I Really Should Read This 27: Human Diastrophism, by Gilbert Hernandez

Human Diastrophism, by Gilbert Hernandez

1985-1995

That's two collections down, and another five to go.

This book is from the omnibus style collections, and contains the graphic novel Human Diastrophism, plus another 150 pages of comics. All are set in or in relation to Hernandez's fictional town of Palomar, and the intertwined lives of dozens of its residents. 

Things are back to normal!

Right up front, I really wish I'd read this twenty years ago. It is a phenomenal piece of work. I sampled some Love and Rockets issues in the late 1990's, and I found them hard to latch onto. By that point, the characters in both Gilbert and Jaime's stories had hundreds of pages of stories behind them, their writing was building off history that I simply hadn't read and I was lost. I probably had about eight issues that I half-heartedly read, and gave up on them until buying my first of these omnibuses about four years back. I loved the The Girl From HOPPERS and soon voraciously read all I could of Jaime's work, but had a hard time with the first Palomar collection and put it back on my shelf for a year or two unread.

There is storytelling at work here

Thanks to COVID-19 upending everything, I dramatically increased my reading time and made a commitment to finally get through that first collection around New Years... and I loved it. I had the enthusiasm that you get when you just can't enjoy something other people love but then something finally clicks and it works, and you wonder what the problem ever was.

Silhouettes are used liberally

With the Palomar stories, I know some of the things that kept made it a hard book for me to get into. For one, the cast of characters is huge, and following a story can be confusing. He has a character guide for each book, and I made use of it a few times. The second is that I still find something off about his inking. It's tight, and his drawing is great, but I still don't love the overall aesthetic. A third thing was his focal character Luba. She is a massive-chested woman, and as a reader, much like all the male characters in the books, that is all you notice at first. I had an issue or two of Luba, and I just didn't get it. After reading the first Palomar stories, which include Luba's introduction to the town, I saw her as a well-rounded and complicated character in a way I just didn't see at all in my first exposure to her.

A wordless sequence about crossing a trench becomes a statement of Luba's frustration and impotence regarding her new lover

At this point, I get what the fuss is about. Hernandez' art still isn't something I drool over like I do with his brother, but he has other points that I find incredible. His storytelling techniques are so potent, walking a fine line between camp, dreams and pathos. So much of what he does here would be told as talking heads by other artists. Hernandez uses old school panel design to amp up the drama of his story. And he fleshes out all his characters, even if it's just to give them a single motivation. Almost all the characters portrayed in his town are flawed and weak. Most are decent, but they are not perfect and usually do things they regret. It's very humanistic storytelling.  

Hernandez builds a real history in Palomar, the people don't forget their past

So what's this collection all about? It is sprawling, covering the lives of the people of the small Latin American town of Palomar across twenty years. There's a 100-page graphic novel tucked inside the larger 250-page collection that tells the story of a serial killer in the town, while the second half of the collection has a number of stories focusing on Luba's half-sisters in America. Much like Jaime's work with Maggie and Hopey, though there are mini-arcs, there isn't a larger arc other than these people living their lives. There is a difference here though, in that with Jaime's stuff, time is occurring roughly along with the real world. Gilbert's Palomar shifts and jumps. That's part of what makes following the story require a character reference page. A character who's ten years old in one story might be 23 in the next and takes some adjustment from the reader to follow. 

Probably his best creation, the one-armed Casimira

Some stories are 30 pages, some are five, some are single pages. The book was done over a ten year period, and you see Hernandez shifting his storytelling style and his focus of characters as he goes. I'm sure a lot of it was simply to keep the making of comics a fresh activity for himself. As a reader, it goes a long way to keeping the book novel. One of the treats of the book is seeing a character like Guadalupe, one of Luba's daughters, go from a little kid hanging out in the corners of a story to being a central character with a kid of her own. I've heard of Palomar being compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and at the level of them both being about rural Spanish speaking towns, it's not a useful comparison, but in terms of them both showing generations of development, it's apt.

Hernandez takes a stylistic departure to give a dense character sketch of Pipo

Palomar has it's own specific weirdness as well. For the most part, I wouldn't call the book surreal, but there are peculiarities. Tontazin selling her slugs. Her sister Diana who overdevelops whichever muscle she trains. Luba's handsome lover Khamo who becomes a burn victim, at which point they settle down together. Casimira, who was shot out of a tree as a toddler, runs around the town wielding her artificial arm. It's weird stuff, generally in the realm of "truth is stranger than fiction" weird rather than feeling explicitly like a writer's touch. And that's so important in a work like this to keep it from feeling cutesy or twee.

Young Fritz at home with her sister is a sad portrayal of neglect

Hernandez's Latino heritage gives him an ability to comfortably navigate both American and Latin American culture without any awkwardness. Later chapters taking place in California don't have the lived in quality of Palomar, but that's city life, where there are way more people you don't know then people you know. 

Maria's back story captures some 1950's goofiness. Fantastic use of negative space in those first two panels

As for the art, it's unfair to compare him to his brother Jaime, the tightest comic artist alive. Gilbert has great art as well, particularly in the layout. His characters occupy just the right amount of panel, the story progresses at a solid clip, and he's not afraid to reposition everything for the sake of a solid panel. Contemporary artists often try to do something more natural, as if the panel was a camera, and that's not Gilbert's school of work. As much as a camera-style perspective can be effective, it can also be boring, and the panel composition here is never boring. His pages have a lot of punch.

The book is not exactly magical realism, but there is room for poetry in the it

So, I'm into it. I'm going to get the rest of the Gilbert Hernandez Love & Rockets omnibuses, slowly over the next few years. This stuff is good, and is the kind of comic that resonates long after reading.