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.

One Coin Reads 24: Assassinistas, by Trini Howard and Gilbert Hernandez

Assassinistas, by Trini Howard and Gilbert Hernandez

2018

It's often easier to talk about a book you loved or hated, than it is to talk about one that didn't much move you either way.

I've tried to get into Gilbert Hernandez multiple times over the years, and it's been hard. I don't enjoy something in the way he draws. He's been doing lots of non-Love and Rockets work for years, and there wasn't much reason for me to check that stuff out if I wasn't into the art already. 

This year, I read his first L&R omnibus, and once I got into it, I enjoyed it a lot, but more for the writing and the density of the world building more than anything else. But I did like it, and I picked up the second omnibus after.

Then

That was some of my thinking before picking up this book, though this was marked down to very near my ¥500 sampling sweet spot, ¥487. It wasn't bad at all, but for a lot of the book, I kept thinking, Is this it?

I'm not well-versed in the work of Tini Howard at all. I know she's done or is doing some X-Calibur work, and I read two or three issues, but it didn't leave an impression either way. That's not a criticism of her work in particular, I tried reading most of the Dawn of X series when they came out and quickly dropped them all. I figured I would go back a year later and see what was worth reading after they were all collected rather than sort through the roughly infinity books they insist on publishing. I'll check her out in X of Swords when the collection is inevitably published.

Now

Assassinistas has a nice enough concept: three women lived a Charlies Angels like life back "then", and "now" it's twenty years later. Time is only referenced in terms of then and now. All the women kick butt, all the guys are nice family-oriented types, emphasizing the role-reversal already present in a concept like Charlies Angels. 

The Assassinistas are Octavia, Charlotte, and Rosalyn. Octavia has a son in college and is struggling to meet the bills, and has gone back to work, to the frustration of her son, Dominic. Domenic just wants a normal family life.

Now

Charlotte's baby is kidnapped, and the story is about Octavia, Domenic and his boyfriend doing a rescue mission.

There was definitely stuff I liked in this. The character work is pretty solid. Domenic makes a point about coming out to his mother Octavia, and the tension is complex in good way: he has tried to come out before, but his mother is too obsessed with her work to notice. He worries about her reaction to him being gay, but she's mainly upset he didn't share it with her sooner. These are strong traits to build characters from: two people who have are frustrated with each other, but for very different reasons than the other thinks.

 

The relationships of the Assassanistas themselves have their own dynamics, as they all have taken different paths in life, some more traditional than others.

Then

There are some sequences which work nicely as well, but for an action book, there was a lack of excitement. I can't lay the blame on the writing or the art, since I don't know where Howard's idea ends and Hernandez's contributions begin. In the best scenes, images build off of one another, but a lot of the action has little energy.

Whenever I'm not feeling Beto's art, he pulls out a pair of panels like this, which are flawless in design and execution: The extreme perspective in panel one, the boy half off-panel in two, and the shared floor line in both

Putting gore and sex and swearing in a book like this, but not exciting gore and sex and swearing is weird to me. The book isn't making any commentary on action tropes, it seems to be going for fun. This book feels more like an Archie version of Kill Bill, but it didn't work as humor, and it didn't work as action.

The colors by Rob Davis are nice and simple, subtly different between the past and present sections

I feel like the pieces are there for something better, but this book, collecting six issues, didn't do it for me. The overall feeling I had from this was of a very straight-forward action comic. Sure, it has women in the lead, non-traditional gender dynamics, and a legendary alternative cartoonist on art, but the actual story of the book, a kidnapping rescue, was very very traditional action, with art that didn't always serve the action well. It's not bad, but it's hard to say it's any better than any other mainstream comic out there.

I'm still just getting into Hernandez's work, and will probably stick with his Love & Rockets work for the time being. I imagine this was a fun project for him to work on, but it didn't carry over to my reading experience.