Sequart Reprints: Garage Band

This article was originally posted at sequart.com in 2007.
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Every time I'm introduced to the work of yet another masterful European artist, it feels like the sort of dream where you're shown a mysterious treasure trove of beautiful art that you'd never seen before. Of all the great comics published in Fantagraphics' Ignatz line, it was Gipi's Wish You Were Here that impressed me the most. Those comics are nuanced character studies that hint at but don't fully reveal dark secrets and plans gone awry. Garage Band is a somewhat sunnier tale, told using his same bag of tricks, where he skillfully reveals just enough of his characters to make us empathize with them.

Gipi's line is delicate and restrained, perfectly balancing the muted watercolors that give the entire book a washed-out look. Above all else, he's a master of body language, gesture, and expressiveness. His ability to convey feeling with often minimalist or cartoony faces and figures is not just remarkable--it's the key to getting those feelings across. This is one of those comics that would be worth looking at even if one didn't read a single word of it.

What makes this one of my favorite comics of 2007 is the way Gipi uses his images to create such vivid characters. With just the barest bones of a plot, Gipi takes us into the lives of several individuals and allows us to understand each of them, even if we don't necessarily like them. The result of his mastery is simply a feeling of enormous satisfaction as a reader. As a critic, it takes time to figure out exactly what he did.

The plot revolves around four young men who decide to form a garage band. Giuliano's father allows them to use an old garage for practice, and the band becomes a vehicle for each of them to express themselves and escape their lives. His friend Stefano is the engine behind the band, hiding pain behind a sneer and a series of outrageous acts. Alex is an oddball whose fascination with Nazi paraphernalia is his own way of dealing with an strange childhood. Alberto is obsessed with the possibility of his father dying, and music is the one thing that removes him from that mindset.

The book is divided into five canzones (songs), each ending with music, the promise of music, or music halted. The first chapter introduces the characters and hints at their problems and backgrounds. The first time Gipi shows the band playing is a revelation. Giuliano is our narrator, filling in bits of background for everyone but himself. During that first practice, he tells us what the songs are about--about each person's joy, pain and the sense of camaraderie. The narration gives way to a page of the band just playing, with Stefano sensing what they're all capable of.

The second chapter introduces Giuliano's girlfriend, perhaps the one person who truly appreciates him and certainly the person who encourages him the most. Later, she reveals some of his secrets. We see bits and pieces of other family life. Alberto's glazed eyes at the dinner table, ignoring his mother haranguing his father, were quite telling--as was the way his face lifted when his father suggested another project revolving around his model plane. That chapter ends with the revelation that Alex's father had run off years ago, and the performance of a song fueled by that feeling.

The third chapter is about the band committing a crime to replace broken equipment, and the fourth chapter is about the price they pay for that. Every character is presented with a series of choices at this point, and Stefano gets the toughest choice of all. The band was recording their songs for a demo for an A&R man that Stefano's father had managed to get the ear of. That record executive was the cruel voice of pragmatism: it's not about talent or music, it's about product. He offered him a job and told him to abandon the band. He said that the only thing that counted was the desire for success.

We don't see Stefano agonize or even think about the decision. All we see is him showing up at the band's new home that Alex has put together after he made his own crucial decision. Though Stefano is obsessed with the idea of making it big, it's clear that it has to be on his own terms--and that he truly believes in his friends.

There isn't much that's resolved in the pages of this book, really. Alberto is still haunted by his father's potential death and Giuliano still has a strained relationship with his father. Alex, despite his act of generosity, is still trying to come to terms with his father's disappearance. Stefano's move will clearly not please his own father, who is mostly concerned with commercial success. That dysfunctional father-son dynamic is at the heart of the book, and the primary fuel for the band's expression. What we do see is the band's affirmations of each other, though they are unspoken, or conveyed through the friends ragging on each other. As a reader, these tacit emotions are palpable because of Gipi's expressiveness. I've rarely seen an artist so adept at using a scribble or set of scratchy lines to get across so much information, feeling and wit. This is character-based narrative at its finest and typical of the best offerings from First Second: accessible but sophisticated comics. Gipi is not pushing the envelope of what is possible with comics here, but is rather more concerned with telling a story with characters and themes that will resonate.

