Monthly Archives: March 2012

Utilitarian Review 3/31/12

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On HU

Most of this week was devoted to our ongoing Locas Roundtable, with posts by Robert Stanley Martin, Jenny Gonzalez-Blitz, Jason Michelitch, and Corey Creekmur. We should have one more post on Monday to finish up.

Also a punk rock download mix.

And I did a post on fashion, sexuality, and superheroes.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice I have a post on death metal and bluegrass.

And also at Splice, a post on Lee Ranaldo’s crappy new album.
 
Other Links

Mahendra Singh on Moebius’ inking.

Christopher Priest with some really high quality sneering at contemporary sci-fi.

David Brothers on Trayvon Martin.

Craig Fischer on Taniguchi.
 

Seeing and Being Seen

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In the March Harper’s Bazaar, there was a spread by Chinese artist Liu Bolin. Bolin usually paints himself to blend into backgrounds, making a “powerful commentary on the individual and society,” as the Harper’s blurb says.

However, for the Harper’s spread, Liu painted, not himself, but other people. Specifically, he painted designers standing against their clothes and fabrics.


Angela Misoni, by Liu Bolin

In this context, the vanishing figures become less about the way individuals are overwhelmed by society, and more about the fashion industries obsession with visibility and identity. Fashion is a world in which you look obsessively, fetishistically, at (generally coded) straight female models, and in which you don’t look — as obsessively? as fetishistically? at (not all, but disproportionately gay and male) designers.


Alber Elbaz by Liu Bolin

The guy painted above, for example, is Alber Elbaz. Bolin shows him fading into his own dresses, while mannequin’s cavort visibly around him. The Women here are seen, but what’s seen isn’t really them — or maybe it’s truer to say that all they are is what is seen; they’re defined by surface. Elbaz, on the other hand, is no surface; his truth is the dresses, but you can’t see him there. Fashion, then, is a collaboration between those defined by appearance and those whose appearance is erased. Bolin’s pictures make that tension and its frisson more clear — the way in which fashion is both hiding in plain sight and appearing though unseen. The designers insist that they enjoy being behind the scenes (“All I try to do is be invisible,” says Elbaz), but they clearly are having fun, too, taking center stage in their own work for once. The point, perhaps, isn’t so much to hide or to be seen as it is to have some control over the look that defines you — as desired, as other, as absent. Or as Elbez says, “I think it’s a choice: to make clothes to make women visible or to be a star and to always be visible. I always preferred to be on the other side of the street and disappear.”


Jean Paul Gaultier by Liu Bolin

Looking at this series made me think again about Ken Parille’s recent piece over at tcj.com. Ken argues that the fully-costumed male body in comic books is a sign of repressed same-sex desire. Or as Ken says:

One explanation for the male cover-up—as for all cover-ups—is that there’s something to hide. Just as the mandatory Burka expresses fears about female bodies and male desire, the superhero costume reflects similar sexual anxieties. We often think of the mainstream superhero comic as a “power fantasy” without acknowledging its sexual dimension: it’s an erotic power fantasy. Perhaps some readers would be willing to admit that heroic tales are fantasies: “I would like to have the super power a superman has.” They might be less inclined to admit that these stories are heterosexual male domination fantasies: “I would like to have the power to control hot females” (yet to admit this would be to acknowledge that these comics’ chivalric code is a sham). Most readers would find it far too scary to recognize that these comics may be homoerotic fantasies: “Watching male bodies in close contact in the male-centric DCMV turns me on.” The hidden body is an unconscious emblem of forbidden same-sex desire.

I don’t have any doubt that idealized, fetishized male superhero bodies are objects of same-sex male desire. But…is it really the case that the more covered male body is less open to same-sex desire? Surely the full-body latex look is itself thoroughly fetishized? Would the Liefield drawing before really be any more sexualized if it had a boob window?

