relegated to cameos and appearances in her "films" (the story where she appears as a furry monster and fights a magic man in boots was hilarious, disgusting and profane in all the best ways), but the sheer weight of their history can be felt on every page. Even for a new reader, their presence becomes important thanks to flashbacks, even though the story could be followed fairly easily as a continuation of the previous issue. The Palomar characters and setting seem effortless for Gilbert to draw, which is why the untitled story was so much fun--the reader got to see him really cut loose and get nasty. The tie-ins between this story and the Maria M. standalone "movie" book were also interesting, as this issue is a kind of commentary on both how the characters view the "films" but also Gilbert's reaction to reader and critical commentary on that work. In a sense, he's giving the readers what they want by going back to Palomar, but he's doing it in a sneaky way, one where he wants the reader to know that they're not going to get exactly what they think they want.

In L&R New Stories #5, Jaime introduced Tonta as his new tentpole character. This teen is a sort of "Bizarro Maggie" in that she shares much of Maggie's awkwardness and desire to be part of a scene but she has far less of Maggie's charm or good looks. Jaime spent the issue slowly exploring her world, one that finds her with her own version of Rand Race (a punk rocker named Eric), except that the crush is pretty much unrequited. If Tonta has a Hopey, it's Gretchen "the Gorgon", a girl from school who's as weird and wired as Hopey, only with a distorted, ugly face. Gretchen clearly has a crush on Tonta, a fact lost on the endlessly dense girl. Indeed, she embraces her nickname (which means "dummy" or "stupid" in Spanish), preferring it her given name of Anoush, which means "sweetness". Jaime sets her up as a punk rock wannabe, but also displays an enormous amount of affection toward this character, whom he's clearly trying to get to know. It is telling, however, that Jaime doesn't use thought balloons for any of his characters in this issue with the exception of one returning character. Traditionally, Maggie always got thought balloons but Hopey never did, as she was an impenetrable character for Jaime. Whereas Maggie was someone that he "knew", and it delighted him to put her in different kinds of situations.

Where that leaves Tonta is a good question, one that I'm not sure Jaime himself is sure of at the moment. We're seeing "Bizarro Maggie's" story play out, but this time, we don't know everything she's thinking. Of course, the way that Tonta blabs out her thoughts and feelings, one wonders what she does keep inside. Hernandez connected her to two old characters: Vivian, the "Frogmouth", is her half-sister. Angel of Tarzana is her high school P.E. teacher. Angel knows Tonta because she knows Vivian, and there are all sorts of hilarious scenes that erupt because of that connection, like Vivian attacking Angel from behind when she's on the field during class. Tonta and her friends (including Gomez, who's sort of Daffy-like in her innocence) are fascinated by their teacher, who wants to bring as many new sports as possible to her students. When they are summoned to a mysterious location for what turns out to be a Luchadora wrestling match, it's all thanks to Gretchen, who knows that their teacher is wrestling as "The Angel of Assassins". This is the most light-hearted part of the book, a throwback to those wrestling comics that Jaime used to do so well.

All of this is window dressing, essentially, fun incidental stuff to get lost in as a means of getting to know the characters. What seemed like somewhat aimless character work in #5 is quickly established in the serial "Crimen" as an especially brutal and heartbreaking story. When Tonta comes home from a day's shenanigans, she's told that her step-father has been killed by a burglar. We are then introduced to Violet and reintroduced to Ishmael, a seeming thug who worked at a country club. When Jaime reveals that Ish is in fact Vivian's twin brother and that they are all half-brothers and sisters (along with Tonta, Muneca and baby Alby), it's a surprise. What is a shock is Violet's assertion that their mother had Tonta's step-father killed, and that she had accused her mother years earlier of killing off her father. This brutal story of family politics, lies and betrayals seamlessly blends the harder edge Jaime has brought to his stories of late along with the lighthearted, character-based work that's been there as well.

Even as the children scheme to send their mother to children (with Tonta being the last to know everything, including the fact that she even had a brother), Jaime manages to inject humor into the grimmest of proceedings. That's because the drama all takes place off-panel, allowing him to focus tightly on the character interactions of the siblings. Thanks to the fact that Vivian is a total loose cannon who's as likely to punch her sister Violet in the mouth as look at her, Jaime has a built-in monkey wrench and live wire for his stories in a character who can't help but liven up any story she appears in. At the same time, he adds depth and even pathos to this brute of a character while subtly crafting a story where she is manipulated by others from the very start. What's remarkable about Jaime's stories in these two issues is the way that he's able to tie the events of this story (which of course end in disaster for the children as they are utterly outmatched in court and intimidated out of court) back into the funny, quotidian adventures of Tonta. Dyeing her hair black and attending a new school, she attends a concert by the band containing her object of affection, a band that's now become popular. When he starts singing a song called "Black Widow", which she realizes is about her mother, she's experienced the ultimate betrayal. It's a heartbreaking way to end the issue, one whose final scene is Tonta as a baby at the swimming hole that's a big part of this story, with her siblings showing her affection even as her older brother (at age 13) has stopped living with his mother because of what he knew she did. Indeed, the family politics surrounding Tonta make Maggie's family look stable and loving by comparison.

Jaime hits the Hank Ketcham hammer hard in this issue with his character design, the overall looseness of the characters, and the slightly goofy and grotesque characteristics this particular cast has. Violet's slightly hard-boiled appearance betrays her as someone who's done a lot of hard living. Ish and Vivi are both impossibly attractive in their own way. Tonta's snaggletooth overbite, her messy hair, her poor posture and overall schlubbiness are simply fantastic; she's a self-described loner who is desperate for company and love. Gomez' willowy frame, Angel's sturdy and powerful body and Gretchen's remarkable grace all inject tremendous amounts of personality into these characters before they speak a single word. As great a draftsman as Jaime Hernandez is, he's a far greater cartoonist. Gesture, body language, minute facial expressions and the ways people interact with each other in space and in terms of panel-to-panel transitions are his real strengths as a cartoonist. Nailing these small details allows him to go "big" with emotions and the occasional exaggerated expression (especially from Tonta, who's always pulling faces) with no dissonance whatsoever, Each chapter of "Crimen" is only two pages long, in a 2x4 panel grid and the first panel blacked out with white title text. This is where things get heavy. The other stories have freer grids, befitting the lighter touch of those stories. Beyond the powerful emotional content and humor in this issue, Jaime's comics are master classes in how to structure a loosely-serialized set of short stories.