Comics For Kids; Toon Books, Adventures In Cartooning, Anna & Froga

The latest batch of comics for kids definitely skews toward the alt-comics neck of the woods this time around, with several new releases from Toon Books, a new volume in the Adventures in Cartooning series and an English translation of a book by Anouk Ricard.

The Toon Books line is an interesting success story, given that editor and publisher Francoise Mouly was initially unable to sell her idea of comics for very young readers to a single big publisher.  Fast-forward a few years, and the line has sold a lot of books and won several awards, and is now an imprint of a larger publisher. Mouly still retains control, but she's started to farm some of the work out ever so slightly to her daughter Nadja, who was a "guest editor" on a couple of the recent books. Mouly has expanded her initial vision for the line, concretizing the notion that some of the books are aimed at pre-K kids and others are for more slightly advanced readers. As such, a couple of the books here are longer and more challenging than any of the prior volumes, but Mouly is also careful not to abandon established formulae, like the beloved Benny & Penny books of Geoffrey Hayes.

Let's start with Hayes. His latest Benny & Penny book is called Lights Out!, and it's once again an evocatively drawn story about two siblings at bedtime.Hayes has an incredible knack for portraying their relationship with great affection yet still understanding the ways in which children squabble and generally enjoy making each other miserable at times. Here, the mischievous Benny can't settle down at bedtime, annoying his sister in every way imaginable, until he has to go get his all-important pirate hat from the playhouse outside. Throughout the series, Hayes has loved folding back a story's conflict onto the aggressor (usually Benny), putting them in the sort of situation that they taunted the other about. Once again, Hayes masterfully balances his background as a traditional illustrator of children's books with making this work as a comic, including finding ways to lead the reader's eyes across the page as simply as possible. At the same time, he provides a wave of eye pops, as characters bleed off-panel or tiny bugs pop up in the same place. For the youngest of readers, these are perfect story and art objects.

Frank Viva (an illustrator for the New Yorker) takes a completely different approach in A Trip To The Bottom of the World. Drawn in Illustrator, this book is much colder and starker than Hayes' work, filled with a confluence of basic shapes and colors that pop off the page.This book is actually based on Viva's own experience on an Antarctic research vessel, as the things that the explorer's mouse sees are things Viva spotted. The plot (with the mouse constantly wanting to go back home, until the trip is over) is fairly boilerplate for this kind of thing, but it's Viva's visuals that make this one worth a look.

Mouly switches things up once again with David Nytra's pen-and-ink comic The Secret of the Stone Frog. It's more than a little influenced by Lewis Carroll (and of course the illustrator John Tenniel) by way of Winsor McCay, as a girl and her younger brother try to find their way home in a mysterious forest, aided by the immobile but loquacious titular frogs. This 80-page book is  the longest of the Toon Book entries and is billed as the first Toon graphic novel, and as such it's obviously aimed at a six or seven year old as an early "big" book for them. The book is beautiful to look at and carries the line's usual sterling production values, even if it does feel derivative.

The gem of Toon's fall batch is Rutu Modan's Maya Makes A Mess. It's a pure visual joy and has some of Modan's best-ever cartooning. It's about a messy little girl with bad table manners who is called to eat with the Queen, and her uncouth nature (done because it's more fun to eat with your hands) has a surprising effect on the Queen and her court. Modan's line is crisp and clear, and her already highly-developed color sense makes every page a treat, without going into too much pyrotechnics. There's also a running gag at the bottom of the page that appears to simply be a visual flourish at first, but is revealed to simply be a time-release joke. I love that this book does not desire to teach any sort of lesson about good manners but rather is all about pursuing a joke to its logical end.