I wonder if the full-body coverage for (most) superheroes, then, might have less to do with disavowing a homosocial investment which couldn’t really be much more obvious anyway, and more to do with seeing and being seen.

Or, to put it another way, the issue is not that men are resisting desiring men, but rather that the kind of men that men imagine themselves desiring in comics are men who are covered. Why, after all, do supeheroes wear costumes in the first place? They wear them, as Elbaz says, to be invisible — or to be someone else. Bruce Wayne doesn’t want to be Bruce Wayne, the wounded child. He wants to be someone bigger, more powerful, more mysterious — a sexy-cool daddy behind what Ken aptly calls the “bat-burka.”

It’s interesting in this context to note that the few male superheroes that do show a lot of skin tend not to really be wearing costumes. Prince Namor, for example, isn’t really a supehero; he’s not dressed up to fight crime and/or hide from his childhood trauma. Similarly, the hypersexualized, phallicly-named Hulk comes busting out of his clothes whether he will or no. These characters are not deploying the power and mastery of clothes; they are not diegetically wearing a hood to control how they look. The characters were never playing with seeing and being seen to begin with; therefore, they might as well let it all hang out (for the delight, presumably, of readers of all genders.)

Fashion and costumes isn’t just about who is sexy and who is not; it’s about who is seen and how and in what way. Superhero men are sexualized — but unlike superhero women, they are sexualized in ways which figures them as covered lookers rather than as exposed lookees. I don’t think that’s because comic-book readers are afraid to own their sexual fantasies; rather, I think it’s a sign of what their sexual fantasies are and how they work. Visibility and invisibility are not just symptoms of desire; they are aspects of desire itself.

Remembering Locas

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Whenever Jaime Hernandez decided (presumably in the shift from the “Mechanics” storyline to what would thereafter be identified as “Locas”) that his loosely linked narrative would unfold well into the future, and, more significantly, that he would mark that duration through the visible aging of his characters, his comics inevitably introduced operations of memory that would be experienced by both his characters and his readers. Most daringly, Jaime allowed his main character, Maggie, to gain weight as a sign of her physical aging, along with the many other changes in her relationships, location, and lifestyle (a term which might here refer to both her shifting sexual and musical preferences): such shifts represent what, outside of comics, we might call a life. It’s worth reinforcing how unusual this is in comics, which often employ a persistent present tense, in which characters never age; and only a comic of a certain duration (say, thirty years) will realize the full effects of this technique. By directly injecting chronology and temporality into his narrative (along the lines most famously pioneered by Frank King’s Gasoline Alley), Jaime brings the impact of the past on the present through directly into play.

While the treatment of memory in comics may be most fully evident in comics memoirs, which (at least since Art Spiegelman’s Maus) have often employed sophisticated formal means to represent relationships between present and past on the static page or, often, to collapse temporal gaps in order to render powerful, often traumatic, memories, the play of memory has in fact been central to mainstream comics as well, particularly following the rise in significance for readers and creators of what fans now summarize as “continuity.” DC’s company-wide Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985) was not only an attempt to clean up the company’s messy and contradictory history, but, more audaciously, a bid to wipe clean the memories of longtime DC fans. But powerful memories aren’t effectively repressed, especially by corporate design or external control. A poignant Deadman story by Alan Brennert, tucked away in Christmas with the Super-Heroes 2 as soon as 1988, suggested that the outrageous notion that post-Crisis readers were simply expected to forget the prior existence of an “officially” eliminated character like Supergirl Kara Zor-El was simply unenforceable. Indeed, the rise of comics fandom (and collecting) was built upon acts of “unofficial” collective memory which rendered DC and Marvel’s loosely connected series as linked serials, transforming semi-autonomous pulp fictions into something like tribal chronicles devoted to (somewhat) logical unfolding and overarching narrative sequence. By 1990, when Grant Morrison retrieved the Psycho Pirate (also ostensibly banished from revised DC history) for his self-reflexive run on Animal Man, the supposedly forgotten DC multiverse came roaring back in a flood of tears (the cover of Animal Man 24 depicts the Psycho Pirate literally weeping old DC comics), with Morrison’s subsequent work for DC dedicated in large part to remembering rather than forgetting ever minor character or event in the company’s history. (DC’s previous injunction to forget has in large measure been turned into a demand that loyal readers, like Morrison, remember everything.)

