Birdland
Gilbert Hernandez, writer/artist
Eros, 1994
104 pages
$14.95
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“It occurred to me: The basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other. But they don’t.” –Richard Harrow, Boardwalk Empire

Does Gilbert Hernandez agree with this, or doesn’t he? That seems to me to be the central question of the Palomar books, and the answer depends on which one you’re reading. Palomar is very much a fiction of community; its stories are not simply about a collection of individuals who either interact or don’t, it’s about that web of interaction and the collective effect it has on everyone involved in it. Certainly in the earlier, lighter material it appears that the importance of this connectivity is paramount for Beto — a sentiment that recurs anytime the characters chafe at the encroachment of the outside world, or at co-option by the United States. On the other hand, you have things like Tonantzin’s self-destruction, or the pack of murdering ghouls who make up the cast of Poison River. In cases like these, all the things we think of as potential connections — love, sex, family, political and ideological worldviews dedicated to the greater good — are revealed as enormously destructive, utterly indifferent forces, at least as well equipped to tear people apart as bring them together. One could easily conceive of Palomar as a long chase scene in which destruction is constantly nipping at connection’s heels.

Birdland, then, is connection opening up the healthiest lead it’s had in hundreds of pages. Doing a straight-up porn comic that borrows the Palomar-verse characters Fritz and Petra gives Beto the freedom to be as silly and utopian as he wants, something he couldn’t get away with in the naturalist, politically aware world of Palomar and Love and Rockets proper. As a result, he can spend three-quarters of the story watching various adulterous pairings unfold as the characters attempt to compensate for their unhappy unrequited loves and unfulfilled lives — and then blammo, aliens can abduct everyone and grant them the gift of totally guilt-free fucking, in which they inflict no emotional pain on one another whatsoever and everyone can get exactly what they want — and then double-blammo, a cosmic mishap shows them how their romantic misadventures, their pleasures and sorrows, echo those of basically every life form throughout the history of life itself. Talk about a happy ending!

Perhaps the easiest way to see what he’s up to here is to note that by the project’s very nature, the human bodies with which he has always shown such proficiency must needs connect. I mean, just look at the amount of luscious, loving detail Beto puts into, say, Mark’s body hair, or Inez’s vagina. When a guy who draws like that is gonna do a sex comic, you’re gonna feel like those connections are worthwhile almost by default. That’s what happens when bodies start slappin’.

Beyond Palomar
(Love and Rockets Library: Palomar, Book Three)
Gilbert Hernandez, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, 2007
256 pages
$16.95
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If all that Poison River were was dense, that would be one thing. We’ve already seen how far Beto has been willing to push his pacing over the course of discrete sequences like that climactic bit in “Human Diastrophism”–jumps in space, jumps in time, jumps in storytelling and story logic. Doing this for 180-odd pages, to the point where uninterrupted stretches of story bridged either by cuts involving a recognizable end for one scene and beginning for another or by some sort of visual signifier of a transition becomes the exception rather than a rule, is a tour de force performance to be sure, but it needn’t necessarily be a shocking one.

And if all Poison River were was brutal, that would be one thing. Beto has done bleak before–it was the exceedingly bleak Israel spotlight strip at the end of Heartbreak Soup where the Palomar stuff really came into its own, after all. And he’s done brutal (the murders in “Human Diastrophism”) and sordid (Israel’s mercenary hedonism) as well. Creating a story that can basically be described as “Luba’s Adventures Among the Worst Motherfuckers on Earth” can make for a grueling read, absolutely, but it needn’t necessarily be a stunning one.