The Center for Cartoon Studies team of James Sturm, Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost return for their third book in the Adventures In Cartooning series, this time with the every-sturdy Christmas Special. This book really does have "stocking stuffer" written all over it, as it's by far the least interactive of the three books. The first one taught cartooning basics and the second volume was pretty much a cartooning workbook, but the Special is mostly just an extended series of (effective) gags and rhymes about Santa struggling to deal with giving gifts in the digital age. All the reader gets to do is write a comic strip for Santa about something cheerful, and they are then encouraged to send it to CCS ("Halfway to the North Pole") for Santa's benefit. It's a clever idea, and I'm curious to see what kind of responses they will wind up getting. The book takes a while to warm up, but once the cartooning elf summons forth the cartooning knight of the first two books, the gags start flying and the visual storytelling of the trio starts popping. I'm still not quite sure what the division of labor is like on these books, but it does seem like I sense Frederick-Frost's hand most strongly. I'm not sure where this series goes next; does it try to teach a more advanced lesson, or will it stick with concept books like this one? I'm hoping for the former (at least another challenging activity book), but I'm guessing the latter would be an easier sell.

It makes sense that Ben Jones blurbed the translation of Anouk Ricard's Anna & Froga: Want a Gumball? That's because her figures look a lot like Jones' own weird, crude and ugly drawings. Like Jones, however, those figures have an enormous amount of personality and power on the page, thanks in part to what looks like a lively application of magic marker. I've never seen a book that had so many ugly drawings on it that made me want to stare at it for hours. Part of that is Ricard's judicious use of negative space on every page, saving the reader from being overwhelmed by the drawings and the colors. Indeed, the use of white made it easy for anyone to follow the characters across the page and zero in on the gags at hand. As interesting as the art is in this book, it's Ricard's skill as a humorist that makes this book endlessly readable. The title characters, plus dog friend Bubu and cat friend Ron form a kind of Seinfeld gang that milks a lot of humor from awkwardness, vanity, self-deception and a healthy sense of mutual aggravation. On some pages, Ricard goes from her crudely-drawn comic strip to beautifully painted full page strips that comment on the previous story. One of the best things about this book is Ricard's storytelling rhythm. With each story running about three or four pages, that allows Ricard to pack a lot of gags into this forty page book. She ramps up the awkwardness in each strip until the climax of the final punchline, gives the reader a palate cleanser with her paintings, and then repeats the process ten times. The result is a highly meaty forty pages, though I found myself wanting more by the end. This is a truly outstanding book for kids, one they will be able to follow with ease as well as appreciate the jokes, which generally wind up with a chase scene, things being thrown, or something gross or cruel happening to one of the characters. I hope this sells well enough for Drawn & Quarterly to publish many more volumes.

Sequart Reprints: Toon Books

This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
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Former RAW co-editor Francoise Mouly is heading up a new line of comics primers aimed squarely at 4-6 year olds, which is such a brilliant idea that one wonders why it hasn't been done before. Mouly co-edited the Little Lit series, which I reviewed here. That brought in both respected alt and underground comics creators, often collaborating with illustrators or children's authors. The Toon Book line is a much more focused attempt at creating comics for children, both in terms of design and content, and the results are intriguing.

First, the books (co-designed by Mome cartoonist Jonathan Bennett) have the look, feel and shape of classic children's books. They are slim, small hardcovers that any child could pick up and hold. Picking them up reminded me of the first time I read a Dr Seuss book when I was a child. However, there is no mistaking these for illustrated novels--they are comics, told in the language of comics, through and through. We get tipped off to that right away on the cover of each book, because they both depict action and have word balloons. In the most RC Harvey sense of the definition of comics, each of these books carefully combines word and image on every page and requires a reader to understand how they combine to form an experience that is very different from looking at words or pictures alone. They're also very deliberately propulsive in terms of the action on the page, emphasizing panel-to-panel transition and the way that motion can be depicted on the page.

Let's begin with Silly Lilly and the Four Seasons, by French children's book author Agnes Rosenstiehl. This is the book I'd first introduce to the youngest readers, perhaps as young as two or three. The concepts and action in this book are simple: Lilly experiences the seasons through a series of activities: playing in the park in spring with her teddy, looking for things in the ocean in the summer, picking apples in the fall, making snowballs in the winter and flying on a swing back in the next spring. The images here are simple and Rosenstiehl's line is warm. That warmth will immediately draw in young readers who are used to similar imagery in books they've seen up to that point in their lives. The panel-to-panel transitions here as Lilly throws a snowball or gets on a swing are simple to understand and will spur on a child's understanding of how movement can be portrayed on the page.