Funhouse: Maria M.

If the current series of stories surrounding Killer visiting Palomar in Love & Rockets is Gilbert Hernandez's way of looking at his most famous creation through a cracked lens, then the latest of his pulp novels starring his character Fritz, Maria M., is Poison River as viewed through a funhouse mirror. After wrapping up the saga of his signature character Luba in Palomar in the first volume of Love & Rockets, Hernandez has focused stories on Luba in America as well as stories surrounding Luba's half-sister, Fritz. Luba's stories in America finished up in volume two of L&R, as did the "true" stories surrounding Fritz. Since then, Hernandez has turned his attention to doing different kinds of lurid pulp fiction in the form of comics versions of fake grindhouse movies, all featuring Fritz from her sordid movie career. In an interview in the Love and Rockets Companion, Hernandez said that the reason he liked putting Fritz in these comics is that he found her to be an unknowable character, and so by putting her in these stories he gets to see what she's like in a number of different settings.

He didn't indicate as to why he thought she was unknowable, but the implication seemed clear. It's because Fritz is Luba's opposite in many ways in that she seems to have no agency of her own as a character. She's the reed that bends in the wind, attaching herself to different people and inevitably becoming a victim. Fritz is far from stupid (in fact, quite the opposite), but her lack of self-worth is directly tied into that lack of agency. She's always an object of desire, so she simply goes along with other people's desires and agencies because it's easier to do than try to figure out her own needs. Hernandez finds her unknowable because she doesn't seem to have any wants of her own, which is a key to an author "knowing" a character. What's interesting is that Hernandez still finds her interesting enough to make her the protagonist of so many of his stories, which allows him to bounce this sort of guileless, Candide sort of figure through horror, sci-fi, crime stories, suspense thrillers, serial killer stories, high school dramas and whatever else he can think of.

Maria M. adds an additional layer of metafiction by making it an adaptation of the story of Fritz's mother, Maria. Of course, Poison River is really about Luba's life up until she reaches Palomar, but Luba is entirely cut out of the book. Maria is subbed in for all kinds of craziness. First, she's cast as being too big to any modeling when she arrives in America. This leads to a series of lurid and frequently hilarious porno photos and a nude roles in a movie. A lot of these scenes are comedic, especially the ones where Fritz (in the role of Maria) keeps hooking up with married men who claim to love her. There's one hilarious page where in panel after panel, a man tells her that he loves her, only to immediately find out that he's married. In one panel, a man is having sex with her and says "I love you, Maria". Then the phone rings and he says, matter-of-factly, "That'll be me wife."

The second half of the book inexplicably sees Maria as the wife of a mobster who's trying to fend off a number of rivals. Gorgo is introduced as his son, who has an instant crush on Maria. Here, Gorgo and his dad are substituted for Peter and Fermin Rio, the musicians whose obsession with Maria and later Luba forms the backbone of Poison River. In Maria M, Gorgo is portrayed as a sort of invincible superhero type who is called upon to defend Maria and his dad's business in increasingly ridiculous scenarios. The best is when he goes off "on vacation" to participate in a brutal series of gladitorial games that he of course wins with ease. The book ends with Gorgo failing to protect Maria, her becoming pregnant after being raped, and her divorcing his father...but it's only the end of part one. Given that Luba is entirely excised from this book, I'll be curious to see if part two includes any part of her story, or if it will be more gangsters, exploitation, and over-the-top action silliness. I like the fact that it will be in two parts; the ambivalent ending begs for a sequel, and serializing the story only emphasizes its fictive qualities all the more.

While the book is effective on its own as an action romp, it's also a sly commentary on how Hollywood might have treated a film adaptation of Love & Rockets. Indeed, when Luba and other characters started talking about the film in L&R, they trash it. It's also perhaps a reaction by Hernandez with regard to the critical response his pulp comics have received, being derided by trash as some critics. They are trashy, to be sure, and actively resist depicting real characters and honest emotional responses in favor of forwarding plot and action. They are also a great deal of fun and are demented in frequently amazing ways, as Hernandez tries to come up with the most sordid, complicated and melodramatic scenarios possible for Fritz. That's the one thing the reader can never quite let go of: that these are works of fiction starring one of his "real" characters, and thus we as readers have it in the back of our minds that this was yet another vaguely humiliating thing that Fritz did in her pliable life. It also doesn't hurt that Hernandez is such a rock-solid storyteller. He mostly uses three or four panels per page, stacked on top of each other wide a wide horizontal base that mimics the effective of watching a film on the big screen. When there's action or motion, he switches to more traditional grids to emphasize that sense of movement and urgency before going back to that "widescreen" approach. There's a firm, steady hand on all of the mechanics and formal aspects of the story (including character design, which allows for a bit of the grotesque), allowing Hernandez to go nuts in terms of content without ever leaving the reader behind.

Fairy Tale Comics

Following up the success of Nursery Rhyme Comics, First Second is aiming another book at younger readers. The formula, once again was to include a mixture of cartoonists and illustrators to adapt classic fairy tales. The results were mixed, and I found that the less successful comics were by the illustrators or cartoonists with whom I was not familiar. While the possibility of being previously biased toward cartoonists whose work I admire is certainly in play, I like to read anthologies precisely because it gives me an opportunity to discover new artists.

Editor Chris Duffy was quite smart about choosing the alt-comics cartoonists for this volume. Nearly all of them had at least some experience with doing all-ages stuff. Both Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez had experienced doing this, especially Gilbert, and it shows in their stories here. Beto's "Hansel and Gretel" is appropriately grisly and weird for a cartoonist who's currently exploring pulp/exploitation comics. Jaime's "Snow White" is appropriate because he's so good at drawing women, though it does inadvertently point out the problem that this story has an astoundingly passive heroine. Stuff just happens to her and she happens to get lucky in the end.