No, it’s the combination of form and content, style and substance that makes Poison River–the graphic novel-length “origin of Luba” story that comprises this collection’s first two-thirds–one of the most singular, potent, unforgettable comics ever made by anyone, ever. When there are more characters involved in the story than in the entire Palomar mythos thus far; when their stories involve a complex web of conspiracies and betrayals, deceptions and secret affairs, over the course of multiple generations; when virtually no page has fewer than seven tightly gridded panels and most have nine or more; when those panels are filled with Gilbert’s never-stronger sooty, inky linework and character designs, which virtually never serve up the sort of iconic imagery that allows you to quickly scan and move on; when each move from one panel to the next holds the promise and threat of feeling more like a page turn or a chapter jump than a simple “and then, and then, and then”; when that feeling lasts not just for a single bravura sequence but for the longest story Beto has yet told; when it’s a story that regularly invokes such brain-lacerating topics as rape, miscarriage, racism, domestic violence, and torture; when it repeatedly slams your heart into scenes of utter cruelty and your genitals into scenes of pure depraved sexuality…It’s like your brain has to spend the length of the story running as fast as it possibly can to keep up, and every so often you run full tilt into someone swinging a baseball bat. You can’t just lie there and shake it off, you’ve got to leap back to your feet and resume sprinting, even though you know you’ve got no hope of not being knocked flat on your ass again.

I’m trying to focus on the emotional response, the feeling, of reading Poison River because, frankly, it’s so overwhelming. But intellectually, I think this is Gilbert’s meatiest work as well. I’m fascinated by how willing he is to lay bare some of his work’s most indelible tropes, like Luba’s comically large breasts and all the baggage that comes with them–with the equivalent of a corny joke, no less: They do her no good in a marriage to a man with a fetish for women’s stomachs. Given the fire Gilbert has taken for his visual depictions of women, it’s quite easy to read Poison River as a lengthy meditation on the damage that having a “type” can do, no matter what your “type” is…which means it’s an extremely black take on the whole of human sexuality, pretty much. It’s also a savagely political work, fusing his past examinations of the powers wielded by both body and brain by showing the physical depravity unleashed around the world by the ivory-tower/missile-silo conflicts of Cold War ideologies promulgated in nations thousands of miles away from the action in the story itself. There’s a haunting, recurring leitmotif involving a racist caricature comic-book character, his beatific blackface smile appearing in the background, and occasionally in context-free close-ups, as a symbol of unthinking, commoditized cruelty. Poison River may also be my favorite artistic exploration of hypocrisy, neither overly condemnatory nor in any way compromising, in terms of how it treats being queer: Nearly every character in the book is either financially or emotionally close to someone who isn’t strictly straight, and nearly all of them really don’t care, and nearly all of them would nevertheless punish those non-straight characters for it if doing so became convenient–and some of the punishments meted out are far more perverse than anything the characters being punished would dream of cooking up. The story also takes Luba herself about as far into unlikablity, even irredeemability, as it can go, before literally walking her through a tunnel and out the other side, as she and we shake off the previous events of her life like a nightmare and emerge with a scarred but strong sense of morality. There’s just a fucking lot going on in this thing.

I feel bad about barely discussing Love and Rockets X, the also-pretty-long story that rounds out the collection, in which we follow some of the Palomar characters in racially tense, hard-partying Los Angeles circa 1990. But in a way, it feels like a riff on the same ideas that drive Poison River, simply filtered through the American/urban/musical milieu normally occupied by Jaime. Racism, capitalism, the way we let sex make us into worse people, violence in the name of ideology…it’s all still there, no matter how many people call each other “dude.”

There aren’t very many comics this affecting, that much I can tell you. You can probably count them on two hands with fingers to spare. I would say I envy the people who still get to read this for the first time, but I just re-read it, and here I sit, knocked on my ass.

Human Diastrophism
(Love and Rockets Library: Palomar, Book Two)
Gilbert Hernandez, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, 2007
292 pages
$14.95
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(Programming note: Yes, LOVE AND ROCKTOBER marches on! And I’m sticking with “LOVE AND ROCKTOBER” because “LOVEMBER AND ROCKETS” just sounds kinda goofy. Thanks for sticking with it, thanks for switching blog locations with me, and thanks for your patience with the unrelated-to-the-blog-switchover computer meltdown that screwed up my reviewing schedule last week.)