Geoffrey Hayes' Benny & Penny in Just Pretend is the most impressive of the three initial books in the line. Hayes, the older brother of highly innovative (but sadly deceased) underground artist Rory Hayes, is another children's book author. In his case, he carried a lifelong love of comics into his chosen career, so his understanding of the nuances of how to compose a page is quite remarkable. Moreover, his skill in depicting gesture and expression in his characters really brings them to life. The story is about an older brother and younger sister (Benny & Penny) and his reluctance to let her play with him.

The characters are anthropomorphic mice, yet their expressiveness is so very lively. The way Hayes composes his page is playful and engaging, but it also perfectly introduces children to the formal elements of comics. Panels tilt to indicate motion, particularly exciting scenes spill out of panels, certain scenes without panels carry their own emotional resonance, and the use of circular panels instead of squares draws the eye in differently as well. The warmth of his line and the gentleness of his pastel palette makes this book another perfect transition point for young readers, especially for the recommended 4-5 year olds who are ready for a more complex narrative. There's a sweetness to this story that is still true to the conflicts that siblings can have. Still, it's Hayes' gorgeous, lively line that makes this my favorite of the three books, especially with regard to eyes and facial expressions.

Otto's Orange Day, drawn by political cartoonist Frank Cammuso and written by underground legend Jay Lynch, is a book I'd probably recommend to slightly older readers. The art is much slicker than in the other two books and the coloring (by design) is much more forceful. It will appeal to children who like watching a lot of modern animation in terms of its character design, coloring and story action. It's about a young anthropomorphic cat who loves the color orange. He is given a genie-inhabited magic lamp and gets his wish granted to have everything in the world turned orange. When that results in chaos (traffic accidents, orange lamb chops, etc), he tricks the genie into changing colors--but then he changes everything into blue. They have to trick him one more time into making the world normal again (thanks to the magic of pizza). This isn't really a book I'd give to a child who hasn't experienced comics before, but as I noted earlier, it's certainly one I'd give to one who loves animation and wants to experience the the equivalent on the written page. The most appealing aspects of this comic are the gags that Lynch comes up with, which isn't surprising considering that I always considered him to be the funniest of the underground artists.

The Toon Books line is one of the best-conceived comics series I've seen from a book publisher. The selection of creators, the design, the understanding of its audience and the niche it's filling in the world of comics all seem scrupulously well-studied and considered. Most importantly, the actual books seem perfect for the intended audience and an ideal way to get kids to understand how to read comics and get them to seek out more as they grow older. Mouly acts as an aesthetic guidepost here, imprinting her own sense of aesthetics and design on the series while bringing out the best in each of the artists she chooses to work with. I'm eager to see the books in the fall release cycle by Eleanor Davis, Art Spiegelman and the team of Jay Lynch & Dean Haspiel. As RAW determined to bring comics kicking and screaming into fulfilling its promise as something other than adolescent pap, the Toon Book line from RAW Junior is setting out to inculcate a lifetime of loving comics for generations that are increasingly removed from its influence.

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 Jaime 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. We conclude today with Jaime Hernandez.
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Maggie The Mechanic is Jaime Hernandez's first volume of the new Fantagraphics Love and Rockets collection, gathering all of the stories roughly before "The Death of Speedy Ortiz" storyline. Jaime wastes no time introducing us to Maggie & Hopey and immediately brings in a certain ambiguity as to their relationship: are they friends or lovers? That central tension would go on to inform the rest of the series; how Maggie and Hopey related to each other often drove entire storylines. Of course, Jaime told stories that mixed the punk rock scene with dinosaurs, futuristic technology, eccentric billionaires, international intrigue, jungle adventures and all sorts of other wackiness. It was a comics version of magical realism, one that he would tone down greatly as the series evolved. Eventually, such trappings disappeared almost entirely and Jaime's stories revolved around the incredibly rich characters he created.