While Jaime Hernandez’s work at times draws upon (usually with parodic affection) the sort of continuity that now undergirds superhero comics, the chronology he more fully employs is closer to the plotting of soap operas or other long-form narratives that may have created without master plans, especially those like long-running television serials or film franchises (begun without conclusions in mind) in which creators must not only keep the narrative ball rolling, but account for the actual bodies of actors playing characters visibly aging before the eyes of their audiences. While superhero narratives now imply that their accumulated events unfold in time, most still have to figure out fantastic (or spuriously scientific) reasons for their main characters’ slow or halted aging despite the passage of time such comics otherwise exploit by drawing upon what had seemed long-abandoned threads. While “Locas” might easily be criticized for lacking a tight coherence across its full span (a criticism I find misapplied to a work that thrives on the fragmentation, improvisation, and spontaneity of punk rock, among Jaime’s more obvious aesthetic models), Jaime has increasingly relied upon a narrative unfolding which is simultaneously ragged and intricately woven (images that recall the original meaning of a “text” as a weaving), often moving forward by leaping back (though flashbacks) or, in his most recent work, through what appears to be an audacious leap into the future. This structure seems willfully incoherent at times, yet increasingly committed to exploring the ability of memories, whether vivid or half-forgotten, to deepen the impact of successive stories in his series. There are clear narrative (and commercial) risks involved in this strategy: Jaime’s work increasingly rewards loyal, long-time readers and is therefore perhaps less and less inviting to newcomers. (The same is true of most mainstream superhero comics, despite weak attempts to reach new audiences through reboots and relaunches every so often.) As a reader who has been with Love and Rockets over the long haul, my own response to the developing “Locas” stories is deep satisfaction and emotional reward in what seems to me one of the richest reading experiences in the history – that is to say, historical experience – of comics.

For instance, much of the general narrative context for the recent and lauded “Browntown” from 2010 derives from a summary of the Chascarillo family’s circumstances by Speedy Ortiz within a single panel of the 1984 story “Locos.” In a following story, “Young Locas” from 1985, Maggie’s best friend Letty’s death was announced, with a (drawing of) a photograph (reminiscent of the notable use of photographs in comics memoirs such as Maus and Fun Home: as Susan Sontag famously claimed, “all photographs are memento mori.”). That early story and traumatic event will be narrated from Letty’s perspective and more fully depicted in 2011’s “Return for Me.” (And “Browntown” and “Return for Me” function as flashbacks of a sort in relation to the five-part “The Love Bunglers” that surrounds them in the two most recent volumes of Love and Rockets.) The full impact of each narrative, in other words, relies upon the invocation of the reader’s memory across the gap of a quarter-century. Only an artist who has established an exceptionally loyal readership (or obsessive re-readership) can perhaps get away with such literal suspense, leaving readers hanging for more than two decades. Again, it seems inevitable that a new reader (who may still appreciate Jaime’s considerable skills as an artist) simply won’t have access to the long-term effect such connections have for others.

Insofar as such instances rely upon a long memory (or, more realistically, re-reading), they seem appropriately attached by Jaime to traumatic events, which are commonly understood (in the now vast literature on the representation of trauma in various media) as unassimilable when they occur. Trauma is typically experienced as a delayed response, in the process Freud termed Nachträglichkeit, or “deferred action,” which recognizes not only a delay in full understanding, but assumes a revised understanding of an earlier event in light of later circumstances and the clarity or obfuscation provided by retrospection. (Lacan translated the term as après-coup, like Freud’s German term more commonplace in French than the typical English translation, which sounds a bit technical. Both psychoanalysts wished to convey the common experience of such temporal disruptions to psychic life.) While the suspense – again, the quite literal suspension of narrative resolution through delayed narration – Jaime has built into his narratives may seem to ask a great deal of readers seeking more autonomous or self-enclosed episodes, the gaps he sustains may be more accurate representations of the way in which traumatic memories function than more efficient and concise narratives provide.