I know I just got finished explaining that biology is destiny in the Palomar stories. But what struck me upon rereading the material collected in this volume, dominated by the titular story of a serial killer’s stay in the town, is the power of ideas. Not emotional or sexual drives, even, like the web of lust and unrequited love surround Luba’s mother Maria in the suite of stories that forms the second half of the collection, but actual honest-to-god ideas. Tonantzin is literally driven mad — broken — by the late Cold War political apocalypticism of her criminal boyfriend. (He himself is freed from nihilism’s grip by a jailbird religious conversion, for all the good it does anyone.) Humberto is thrown so far off-kilter by his discovery of the avant-garde artistic tradition from the Impressionists onward that the impact, combined with his fear of the killer, drives him to abandon notions of right and wrong entirely in favor of the truth art can express. In both cases, this ends in disaster.

But there’s a counterpoint to the damage these ideas do. Pipo’s success as a designer and entrepreneur is at least as driven by ideas — from the designs she and her siblings create, to her no-nonsense but still thoughtful approach to business and investing, even to her adamant refusal to learn English as a way to defy being fully coopted by American cultural capitalism — as Tonantzin’s self-immolation and Humberto’s life-threatening secret. Similarly, “American in Palomar” Howard Miller once thought his ideas of art and genius allowed him to dehumanize and exploit the Palomarians, until his actual experiences with them revealed what a creep this makes him; now he’s returned to help Pipo and Diana rebuild and restore the town, using the money made from the artistic project that his time in Palomar forced him to rethink.

Maybe I’m just looking for pat connections here, but perhaps this is why Gilbert’s technique takes a turn for the heady here. Think of that climactic sequence in “Human Diastrophism” where over the course of three tightly gridded pages, each panel represents a jump in time and space, forcing the reader to reconstruct the events that led up to each image herself. Think of the entire Maria/Gorgo section, with its massive, unceremonious leaps throughout the history of the pair’s lives and relationship, the exact contours of which constitute as much of a mystery as the sinister events that forced them both into their secret lives. Think even of the almost playful, superhero-universe-style continuity games Beto plays — the implication that the weird animals that surround Palomar, from an eyeball-eating bird to those vicious monkeys to perhaps even those giant, tasty slugs, are the result of experiments by American military scientists; most especially the oblique revelation that concludes the volume (and all of the first run of Love and Rockets) by bridging the lives and worlds of two of the most haunting characters Gilbert and Jaime ever created. If Heartbreak Soup showed us Gilbert the literary comics stylist, Human Diastrophism shows us Gilbert the mindfucker — the Gilbert who’s still with us today.

Two more quick notes:

1) Human Diastrophism is the one point in the entire excellent Love and Rockets Library digest-size reprint program where I actually have something to object to, format-wise. I found the Palomar hardcover somewhat frustrating because it left out Love and Rockets X and Poison River, two stand-alone graphic novels set in the Palomar-verse if not in Palomar itself. But it wasn’t as bad as Locas leaving out short stories like “Flies on the Ceiling,” and at any rate I understood that when you’re talking about adding two full-length graphic novels to an already gigantic book, page count becomes a factor. However, I figured that with the digests, we’d finally get all the Palomar-verse stories in chronological order, so that Palomar Book Two would include “Human Diastrophism” and “Love and Rockets X,” and Palomar Book Three would include “Poison River” and the material originally collected in “Luba Conquers the World,” which marked the end of the first Love and Rockets run. Instead, things are collected pretty much as they were in the Palomar HC, with the “Human Diastrophism” and “Luba Conquers the World” material collected back to back in this volume, and “Love and Rockets X” and “Poison River” taken out of order and placed in Book Three, Beyond Palomar. If Eric Reynolds had a nickel for every time he’s heard me complain about this, he’d have, well, at least two bits, but this has always driven me nuts. I could be wrong, but I think collecting everything in order would have worked just fine in terms of page count, story cohesion, you name it. Human Diastrophism is a fine collection, and in all honesty the material towards the end involving Luba, her mother, her sisters, Gorgo, and their backstory isn’t really any more confusing without having read the intervening stories in “X” and “Poison River” than a lot of things Gilbert does on purpose. But it wasn’t the way the material was first released, it does make things confusing at least to an extent, and most importantly, it gives the back half of this collection a valedictory, bon voyage feel (since that material was the end of Love and Rockets, as far as anyone knew) that comes across as really sudden and jarring. Next time I may manually monkey with the reading order and stop Human Diastrophism halfway through, read Beyond Palomar, and then pick up with the back half of the book. Hey, if I can do this sort of thing for Final Crisis…