I always hesitate in recommending Jaime's earliest stories to new readers. His learning curve was a lot steeper than his brother Beto's, though it is fascinating to see how quickly he evolved in just a couple of years. Even as Jaime puts Maggie through all sorts of adventures, he still takes the time to slowly develop the supporting cast: superhero wannabee and all-around knockout Penny Century, Maggie's long-time friend Izzy Ortiz, Izzy's brother and object of Maggie's affection Speedy, the "prosolar mech" crew of Race & Duke, devilish-looking billionaire H.R. Costigan, and of course Hopey Glass. Maggie is all self-doubt and awkwardness, yet radiates such a powerful sense of self that everyone's drawn to her. She possesses a benevolence that attracts both the right and wrong kind of people to her. Chief among them is Hopey, who's all aggression and acting out. The chip on her shoulder protects her against the world, as we are very slowly introduced to her complexities as a character as the series progresses.

After those earlier stories involving assorted Maggie-centered shenanigans, Jaime turns a corner with "100 Rooms". It's about Maggie, Hopey and Izzy staying at the estate of Costigan at Penny's invitation. Though there's plenty of weirdness (and even super-heroes, something Jaime lovingly pokes fun at throughout the series), the story really turns on the relationship between Maggie & Hopey. One could cut away virtually every other story in this volume, but if you read "100 Rooms", one could easily follow the rest of the series. This story also gives some more time to Izzy, who may be the most interesting of Jaime's characters. We only get hints of her backstory in this volume, but we know that something turned her from a happily married woman to someone into "punker voodoo shit", who started to lose touch with reality. While Maggie started to occupy a perfectly normal universe, things always remained strange for haunted, tortured Izzy.

It's interesting to watch Jaime grow as an artist. He starts off by making all the usual mistakes: cramming too much information on a page, over-rendering his figures, and making some pages difficult to read. This was especially true in his first big storyline, "Mechanics". By the time "100 Rooms" rolls around, he's much closer to reaching his current (and flawless) style: a thinner line, an astonishing level of expressiveness with his characters, an assured use of negative space, and a much clearer sense of both page and panel composition. Above all else, Jaime became the master of gesture and body language. There's one page from "Locas Starring Hopey" where Hopey is confronted with a cop who catches her about to spraypaint graffiti on a wall. As the cop taunts her, her older, wilder self screams out insults as her "inner voice", while Hopey herself remains seemingly-calm as Izzy begs her not to snap. Finally, her inner voice becomes her real voice as she screams out obscenities. The cop is entirely in shadow on the left side of each panel, the increasingly agitated Izzy acts as each panel's anchor, Hopey herself remains impassive, and her younger/thought self becomes the raging object of the reader's eye. It's a brilliant page that perfectly serves this bit of slice-of-life that Jaime would become so good at later in his career.

"Las Mujeres Perdidas" ("The Lost Women") is the last full-length story in this collection. Jaime clearly learned from his earlier mistakes to create a breezy, snappy adventure story starring Maggie and Rena Titanion, the wrestling champ-turned-revolutionary. More intriguing are the brief vignettes he offers up at the end, detailing Hopey's stint in a punk band and more details of her life. As fun as the longer storyline was (with an earnest girl reporter, deadly twin midgets, robots, revolutionaries, etc.), Hopey's story was far more compelling. The best was certainly yet to come for Jaime.
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The old saw on Jaime & Gilbert was that Jaime was the better artist and Gilbert the better writer. That was really only true in the very beginning of the series, and the real differences between them have a lot more to do with their choices as storytellers than judgment as to the worth of their comics. The two brothers have always dealt with a lot of similar issues and scenarios. The most obvious is that they were totally unique in the level of detail devoted to depicting two very different Latino cultures, one in California, one "somewhere to the south of the US border". The new Jaime volume, The Girl From H.O.P.P.E.R.S., is especially vivid in its establishment of time and place. From gang tensions in the barrios to an electrifying snapshot of punk culture to the ennui surrounding slacker culture, there's an aching familiarity to the settings his characters find themselves in. Jaime almost totally junks the fantasy element that dominated his early stories, only retaining the wacky wrestling storyline and the adventures of Rena Titanion.