Vanessa Davis' "Puss In Boots" was one of the best stories in the whole book. Her painterly style combined with her strong cartooning fundamentals makes this a perfect hybrid piece for children, as it combines elements of comics and traditional children's illustration.  I can't imagine an artist more suited to do an original Toon Book than Davis, and I hope she gets a crack at that in the future. Luke Pearson's "The Boy Who Drew Cats" is done very much in his Hilda style, down to the muted color palette, thin lines and simple but solid character design. It's a story that's at once cute, funny and frightening. "Rabbit Will Not Help" (based on "Bre'r Rabbit") by Joe Lambert is another story perfectly suited for the artist, as he's great at drawing anthropomorphic animals. Using pages packed with as many fifteen panels on them in rows of three, Lambert crams a lot of detail into a small space, establishing a particular kind of rhythm as the story sets up and repeats a certain kind of gag again and again. Breaking that rhythm and establishing the final punchline (slightly altered from the original story but still the same basic idea of saying, "Oh no, please don't make me do something I really want you to do!") allows Lambert to unpack his panels just a bit.

Other highlights include Graham Annable's "Goldilocks", which is told without words and with a deadpan character that heightens its humor, as well as Jillian Tamaki's "Baba Yaga", which eschews the grid entirely to create an open page with two or three images slowly transitioning into each other. Craig Thompson's story about a young king demanding constant storytelling plays to his strengths as an artist who loves to add a lot of detail and decorative elements to his comics. David Mazzucchelli's story about a boy who couldn't shudder was clever but looked a bit on the dull and flat side. Raina Telgemeier's "Rapunzel" was solid as per usual but lacked the distinctive energy and pacing of her own comics. Most of the other stories didn't really make much of an impact on me as a reader one way or another, but Gigi D.G.'s version of "Little Red Riding Hood" was the only story that I thought went out of its way to look twee, like it was trying too hard to look like a story for children. Overall, I thought giving the cartoonists space to really flesh stories out made for a lot of successful results, and even most of the more uneven or forgettable stories were at the very least pleasant. I'll be curious to see if First Second tries to continue to market books to younger readers in the same vein.

The New Normal: Love and Rockets New Stories #5

Before I begin my review of the new issue of Love and Rockets, here are links to my reviews of L&R New Stories #1, #2, #3 (as part of a best of the year column) and #4 Anyone who's read these four issues knows that Jaime Hernandez just concluded a highly dramatic and emotional storyline about family, betrayals, trauma and finding one's center in the nick of time. Gilbert has been exploring his interesting in pulp storytelling as framed through his comics adaptations of the "films" that star long-running character Fritz. Along the way, he's slowly been exploring Killer, the daughter of Guadalupe and granddaughter of Luba and Heraclio, several more of his bedrock characters. For both artists, this issue represents a sort of retreat, retrenching and reseeding of storylines.

Let's start with Gilbert. After more or less leaving behind Palomar stories at the conclusion of volume 1 of Love and Rockets (with some flashback series such as his Ignatz line stories and the occasional very brief look-in as exceptions), it looks like Gilbert is returning to his old stomping grounds. However, there's a twist. It's not just that everyone's older, but rather that the story is being told through the innocent but not naive eyes of Killer, whose resemblance to Luba is not accidental. "Somewhere Outside the U.S. Border" reintroduces us to Chelo, the guardian and sheriff of Palomar, and Vicente, the scarred man whom Chelo watched over his entire life. "And here we go all over again", says Chelo, bemusedly remarking on Killer's potential to wreak havoc. "Proof That The Devil Loves You" is the central narrative for Beto in this issue, and it's a stunner. He combines his fascination with lurid pulp with Palomar to create perhaps the most meta story since Dan Clowes' story "Velvet Glove: The Movie".

Interspersing Killer's adventures exploring Palomar after coming from America with a movie starring Fritz as a character who's half-Luba and half-Tonatzin, Hernandez not only hilariously pokes fun at his own comic but also builds a real narrative as we understand why the movie is vicious to a couple of characters in particular. Fritz plays Bula, who carries around a "symbolic screwdriver" (I laughed out loud at that one) and flails about town trying to establish her own identity in the most shallow way possible. The actress who plays the Chelo character is depicted as being cruel and capricious to the Pipo stand-in, which is no surprise considering that the movie was produced  Pipo. Pipo had long-standing feuds with Chelo and Luba, so this is her little way of getting payback (Encouraging Chelo to watch the movie sometime was a particularly bitchy thing for her to say). Meanwhile, Killer is entranced by Palomar, downplaying the "haunted" nature of the town and the hatred "her tia" (I'm presuming Maricela, given her shared loathing of her mother Luba and Chelo) had in talking about the town. When Luba's original hammer falls from the Whispering Tree, Killer treks back to the US to give it to her grandmother, but she's wise enough to know where this story is going. In much the same way Fritz was the focus of L&R Volume 2, it's clear that Killer's journey is just beginning.

Is Gilbert simply repeating himself by going back to the Palomar well? I don't think so. Instead, he's using the cracked lens he's been training on pulp stories through Fritz and training it on an old target. Already, he's given the reader a taste of what his Palomar stories might have been like if he had been a different kind of storyteller (certainly, a less humane one). The Luba, Pipo and Chelo stand-ins all wind up dead while all thought of nuance is thrown to the winds. Unlike Beto's other pulp stories, which are similarly lurid in terms of violence and overall noir quality, Pipo's movie "Proof That That The Devil Loves You" is simple-minded to the point of silliness, a lampoon of the events that originally occurred. Gilbert quite noticeably never has heroes or villains in his stories, only characters whose flaws wind up hurting others to a greater or lesser degree, and the assignation of heroism and villainy in the movie story is what makes it so amusing. With the fun and games over, I'm curious to see whether Killer will wind up being an active protagonist like Luba in the Palomar stories or a passive one like Luba in "Poison River". Luba will clearly be her mirror both for the reader and the other characters, and it will be quite a feat for Gilbert to pull off the trick of creating a new story that treads on new ground while making Killer as memorable as her grandmother.