2) di·as·tro·phism (dī as′trə fiz′əm)
noun
1. the process by which the earth’s surface is reshaped through rock movements and displacements
2. formations so made
Origin: < Gr diastrophē, distortion < diastrephein, to turn aside, distort < dia-, aside + strephein, to turn (see strophe) + -ism Thanks, Webster's.

Heartbreak Soup

(Love and Rockets Library: Palomar, Book One)

Gilbert Hernandez, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2007

292 pages

$14.95

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(Programming Note: Due to technical difficulties, I was unable to post this review during the regularly scheduled Comics Time slot on Wednesday of this week. This is the first time I’ve missed a Comics Time deadline, scheduled time off aside, in probably two years, and I’m pretty bummed. My hope is to resume the regular MWF schedule beginning tomorrow, but delays or erratic scheduling may continue until the issue is resolved. I apologize for the interruption in service. Anyway…)

The great temptation when discussing Los Bros Hernandez, and it’s a temptation I’ve succumbed to, is to operate under the assumption that they’re both trying to do basically the same thing, only one of them is better than the other at it. Now, obviously, they are doing many of the same things. They’re brothers who co-founded a series they share in which they tell the sprawling saga of groups of (mostly) Latin American (mostly) young adults that unfold over (mostly) real time, dealing frankly with issues of sex, community, and mortality, starring women who are the closest alternative comics have come to generating sex symbols, and utilizing striking black and white art and inventive, challenging pacing. If that’s all you’re going by (and granted, it’s a lot!), then it’s almost irresistible to point to an element you feel one brother has over the other–Jaime’s incorporation of poster-ready design into his visual storytelling, say, or Gilbert’s magical-realist literary panache–and call him the victor.

But a) much as we comics folks love looking at absolutely everything otherwise, it’s really not a “who’d win in a fight” situation, and b) my re-read of Heartbreak Soup has me more convinced than other that the differences between Beto and Xaime are not differences of degree, but differences of kind.

Let’s talk about the art first. This is the arena where Jaime is most frequently said to have it over Gilbert. And indeed, I can happily imagine a day spent doing nothing but looking at drawings of Terry Downe or Doyle Blackburn. That smooth line, those sumptuous, propulsive blacks, those enormously appealing and endearing character designs–it really is eye candy, in the best sense of that term. But a key goal of Jaime’s art, besides being pleasant to look at, is pop. Not in the sense of “pop art,” although I think that’s a major element and not just due to the occasional overt Lichtenstein homage, but in the sense that they pop off the page. Those blacks fill in space in a way designed to sharply foreground the figures and objects Jaime wants you to focus on or remember, something his sharp, slick line abets. When I picture Jaime panels, I tend to picture the characters are arrayed in a line from left to right against some sort of horizontally oriented background like a car or a wall, like actors (or punk rockers) on a stage. Moreover, he tends to draw his characters in poses and facial expressions that come across as, well, poses–the precise moment at which whatever they’re feeling or thinking or saying or doing is communicated most clearly, so that that thing pops off the page. The overall effect is that there’s them in the spotlight, and then there’s the other stuff against which that spotlight is defined.