The story that was the obvious wake-up call for his new direction was "The Death of Speedy Ortiz", a masterwork of pain, tension and longing. I'm not sure if it was coincidence or not, but he wrote this story not too long after he had started drawing in his current, mature style. If there was a flaw in his early work, it was his kitchen sink approach to creating comics, stuffing every page and panel. Once he started to simplify, he was able to write extended narratives that slowly unveiled fascinating truths about the characters. With characterization as his main focus, the stories flowed out of their interactions, especially as he started adding new characters to the mix and expanded on old ones. In addition to our flawed young heroes Maggie & Hopey, mentor Izzy (Speedy's sister), and wacky pal Penny Century, we also meet Ray (a former crush of Maggie who returns to Hoppers) and see more of Doyle (Ray's best friend and a hard-living man who just got out of jail), along with many others.

Starting with "The Death of Speedy Ortiz", there's also a tonal shift. Jaime went from the breezy feel of his early stories to adding a bittersweet layer in every subsequent narrative. Even in the funnier stories and brief anecdotes, there's a tinge of sadness to every situation, with so much that's left unsaid but that is desperate to be spoken aloud. As we learn more of the characters' backstories, it becomes apparent that everyone's youth is quickly slipping away, a fact that no one wants to address but everyone understands. Maggie, Hopey, Izzy, Ray, Doyle and even ditzy Penny all experience loss, trauma and tragedy, but the most desperate battle is the fight to connect with others.

Maggie and Hopey are of course the central figures in this battle, as their literal separation only mirrored the simultaneous ambivalence and desperate connection they felt for each other. Izzy is the tragic figure in all this, a broken woman who alternately is loving and protective and but completely alienated from her environment. Ray has an enormous amount of love to give and proves to be vulnerable, while Doyle's been burned so many times that he also tends to close up or run away. While there are many moments of brief happiness, especially with Ray and Maggie, we leave this collection with Maggie leaving him in order to find Hopey.
If forced to pick a couple of stories that were favorites, I'd take "Tear It Up, Terry Downe" as my first. A side character who was involved with Hopey and resents Maggie, this story uses a 9-panel grid with "interview"-style techniques where different people give their opinion of the prickly Terry and then flashes back to her relationship with Hopey. Jaime's ability to get the audience to understand and sympathize with such an unpleasant character is what makes this story stand out, as we see her go from victim to victimizer to victim once again. The crown jewel in this book may be "Flies On The Ceiling", the harrowing account of Izzy's sojourn in Mexico. Izzy is the one character who retained the magical realist trappings of the series, as her battle with the devil here is both symbolic and quite real. There's a different feeling in this story than in most of Jaime's material from this time, one of dread, a sense that nothing is going to be all right ever again. What's interesting is that this is the feeling often evoked in Gilbert's stories.

Comparing Gilbert and Jaime further, let's look at their similarities. Both freely jump back and forth in time; while there is a central narrative to follow, both artists will jump forward months or years as they see fit. Both love writing and drawing about children; the multi-generational sweep of Love and Rockets is one of its biggest calling cards. Of course, women are the central characters of both artists. Gilbert works with a wider swath of time and so has characters that we first met as infants becoming mothers and even grandmothers. Giving life and raising children, while frequently portrayed as an ordeal, is also what forestalls the sense of doom that's so prevalent in Gilbert's stories. Interestingly, few of the regulars in Jaime's stories have children of their own.

Looking at Love and Rockets V2 #20, Jaime recapitulates Maggie's life with two different strips running in parallel to each other. "La Maggie La Loca" (in color) runs at the top of the page, and "Gold Diggers of 1969" (in black & white) is printed at the bottom. The first story, which originally ran in the New York Times, sees Maggie visiting Queen Rena. Designed as a self-contained story for newcomers, there are plenty of references to Mechanics as well. It's a throwback in that there's a little adventure in there, but there's a slight weariness in Maggie's tone as well. We learn at the end that Maggie turned 40 years old on this trip, and it's clear that while she's gained some perspective in life and even some contentment, there's still a sense of something missing. Having another adventure on her birthday was a bit of a restorative for her, something that she needed to do, and there's a sense that she's going to return to her old life with a slightly different perspective.