In addition to calling upon memories across years, even decades, of “Locas,” Jaime also often treats the function of memory (as well as fantasy, a topic that demands its own attention within Love and Rockets) at the level of the page or sequence, and often as the operative dynamic between juxtaposed panels. As others have demonstrated, the Hernandez brothers are masters of transitions, though not in the way typically praised in mainstream comics. As Charles Hatfield has noted, despite their preference for standard “grid” layouts, both Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez “nonetheless take a drastic approach to narrative elision …” relying on the technique Joseph Witek calls “uncued closure,” which (as Hatfield says) “pits image, image-series, and page surface against each other.” Shifts between panels are often surprising and jolting, more in the tradition of Eisenstein’s theories of montage, in which he defined the dialectical relationship between shots as “collision,” rather than the smoother “linkage” favored by his equally brilliant contemporary Pudovkin, which might define the transitional goals of most comics creators. (Early comics suggest the form experienced some anxiety in this regard, as in Winsor McCay’s numbering of his panels, or in the arrows that guide readers in the dynamic fight sequences in Jack Kirby’s early Captain America pages, devices that seem to indicate some concern about readers’ abilities to move forward correctly.) Jaime typically avoids the nondiegetic clarifications that hold the hands of readers moving through more conventional comics: the small boxes that carry us across time or space with a helpful “meanwhile …,” “later that day …,” or “At a secret hideout on the other side of the world …” as well as the more recent technique shared by mainstream “widescreen” comics and contemporary films that provide “on-screen” titles identifying a location and perhaps date and time to guide readers. In Love and Rockets (which is hardly unique in this regard) the leap across panels can be uncertain and disorienting rather than obvious and “invisible.”

In their exploration of memory at all levels, the sequence of stories centered around Maggie and Hopey in Volume II of Love and Rockets is exemplary. (This material was first collected in the volumes Ghost of Hoppers and The Education of Hopey Glass, which were combined to make up the recent “collected works” volume Esperanza; this material is also all found in the larger volume Locas II). The “ghost” referred to in the title Ghost of Hoppers is explicitly Maggie, experiencing the genuine nostalgia of return, in the original Greek sense of the pain — rather than fuzzy warmth the bastardized use of the term connotes — one experiences upon returning to a “home” that will never again exist as one once knew it. (Maggie experiences nostalgia the same way Ulysses does: it hurts.) But she might be just as easily described as haunted rather than a haunt herself: she’s haunted by memories of the past that return in (appropriately for a comic) strikingly visible and sometimes fantastic forms (a demonic dog and dog-footed child). In a larger sense, the second volume of Love and Rockets is haunted by memories of the (younger, somewhat more carefree) first volume, and so the reader of this series – returning to familiar yet changed characters and settings after the gap the Hernandez brothers imposed through a hiatus of about five years – is also called upon to recall that past which constantly burdens the forward progress of these characters and this narrative. (Whether they wanted to or not, it’s worth recalling that the Hernandez brothers “returned” to the familiar narratives of Love and Rockets because of fairly consistent reader demand. Despite work on other projects, they seem fated to never escape the persistent drag of their most successful creations.)