Jaime takes a slightly different tact in following up a story that could have easily wrapped up the entire series if he had so desired. He essentially puts Maggie and Ray on the shelf (they appear only briefly) and introduces a new character "Tonta" (Spanish for "dummy"), the half-sister of Vivian the Frogmouth. We jump back and forth in time with Tonta, who proves to be a sort of Bizarro Maggie. They're about the same age and liked the same kind of bands, only the frumpier Tonta never quite got her dream man, the singer Eric Lopez (sort of her version of Rand Race). Jaime clearly is going places with this character, spending a lot of time setting up her past and establishing mysteries that he will explore in the next few years but also putting her in the same setting as the modern L&R stories. The violent, dangerous world that the Frogmouth flirts with and that has been touched upon from afar by Jaime gets his full attention in "Crime Raiders International Mobsters and Executioners", a kitschy title that does indeed involve a gang and a potential assassination. The Frogmouth has been a fun character because she seems to show absolutely no regard for others and is essentially a thrill-seeking narcissist. However, despite her great looks, her repulsive personality essentially sets off everyone's bullshit detector instantly, leaving her constantly frustrated. We got to see that explored to comedic effect with her interactions with Ray and Maggie in Volume 2 of L&R, but here, we see that the game she plays sometimes has more serious consequences.

The most intriguing new character Jaime introduces is Gretchen, "the Gorgon". This is a character who appears in the flashback portion of Tonta's story, a teenaged girl with a profoundly ugly face who fully owns that aspect of her herself while generating all sorts of mystery. Tonta talks to her all the time but constantly hides that fact from her hipper friends. Like Gilbert saying "And here we go", Jaime's last line of her initial appearance is "It's going to be a hell of a summer." Going with a brand-new character instead of further fleshing out Angel of Tarzana is an interesting move. By extensively utilizing flashbacks, Jaime will get a chance to explore a cracked-lens version of Maggie as a teen (roughly the same age when L&R #1 debuted) as well as keeping her firmly ensconsced in the wider Locas storyline (though as an outsider looking in). Both brothers, after thirty years, are looking forward and looking back at the same time, revisiting characters on the verge of adulthood like in the earliest days of their comics (characters who were the same age as they were, essentially) while still spending time with characters who are now pushing fifty. There were no earth-shaking events depicted by either brother in this comic, but I'm guessing the next the next three volumes will explore (and explode) the groundwork laid in this issue.

A Tribute To Gilbert Hernandez

This weekend, I'm paying tribute to the 30th anniversary of Love & Rockets by publishing several long out-of-print reviews I did a few years back, in anticipation of my review of L&R New Stories #5. The reviews covered the then-new series of paperback collections which replaced the individual trade paperbacks that appeared after each individual storyline from volume 1 of the series, as well as several other projects outside the official purview of L&R. We'll begin today with Gilbert Hernandez.

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Fantagraphics is perhaps best known for launching the careers of Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez in the early 80s, with their hugely influential series Love and Rockets. Over the years, various stories from the series have been reprinted in over 20 volumes. The problem is that each artist has been producing new episodes of long-running stories for the duration of their run of the comic. As a result, it was sometimes difficult to follow the story from volume to volume, because many of the earliest volumes would print work by both brothers (as well as their brother Mario, an occasional contributor to the series). In addition, the earlier reprints also had other stories not related to their main narratives. While these stories are fascinating in their own right, it was again distracting for those simply looking to follow the increasingly complex central narratives.

Fantagraphics solved this problem in part by putting out gorgeous hardcover collections: Jaime's tales of Maggie & Hopey was appropriately and simply called Locas, while Gilbert's story of life in a small Latin American town was just called Palomar. Each reprinted the majority of the stories from Love and Rockets #1-50. The problem with these books is that they demand a lot of commitment from a new reader. They're high-priced items, with a look & feel that resembles a coffee-table book. In other words, they aren't necessarily the best way to get a new reader to delve into the worlds of Hoppers 13 and Palomar. In addition, some smaller stories that added color and texture to these worlds but didn't advance the overall narrative were cut. To that end, Fantagraphics has provided a nice compromise between their all-inclusive earlier L&R volumes and the oversized hardbacks. They are now reproducing a new series of Love and Rockets reprints with an attractive & eye-catching cover design by Jacob Covey. Each volume is meaty in its own right, totalling close to 300 pages. They're softbacks, and thus sell at a reasonable $14.95 apiece. Jaime's volumes are solely devoted to his Locas stories, and in chronological order, while Gilbert's do the same for Palomar. When FBI is done with this set of reprints, it'll actually present a more complete version of the story than what was presented in the hardbacks. There will be three volumes for Gilbert and three volumes for Jaime, plus a seventh volume that collects the various odds 'n ends from both. (There have been additional volumes printed for some of the stories from volum as Hernandez Bros. solo series.)

 

Gilbert ("Beto") Hernandez's Heartbreak Soup shows him at the top of his game from the very beginning. Whereas Jaime concentrated mostly on the adventures of 18-year-olds in the cities and suburbs of Southern California, Beto told his stories through multigenerational and mostly rural eyes. Throughout this volume, we see several generations of characters first as youngsters and then as adults, with Beto flashing back and forward as he sees fit. After introducing Chelo and the basics of Palomar, Beto launched right into "Heartbreak Soup", an awe-inspiring tale that delivers the tragic story of Manuel and Soledad, the rivalry of the mysterious Luba & Chelo (and then their eventual partnership), tomfoolery surrounding the buffoonish Tipin Tipin, and the achingly real difficulties of Heraclio as he struggles to fit in with other kids his age. The centerpiece of the story is a tree where a boy who had died years earlier is sometimes visible to his old friends, and which child winds up joining him under that tree.

Beto's sense of composition is remarkably assured for such a young artist, as is his character design. His style never quite reaches the level of sublime beauty and simplicity that Jaime eventually achieved, but then that style wouldn't quite be a match for the kinds of stories he tells in Palomar. These stories were also much less prone to the flights of whimsy present in Jaime's early work, muting the magical realist tendencies and doling them out in small doses.

After "Heartbreak Soup", there's one strong story after another: "Act of Contrition" (where Luba hooks up with Archie at her pal Ofelia's expense), "The Laughing Sun" (where Jesus, whom we met earlier as a child, goes crazy and nearly kills his baby and his friends have to reunite to go after him), "Ecce Homo" (a hilarious account of a picnic and the ways in which men act like idiots), "An American in Palomar" (where a foreign photographer sets the town a-twitter with promises of fame and glamor), "For The Love of Carmen" (the story of Heraclio [the most likeable of all Beto's characters] and Carmen's courtship and marriage), and the astonishing "Duck Feet" (a frightening hallucination of a story involving a visiting witch and a sickness that overtakes Palomar).