"Gold Diggers" is about Maggie as a toddler, drawn in Jaime's Hank Ketcham style. The characters are cuter, simplified and more iconic, but the emotions felt and portrayed are no less complex. Though his figure work is completely different, his mastery of gesture and expressiveness is exactly the same. What's amazing is seeing an artist known for his lush, flowing lines using minimalist techniques with such verve and cleverness. Thematically, it's a delight to read because this style represents the way a child sees the world: simplistic and dramatic, with hidden meanings everywhere.

*******

As I've written in my past two reviews of the excellent new Love & Rockets collections from Fantagraphics, this new format has almost reinvented the careers of Los Bros. Hernandez. Having the complete Locas stories in three affordable ($16.95 each), portable volumes ends the problem of trying to figure out where to start in the old, 20+ volume collections and also gives a reader a more casual copy rather than buying the Locas coffee table book. That Jacob Covey's design for the books is enormously attractive and does a superb job in getting across the emotional tenor of each book is an added bonus. Perla La Loca contains the latter half of his Love & Rockets Volume I, with his seminal "Wigwam Bam" and "Chester Square" storylines. Those are the storylines that put him on an equal plane with his brother Gilbert. It's sort of Jaime's PhD dissertation as an artist, incorporating all of his old themes and interests while skillfully finding new ways to examine his characters and move them beyond the heady bloom of youth.

These stories are about how someone's absence can be every bit as affecting as someone's presence. Jaime had split up Maggie and Hopey before, but that was usually in the context of some sort of Mechanics adventure of Maggie's. This time around, the reason why they part company and what actually happened to Maggie, is the fuel for "Wigwam Bam's" narrative. As the story opens, the duo is on the east coast, hopping from house party to house party. If Jaime captured the feel of late teenhood and early adulthood in the first two volumes, he's even more evocative in his depiction of the sort of alternating malaise and excitement that 20-somethings feel in that period where they're still allowed to be somewhat aimless and in full possession of their youthful energy. This story starts at the end of that particular road, as both Maggie and Hopey start to unconsciously fear the future. After an argument, Maggie suddenly disappears from the story, and her absence affects every single character in the book.

Danita, now with Ray, is worried when she hears that Maggie has been seen in Hoppers. Ray, jilted by Maggie, is intrigued by this. Maggie's friend Daffy is hurt that Maggie might be back in town and hasn't contacted her. Izzy is haunted by the presence of Maggie and Hopey in her life. That's one of the story's central mysteries--where's Maggie? The other is, who put Hopey's picture on a "have you seen me?" milk carton? Those two simple plot points stir up a complex series of interactions, many of which have been brewing over time. In this volume, Jaime gets a great deal of emotional power from what is not said, not seen and not done, but rather suggested. The first mystery is not resolved in this story, but that lack of resolution in itself is a kind of closure for the denizens of Hoppers. The second mystery proves to be a kind of shaggy dog story, where the actual answer is a goof on everyone trying to solve the mystery--including the reader.

What sets this story apart from past Jaime efforts is the sense the reader gets that he's finally in total command as a storyteller. He effortlessly uses jump cuts and flashbacks while moving the whole story ahead in time. His realistic but supple line often switches styles in mid-panel, using Peter Bagge-style exaggeration and Hank Ketcham-style minimalist cartooning when depicting young children. He manages to imbue every character, no matter how small their role, with a strong inner life and compelling story. A running theme throughout the book is people vainly trying to recapture experiences--a time, a place, a set of people, a set of events. While many of the flashbacks are outrageous and hilarious, there's a certain sadness in many of the characters as they realize that a certain magic has slipped through their hands. Jaime never lets things get too maudlin, and cleverly puts Izzy through an improbable comedic escapade that winds up with her seeing Hopey again--but finding that nothing's the same (and everything's the same).