By contrast, when I picture Beto panels, I picture someone more or less standing around, usually with one or more other characters milling around as well, with the house-lined streets and intersections of Palomar extending out to the back left and back right. The very setting of his stories is one through which his characters are constantly walking to get from one place to another; I couldn’t draw you a map of Palomar or anything like that, but I feel like I’ve been walked through its streets much more than I can say that of Hoppers. Moreover there’s a casual element to Gilbert’s imagery that Jaime’s more compositionally calibrated panels don’t have. Beto’s line is rubbery, and complimented not by masterful fields of smooth, clean black but by shading and stippling that feels almost dusty. His character designs famously overemphasize flaws and virtues alike, and have a uniformly heavy-lidded weight to them; my wife simply describes his characters as “hard.” It’s tough to imagine spending a pleasant few hours staring even at Tonantzin or Israel the way you might at Maggie or Rand Race. And when characters are depicted for maximum impact, it feels like it’s being done through great force of effort on Gilbert’s part rather than with the effortless, effervescent precision with which Jaime does it. It’s also almost always either something the characters in question are doing on purpose to impress someone else, or a shot of them as seen by someone who they’ve impressed unwittingly. The overall effect feels calculated more for immersion than impact.

Then there are the stories and subject matter. One difference is obvious from the start: Jaime had a couple-issue jump on his brother in terms of beginning his magnum opus, but the delay gave Gilbert the opportunity to draw a bright line between his science-fiction work and his (occasionally magical) realist material. But beyond that, Gilbert very rapidly jumps his action forward about ten years or so from the first major story to the next, while Jaime’s almost resolutely marches forward in sync with our own real-world timeline. Jaime presents material from the past largely in the context of memory and how it intrudes upon and influences us; arguably the past’s on-again off-again love affair with the present is even more central to the Locas strips than Maggie and Hopey’s. Gilbert, however, doesn’t usually view stories from back in the day through that psychological lens. They tend to be presented as discreet tales, filling in backstory, spotlighting a character or a relationship, illuminating a part of Palomar we haven’t seen, depicting someone or something lost to time. Jaime’s interest in the past is primarily internal in its effect; Gilbert’s is primarily epic.

Particularly in light of their recent work, there’s another difference between Gilbert and Jaime worth pointing out. Jaime’s work is studded with sit-up-and-take-notice stories, and his most harrowing stuff–“The Death of Speedy Ortiz,” “Flies on the Ceiling,” and now “Browntown/The Love Bunglers”–tends to be among them. But when you hit “The Death of Speedy,” it’s not as though it establishes the tone for the rest of the series. It’s an exception, not a rule. “Locas” tends to be lighthearted even though what it’s really about–friendship, sexuality, identity, adulthood–is actually quite serious.

By contrast, the harshness, seediness, and bleakness of the world of Palomar and of Gilbert’s work generally–the love many of his characters feel for one another notwithstanding–tends to be what first comes to mind when I think of his comics. Yet Heatbreak Soup struck me for how good-natured it feels, up until the very end. Yes, sex is presented from the very first strip as a magnetic force with the potential for incalculable damage, and the book often does feel like “horniness punctuated by the occasional physical assault.” But centering the material on good-hearted Heraclio, unpredictable Luba, and packs of sweetly belligerent little kids and teenagers goes a long way to making everything feel funny, even when you’re not laughing. It’s almost Pueblo Home Companion, you know what I mean?

It’s only when you hit the final story in this collection, “Bullnecks and Bracelets,” that things truly take a turn for the dark: Try as he might to bury himself in bodybuilding, drugs, love affairs, and hustling, Israel’s whole life is defined by the disappearance of his twin sister during a solar eclipse when they were very young. No matter where he goes or what he does, he cannot escape that black sun. And this is where “Palomar” becomes what it is–where Gilbert becomes what he is–as surely as The Sopranos became what it was with “University” in Season Three. Whether in terms of family, sexuality, physicality, or deformity, biology is destiny for the people of Palomar, in a way that is almost never true for the Locas (Penny and H.R. excepted, perhaps–and a certain character in “Browntown”). And although biology is obviously among Beto’s primary concerns, destiny is the operative word. I don’t think the Palomarians have the ability to escape the way the Locas do. Not all of them need to escape, mind you–there’s a lot of really warm and adorable and hilarious and awesome stuff going down in Palomar–but whatever walks alongside them in their lives is gonna walk alongside them till the very end.