Heartbreak Soup is simply great cartooning from beginning to end. Beto would go on to make even more complex and haunting stories in the next volume, Human Diastrophism, which has one of my favorite stories of all time in comics.. I do think that any reader interested in the history of comics should have all of the Hernandez brothers' output through volume I of Love and Rockets at a minimum; it's a comics cultural requirement in my view. So many cartoonists of today were directly influenced by their character development, understanding of human relationships and ability to create what seemed to be living, breathing people. I wouldn't describe their work as avant-garde or experimental in comparison to some of today's more aggressively individualistic artists; in fact, "Los Bros." drew their influence from 60s Marvel comics, horror comics, monster movies, pro wrestling, Hank "Dennis the Menace" Ketcham and Dan "Archies" DeCarlo. They synthesized the clarity of that storytelling style with the kind of slice-of-life stories that had never before been seen in comics, and set them in locations that were also groundbreaking. The fact that the main characters were women, and that they were portrayed as familiar and flesh-and-blood characters, was not only groundbreaking but hugely inspirational for many cartoonists. I'd recommend Love and Rockets for any general reader interested in human sexuality, issues of gender and gender identification -- the meaning of what it is to be masculine or feminine are running themes for both artists. Beto & Jaime have only gotten better and more refined in their work.
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In Gilbert's Palomar stories, there's a rawness that dominates the proceedings: raw anger, raw sexuality, raw passion for life, death and art. Unlike the intimacy of Jaime's stories that make so many people identify with his characters, Gilbert deliberately distances the audience from his characters with both a variety of narrative techniques and a frank exposure of everyone's flaws. Nowhere is that truer with Luba, the bombshell capable of horrendous acts of coldness and anger. Her dysfunctional relationship with her children reflects her affection for them and resentment towards them, and it culminates in nearly breaking her daughter's arm in a fit of rage. As the book progresses and we reach the end of the main Palomar stories, even the most likeable characters are shown to make mistakes as they progress through life. Gilbert the creator passes no judgment on his characters, letting all of them simply be human.

The tone of Gilbert's stories always had an air of living on borrowed time, as some kind of nameless doom threatened the world of Palomar. That sense of dread seemed to have been influenced by the 80's zeitgeist of the threat of nuclear war. The fact that the end of the world never came to pass didn't ease the tone of the stories; if anything, the level of angst only increased precisely because the world didn't end, even though everyone was expecting it. That sense of dread was made manifest by the book's extended narrative, Human Diastrophism, wherein a serial killer stalks Palomar. Beto ramps up the tension in this story: tension between Luba and her daughter Maricela, tension because of a group of monkeys infesting the town, tension because Tonantzin has suddenly decided to become political, tension between Luba and her various lovers, and of course the tension raised because of the killer. There's a shocking twist at the end of the story that echoes through the rest of the narratives in this volume.

The rest of the stories in this book turn their attention elsewhere, particularly on Luba's two sisters who were introduced in stories that took place outside of Palomar and will be seen in the next volume of the series. Gilbert creates one memorable character after another, spinning epics out of people he just introduced to the saga. My favorite was the superhuman Gorgo, a lovelorn gangster who fell for Luba's mother Maria and subsequently vowed to project everyone in the family. The genius of Gilbert is his ability to craft short stories that are comprehensible to anyone reading these characters for the first time, yet packed with deeper layers of meaning for long-time fans. He deftly manages to tie in virtually every plot thread in the collection's last story, "Chelo's Burden." The disaster that had hung over the town finally happened in the form of an earthquake, yet this event wasn't the end of Palomar, but rather only Luba's role in the community. This was the fitting end for the Palomar stories, but it only served to set up the final act for Luba's saga.

Gilbert carried that saga through various other series and it culminated in the second half of Love and Rockets V2 #20, in a story called "Venus and You". Venus is the daughter of Petra (Luba's half-sister), and in many ways is the character who is purest of heart in Gilbert's stories. It's only fitting that she should be the main character narrating the end of the story of Luba and her family. Venus talks to an elderly Luba towards the end, a Luba who finally wants nothing more than peace. The story ends with Venus embracing "the good madness", talking to the people in her life who have died and taking solace from their presence in her life. Venus is able to achieve a balance in her life that eluded her aunts and cousins.

Gilbert's draftsmanship was remarkably steady from his earliest work to his most recent comics. What has changed and deepened is his understanding of comics-as-language. As a result, he takes more formal and narrative risks. Beto takes the risk of confounding his audience with dizzying tonal and temporal shifts. There are long side-trips focusing on minor characters and extended meditations on sexual frustration. The shift to America and focus on Fritz & Petra's stories was all about neurosis, the search for meaning and a quest for identity in a shallow culture. Venus proved to be living the most authentic life of Beto's characters, balancing family, love and her own dizzying creativity; she was a fitting character to fade out on.

Of course, Gilbert can't quite let alone certain aspects of these stories. Fritz eventually quits her job as a therapist and becomes an actress in lurid, pulp b-movies. Gilbert has decided to adapt these movies he wrote about into graphic novels, the first of which is Chance In Hell. Fritz appears as a prostitute, but is really only a background character. The book concerns a burned-out city torn apart by war and inhabited by children whose daily life is punctuated by rape and murder. The main character is a young girl named Empress, a survivor who had to become cold and distant in order to hide her own emotional scars--the greatest of which was being separated from her father at an early age.

Her story is about auditioning potential father figures in her life, none of whom are really up to the job. The book is in a three-act structure, the first two of which climax with horrendous acts of violence. We go from Empress as a child, where she somehow survives the chaos surrounding her; to Empress as a teen, where she is disappointed by virtually every man in her life; to Empress as an adult, who has trouble connecting with her husband. As Empress' life and emotional makeup becomes more complex, so does Beto's narrative become more oblique and unusual. This book is a perfect merger of many of Gilbert's interests: pulpy stories with complicated emotional layering, vivid characters, family dynamics, daring narrative choices, action, sex, and a relentlessly downbeat and cynical vision of humanity. Chance In Hell works on so many levels, and while its unrelentingly grim tone can be difficult to process at times, one is rewarded by repeated readings.