Doyle proves to be one of the more compelling characters in the story. Always a likable sort of neer-do-well, there's a certain pathos to his story here. We learn about his past and current dead-end future, made all the more grim when he feels desperately cut off from real human contact. There's an amazing depiction of camaraderie between him and Ray, but that's a fleeting feeling because Doyle knows that Ray has real connections that he can't leave behind. His desperate attempt at trying to regain his virility (and a connection to humanity) with Daffy's younger sister is devastating.

The story has two emotional climaxes, one uplifting and the other devastating. The former is a flashback as Izzy reads an old journal of Maggie detailing her friendship with Letty, who died before her 16th birthday. Izzy, always Maggie's protector, introduced her to Hopey in order to help Maggie get over Letty. The story overwhelms Izzy and indirectly reestablishes her emotional connection to Maggie. The latter ending involves Hopey. She had wound up staying in a mansion (in a story that's a sort of twisted parody of "100 Rooms") with a Lucille Ball-like former TV star who has some very unusual fetishes. Hopey inadvertently gets her friend Tex beaten up and almost killed, and she simply walks away, shattered. It had all been fun & games for Hopey, just a bunch of hijinx where the consequences never seemed to matter much for her. She never understood how her charismatic nature, the way that she attracted people to orbit around her, could wind up destroying lives.

Jaime returns to Maggie in the second half of the book, "Chester Square". It's more episodic and rambling and brings Maggie through a very different kind of experience from Hopey. By the end, Maggie finally grows up and learns to assert herself and comes to terms with a number of important people in her life: her sister, her father, Danica, her aunt Vicki, Queen Rena and many more. Maggie reaches her own low point and more importantly comes to terms with what she had to do to survive. Going through that nadir had a sort of transformative effect on her, where she stopped caring what others thought about her. It was that catharsis, combined with Hopey's realization that Maggie was the only really important person in her life, that allowed the two to reunite.

Once again, Jaime returns to a number of his story interests: wrestling melodrama with Vicki Glory and Rena's wrestler brother Diablo, political (and interpersonal) intrigue with Rena, Hispanic culture, a kidnapping plot and much more. He even ties the story emotionally to Speedy's death, and alternates a light, comedic touch with great empathy for his characters who are stumbling their way through their lives.

Maggie notes in this story that she just wants a clean slate and discovers that it's not that simple. Jaime gives the reader a false, "it was all a dream" happy ending that comes in the middle of one of my favorite sequences in all of comics. Maggie has just finally managed to make amends with everyone in her life, including a prostitute that she managed to run afoul of on more than one occasion. Hopey is in town, touring with a new band, desperately looking for Maggie. She spots her going into a bar, and another loose end of Maggie finds her and calls her a whore. As she walks out of the bar, she's slapped by an old woman on the street, which kicks off an amazing sequence where every person in Maggie's life slaps her in the face. That leads to that little dream sequence before Maggie is snapped back into reality, and reunited with Hopey in the back of a police car. It's an ending that's far more satisfying than the false one that Jaime teased us with, and in a way it's an ending he teased himself with. That ending represented a dead end in storytelling, a regression to his earliest development as an artist, and the real ending was just a little reminder of how far he had come as a creator who created an entire dramatic world with characters that we couldn't help but ache for as they struggled.

Ultimately, there's an idealistic streak in Jaime's comics that burns through the hipster cynicism that permeates characters like Hopey and many of her friends. Even Hopey knows that this is just a pose, and that Maggie represents a sort of authenticity in human relationships that she can't achieve otherwise. For Maggie, she had to learn how to focus, find out what she wanted and how to get it. Jaime Hernandez ties in pathos, raw sexuality, humor and action in a rambling, complex and multi-layered storyline that both stands well on its own and builds on what has come before. As always, Jaime is able to skillfully evoke a sense of time and place that grounds the characters but never drags them down. The best news about this volume is that it's only the beginning of Jaime's mature style, and he's only continued to get better.

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.