Like Jaime, Dan DeCarlo's art is an important influence, but I'd argue that Steve Ditko is an even bigger one for Gilbert, along with certain aspects of EC Comics. Character design is Gilbert's greatest strength, both as writer and artist. He has always managed to make even his minor characters the center of whatever universe they happen to be inhabiting, using key exaggerations to make them immediately memorable and then introducing surprising layers of subtlety. Chance In Hell represents Gilbert at his peak as a creator, 25 years after he first began drawing Love and Rockets. Both he and Jaime continue to refine their styles, take new chances and carve out a unique & distinguished place in comics history. Their influence on several generations of artists is unmistakable, but what young artists should really take from them is their complete devotion to the art and a fierce desire to continue to evolve.

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From the very beginning, Gilbert Hernandez' mythical Latin American town of Palomar was not immune to violence. Indeed, we see sex and violence converge in the very first Palomar story, as a man who was in love with his best friend wound up killing him in a fit of jealous rage. Throughout the Palomar saga, Gilbert's primary focus has been on the way sexual desire (fulfilled or frustrated) informs the actions of the adults in Palomar. Desire frustrated or denied often acted as a wellspring for conflict or even violence in these stories, and in particular led to the fetishization of desire. In the Palomar stories, that raw undercurrent was tempered by his other storytelling interests, especially Beto's exploration of family and family relationships as a force that ranged from beneficent to ambivalent and the way that children interrelate. The obvious affection Hernandez holds for his Palomar characters always gave these stories a sweet quality, even when dark events like a serial killer or an earthquake afflicted the town. One always got the sense, throughout its long history, that Palomar would always survive any threat. That is, perhaps one reason why Hernandez chose to quit telling stories about the town--there wasn't much left to tell about its future without destroying his creation.

Gilbert has often given vent to his darker explorations in stories either tangential to Palomar or outside of its scope completely. Let's first look at the handsome collection Beyond Palomar. This collects two storylines: "Love and Rockets X" and what is in many ways Beto's masterpiece, "Poison River". Both are sprawling, tense cast-of-thousands epics that offer vivid portraits of a particular set of times and places. "Love and Rockets X" is a masterwork of light character drama and visceral racial tensions. On the one hand, it's a goof on the band that named itself "Love and Rockets" in the 80's (after the comic), as a group of characters are the "real" Love and Rockets. On the other hand, it's a story built around a violent hate crime and the way various characters react to it. The story draws in Maricela (Luba's daughter) and her lover, who ran away from home and was never heard from again in the main Palomar storyline and introduces some characters who would have a major impact further down the line. It's a story about the exuberance of youth and the ways it can be crushed. It's about all forms of identity (racial, religious, ethnic, sexual) and the ways these differences often bring out the worst in others. It's a story with no pat resolution or answers, with some lives ended, some lives shattered, and many rash decisions made that alter some lives irrevocably.

As vivid as the characters in this story were and as tense as the conflict became, "Love and Rockets X" pales in comparison to "Poison River". The brief description of this story is that it details Luba's life from birth until the time that she came upon Palomar with Ofelia and decided to stay. We learn why Luba was always so guarded, and Ofelia so paranoid, but that information is secondary to the epic tale of crime bosses, revolutionary politics, savage violence, sexual fetishes, betrayals and counter-betrayals. It's like reading a comics version of a John Woo Hong Kong film like A Bullet In The Head. Hernandez pulls off the impressive trick of telling a story with enough plot for three or four stories while still providing some remarkably vivid characterization. His master stroke is using the then-naive Luba as the tent pole for the story--everything revolves around her, directly or indirectly.

What makes this perhaps his best-ever work is not just the complexity of the story and the numerous betrayals, surprises and reversals that occur over a period of decades. It's the complexity of the characters themselves, none of whom can be simplistically pigeonholed as "good" or "evil". Take Ofelia, for instance. She's a young revolutionary, a fiery and passionate intellectual who is working against the oppressive government. She's saddled with taking care of Luba (her cousin) when she's a toddler, and frequently smacks her around. At the same time, she teaches her to read and is the only real parental figure Luba has. All Ofelia has to do is shake her fist and Luba knows to clam up, or sit for hours in one spot while Ofelia goes off to meet her revolutionary friends or lover. That particular device is used to horrific effect when a car she's driving in with those friends is stopped by sadistic government troops, and her friends are killed and Ofelia herself is savagely raped and left for dead. As she's being assaulted, she sees a sobbing Luba and saves her life by shaking her fist so as to keep her quiet. The relationship between Luba and Ofelia is enormously complex, filled with a mixture of intense devotion & love along with loathing and resentment.

What propels the story is the way Luba develops as a character. Even if she is never at the center of the plotline, her existence serves as a catalyst for a number of events (many of which have to do with her mother Maria). Luba goes from being a blank slate to an innocent toddler to a naive teen to a bewildered young woman. For much of this story, things happen to her that she doesn't understand. She's a passive protagonist who is at the mercy of those who have chosen to protect her. The story ends with Luba becoming an active protagonist and Ofelia's equal and even master in many ways. Changing the nature of a protagonist without putting them through a standard "hero's journey" is yet another unique aspect of this story and why it's so unconventional while being so familiar.

More than any other Love & Rockets story I've read from Beto, "Poison River" is all about the intersection between sex and violence. Peter Rio is perhaps the best example, a violent man who fetishizes Luba's stomach for reasons that become clear (and disturbing) later in the story. He's incapable of true love or even regular sex because of his obsessions, and the most obsessive characters in this story are the most violent. The way that homosexual urges are supressed and the way in which they bubble up also lead to violence, as these desires are often impossible to reconcile. Many of the characters in the story are in pain and are trying to numb it. In Luba's case, she turns to drugs. For others, violence itself is a sort of anesthetic. For others, it's indulging in their fetishes. No character in this story can numb themselves for long; sooner or later, they have to face their pain and their desires, and it rarely turns out well for anyone.

The action of the story crackles off the page. For those readers used to the pleasantly ambling Palomar stories, the whip-crack pace and sudden reversals in this story may be a bit of a shock. There's more pure action in this story than in any other Beto tale, and it's not action in the bloodless Kirby sense (where a story is all action and momentum), but more in a Coen brothers sense--we feel the power of the violence of the story. It's not a game, it's not for fun, and this gives each death an enormous amount of emotional impact. This is no glorification of violence, but rather a story that portrays its impact with a great deal of care. By framing each chapter around a single character (or pair of characters), Beto is able to jump back and forth in time while still letting the reader understand that it's now time to focus in on the story of a particular character. His character design is astoundingly varied and his storytelling is remarkably assured.

Since that time, Gilbert returned frequently to Luba's clan, just recently finishing up their story. However, his interest in sex, violence and how they interrelate has only continued to grow. In the first four issues of Speak of the Devil (Dark Horse), he addresses these issues much more directly. It's telling, perhaps, that Hernandez depicts violence in graphic detail in these comics but chooses not to directly show nudity, which he does quite freely in Love & Rockets. I'm not sure if this was his own decision or one by editorial, but otherwise it's an interesting comment on American culture. The story feels influenced by lurid pulp traditions, though Beto starts slow and ratchets up the tension from issue to issue.

The story follows Val, a high school gymnast, who also happens to be a devil-masked peeping Tom. Things start to get especially interesting when she peeps in on her father and her very young stepmother, Linda. The cliffhanger at the end of the first issue sees Val caught by a gang of punks while she's in her mask. In the second issue, she's falling in love with her tormented friend Paul, who is being abused by his parents. Val still looks in on her stepmother (whom she professes to despise), this time when she's masturbating--but she finds that Linda is a more than willing object of the peeping Tom's desire. The cliffhanger this time sees Paul finding Val dressed as the devil, and he kisses her.

Up to this point, tensions simmer but haven't boiled over just yet. In the third issue, the tension becomes even greater as Val starts to slowly lose a grip on her sanity. Val had to miss the state finals in gymnastics because she injured her ankle (when she was running from the punks), but went to support her friend Patty, who has long had a crush on her. After she came home, she found Paul in the arms of Linda. He had come to her in the devil costume, and she was immediately drawn to him. Initially seemingly unfazed by that revelation, Val then grabs a knife and screams "Who wants it first?" as the issue ends. The most recent issue ratchets up the intensity another level, as we see the result of Val's attack--she hurts Paul but doesn't kill him, and is disarmed before she can get to Linda. The three of them all calm down, but the experience has affected them. After Paul is abused yet again, the three of them enter their house in disguise and brutally murder his parents, complete with a vicious "injury to the eye" motif on Paul's mother. The three of them realize that they're perfectly OK with what they've done, but that experience has permanently altered them. As the issue ends, we see Linda and Val luring a passing motorist to his doom.

This is one of the few periodicals that whose arrival at the comic shop is an eagerly-awaited event. I wondering just how far Hernandez is going to take this story, and how far he can go. It appears like the murderous trio is about to embark on a road trip or killing spree, and it's obvious that each of their own repressed sexual desires is a key to what triggered this cycle of events. Val's voyeurism and desire for her stepmother but inability to express or understand it led to her deepening her double life. Linda being turned on by the forbidden also helped lead to act out, while Paul's constant exposure to violence led to his own transformation. There were hints dropped in issue 4 where they may not be able to hide this transformation for long, and one almost gets the sense that they don't want to. Each issue feels like a punch to the stomach as Beto shockingly, stunningly turns characters that he carefully created as sympathetic figures into completely amoral monsters--and indirectly asks the reader what the line is. This is easily his most brilliant non-Fantagraphics work, and rivals some of his best stories for its sheer clarity and harshness.

By contrast, New Tales of Old Palomar #3 is almost a welcome relief to read in comparison, even though this issue has its own share of violence. A running theme in Gilbert's stories has been the nature of motherhood and caretakers. Many of the women who can't have children wind up becoming caretakers of children, like Ofelia or as noted in this issue, Chelo. Tonantzin is confronted with this issue rather dramatically, as a sort of mystical creature that appears in the form of a baby starts appearing to her. Learning how to banish and possibly destroy it, she instead spares it and leads it to safety. In the second story, we flash forward to the future, right before the huge earthquake at the end of the Palomar saga. Each story in the series has been titled "The Children of Palomar", and while the prior two issues dealt explicitly with children, this issue deals with ramifications of the earlier stories.

In particular, Chelo once again encounters the bizarre aliens she met in #2, and this time they pose as "bird scientists". Eventually, they invite her inside and attack her, eventually restraining her and plucking out her eye. She comes back to confront them and a small earthquake comes, killing the aliens. It's as though Palomar itself rose up to protect one of its most ardent supporters. There's a sense that Chelo is the town's mother figure, down to fining women who dress too provocatively in her role as sheriff. I thought the final issue of this series might see Chelo's early childhood, but instead Hernandez chose to write a story that tied up the events of the first two issues and firmly established Chelo as the emotional center of Palomar. There's a purity of purpose in her character that is rarely seen in Hernandez' stories, and it's a fitting goodbye to this world that he created. It'll be interesting to see how he continues to develop his interest in pulp fiction, given the increasingly dark bent to his art.

A Dozen Thoughts On Love & Rockets: New Stories #4

This isn't a formal review, per se, but instead a few gut-reaction thoughts on the remarkable new issue of Love & Rockets: New Stories (#4). I've never bothered to do this before in a review, but the nature of this issue demands that I note that there are spoilers below.

1. Gilbert's "King Vampire" is another in his line of Fritz-related grindhouse movie adaptations. It's also a brutal takedown of the current cultural obsession over vampires. Vampire fiction eroticizes the monsters at the core of their stories, equating bloodlust with simple lust and essentially glorifying rape fantasies. In one shockingly disgusting scene, the sexy vampire in the story squashes a guy's head against a wall in the most visceral manner possible so as to make it easy for his new prey to drink his blood, but also provide an object lesson. For a predator, its prey is little more than an object at hand. That scene bluntly drains all of the eroticism out of the story and rightly smashes the whole vampire erotica genre to bits.

2. Gilbert's "And Then Reality Kicks In" is a sober, complex and layered conversation between Fritz and an old boyfriend. Like a lot of things in this issue, this story has an air of finality to it, a capstone of sorts. I haven't figured out which old lover of Fritz's this is (I need to go back and reread), but there was something satisfying about seeing her in possession of hard-won wisdom.

3. Speaking of an air of finality, Jaime's follow-up to last issue's "Browntown" and "The Love Bunglers" is what pushes this issue into the stratosphere. I literally have no idea where he goes from here with his Locas characters.

4. It is cliche' to talk about one's favorite characters as though they really exist and feel like friends. It is certainly not a very sophisticated way to read a story. That said, if any cartoonist has created work that's earned this mark, it's Jaime. When Ray Dominguez was getting his head bashed in by Calvin (truly the most tragic character in Jaime's cast), my gut reaction was "No!" Ray is Jaime's Everyman character--a decent if slightly underachieving guy who never had the cool of someone like Speedy or Hopey (especially in his own eyes) and so always feels like an underdog in earning Maggie's affections.

5. The theme of the past two issues has been emotional steadfastness and patience. Characters are forced to put their cards on the table about their feelings. For some, like Ray, it was a move of maturity, of realizing what he wanted as a middle-aged man and that he had no more time to waste. For some, like Reno, it was trying to act on long-supressed crushes but not understanding the difference between fantasy and reality. For Vivian "the Frogmouth", it was an expose' of her essential vapidness, a lesson learned too late. For Maggie, it was a lesson learned almost too late that one must jump on opportunities when they arise, that putting aside one's own baggage is the key to moving on. Maggie could simply never get out of her own way. Calvin's story was one of devotion never being rewarded and becoming warped as a result. Intimacy was conflated with assault in his mind as he tried to "protect" his sister.

6. Those themes are tied up in "Return To Me", which is a sequel to both "Browntown" and "Wigwam Bam". The latter, in my opinion, was the high point of Jaime's work in Love & Rockets Volume I. The flashback stories in the past two issues have served the purpose of filling in a couple of crucial emotional blanks in Maggie's backstory. "Browntown" established how her parents' divorce cut her off emotionally from her family on a permanent basis, but also how her relationship to her best friend Letty started to fracture a bit. "Wigwam Bam" was Letty's story from Maggie's point of view, a crucial entry in that it revealed where Maggie was emotionally right before she met Hopey. Letty was of course killed in a car accident, but the heartbreaking "Return To Me" documents her friendship with Maggie from her point of view. Maggie always feared that Letty was too cool for her, but Letty never let Maggie out of her heart. This story was all the more tragic because Letty felt so awful for Maggie that her mother left her behind in Hoppers and was prepared to take her in and really nurture her. Instead, she was cruelly cut down, and Maggie never quite knew how her friend felt about her.

7. The last chapter of "The Love Bunglers" was a tour-de-force, a walk-off grand slam of a story that was thirty years in the making. I doubt there were any dry eyes on the part of long-time fans of the series while reading this, yet every single moment was completely earned organically. There was no easy sentiment on display, but rather thirty years' worth of hard-won lessons and building emotion. What was especially powerful about the last chapter is how slow and easy the pace of the prior chapters was. In retrospect, one can see how Jaime was building up to this in the earlier chapters (just as the flashback stories enhance and comment on the present-day story), but the scene where Calvin has a psychotic breakdown (after once again seeing the blue sun, a metaphor for the way Calvin sees real things that others don't and ignore) and thinks that Ray has done something bad to Maggie was heartbreaking. Ray was typical Ray in that scene--slightly exasperated, more than a little patient and trying to do the right thing--and got his head bashed in for his troubles.

8. Considering the tragic circumstances of Calvin and Ray's own hard-luck life, I honestly thought that's where the story was going to end. Jaime's narrative equivocation about Ray's fate didn't feel manipulative to me; instead, he effectively inserts us into Maggie's perspective while giving the reader enough extra information to make the scene where she's talking to the guy in the record shop about Ray all the more heartbreaking. Jaime also inserts a bit of humor when she visits a brain-damaged Ray at his parents' house when his mother notes that all he says is "Maggie", "fuck" and "shit". Jaime is a master of body language and gesture, and the panel where Maggie curls into a ball was devastating.

9. That set up the two-pages with a nine-panel grid on each. The Maggie page is something we've seen before with her, and this page took us from her time as a baby to now. Seeing that the next page not only did the same with Ray, but when I realized as a reader that each corresponding panel on Ray's page commented on Maggie (and in most of them, because they were eyeing one another), it was a stunning gut punch. This was Jaime at his finest, "sampling" old stories, telling a story without a true narrative and using his command of gesture to recapitulate a thirty-year story.

10. The final scene with Maggie (now a mechanic once again) taking Hopey's son back to her was pitch-perfect. There's hasn't been much interaction between the two characters in a number of years, yet Jaime still has a way of conveying an astonishing amount of meaning in a very short number of panels. As always, there is both ease and tension between the two women, even as they have their own very different lives. Hopey inviting Maggie in several times and Maggie demurring was a crucial narrative point, though that's not clear until we see Ray. In other words, Ray is now Maggie's top priority.

11. Finally, the last scene with Ray was simple, powerful, emotional--again, all of that feeling felt earned, with Maggie's saying "Of course I waited for you, I love you" succinctly summing up this complex, messy, beautiful relationship. That scene was also a connector to the opening sequence of Jaime's stories in this issue, as we meet a long-time couple and see them go about their daily routine; it's decidedly unsexy and is all about devotion. The man is Yax, Maggie's new business partner, but that relationship is a referent to Maggie and Ray growing old together.

12. Again, where does Jaime go from here? Does he continue to examine Maggie & Ray's relationship as they grow older? Does he turn his eye back to Hopey as she raises a son? Is Calvin's story over? Will we see more from Penny or Izzy? Or does he turn back to depicting youth as Angel goes off to college? Perhaps at this point Maggie will be more of a background character for a few years. Perhaps he'll start over with something completely different. Certainly, his "Locas" universe feels as finished as it ever will. Whatever he decides, Jaime certainly stuck the landing on his life's work to date.