In order to represent the tricks of memory (or, again, the transition from objective reality to fantasy or dream, a comics tradition that goes back at least to McCay) Jaime may present panels in a sequence that requires the reader to briefly back up, understanding transitions not just by forward movement but through brief retrospection, a step back in order to move forward with an understanding of how the ground has shifted. The propulsive forward motion that seems to define the consumption of comics, panel by accumulative panel, is in this case staggered by a movement that shuttles between projective and retrospective understanding. (For an otherwise strained cinematic comparison, consider the famous transitions in the films of Yasujiro Ozu, which are often only clear once they are over.) In a number of instances, Maggie wanders through panels which otherwise represent her past, like a dreamer; more complexly, the shift from present to past is made via panels in which the adult Maggie looks out a window at herself as a child, with each version drawn in a distinctive style: the adult Maggie is more realistic, the child Maggie is more cartoonish. (The sequence in fact dramatizes the moment when little Perla accepts being called Maggie for her future.) Emphasizing their complex status as a couple and pair across the full history of “Locas,” Hopey will view herself as a child in the same way in another sequence. Such sequences are briefly disorienting, and only fully comprehensible through a reading that steps back for confirmation before securely moving forward: in one panel Maggie is looking at some kids; although the stylistic shift should cue us, only the identification of one of the children as “Perla” in the next panel clarifies that a temporal shift has taken place, and thus we re-read the previous panel in light of what follows it. We come out of this detour into the past in the same way, via a panel of Maggie-in-the-present again looking out the window (but now from the interior rather than the earlier exterior) at Maggie-in-the-past. In a few more panels, Maggie will see herself and Letty pass by: in the cinema, these would be misleading eyeline matches, organized to imply spatial contiguity and temporal simultaneity, but which in fact articulate impossible spatial and temporal coordinates, only available in memory, dream, or delusion.

Jaime is celebrated for his representations of children, in a style that derives (as he acknowledges) from the kid-comic traditions of Dennis the Menace, Little Archie, and (to a lesser extent) Peanuts. But it’s not often noted that he does not always draw children in this way: these “cartoonish” kids are often children as they appear in memory as opposed to representations of his characters in the historical past, who retain more realistic qualities. Jaime’s characters seem to remember their own childhoods in the visual idiom of early kids’ comics. In other instances, children are drawn in a style that matches depictions of adults, as in the devastating flashbacks of “Browntown” and “The Love Bunglers” in his most recent work. But when his characters recall themselves or others as children, such memories seems to signal the artist’s recourse to his own memory of how children appeared in comics when he was a kid. (This is loosely related to the technique, perhaps first employed in Alan Moore’s run on Supreme, of having the memories and/or history of that Superman knock-off drawn in the style of Silver Age DC comics, in marked contrast to the generic style of contemporary superhero comics otherwise employed by Moore’s artists.)

Although a number of critics have questioned or criticized the notion of “collective memory,” which might be another term for what we attempt to define as “history” (all too often in its most “official,” hegemonic forms), Jaime Hernandez’s work across the past three decades relies – for at least some of his readers – on a relay between the memories of his characters, his own narrative sensibility, and the recall of his audience. (Fantagraphics of course plays a considerable role by keeping everything in print: in terms of the preservation of memory, we might call the many collected volumes of Love and Rockets an archive.) Reading “Locas” is, in effect, remembering “Locas.” This is not to say that Jaime’s narrative has no future (a promise his last work, again, takes to a surprising new level), but that it seems bound to remain haunted by the persistent past.
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The index to the Locas Roundtable is here.

Disjointed Glimpses, or The Wrong Way to Read Locas

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I started ingesting Jaime’s work through osmosis when I was a little kid hanging out in the back of my father’s comic book store — images in ads, articles, seeing the covers of his books on shelves, hearing conversations about Maggie and Hopey. Love and Rockets was an aesthetic space that existed for me in the abstract long before I ever read the comics themselves. (In one sense, that adds a layer of truth to Noah’s assertions re: nostalgia, in that the Locas stories all bring me a nostalgia for the mysterious allure they exerted on my young mind before I’d read them. I get wistful just looking at their cover fonts!)

Despite being around Love and Rockets comics since an early age, I didn’t read any of it until much, much later, and I didn’t start at the beginning. The first comic by Jaime Hernandez I ever read was “Flies on the Ceiling,” which still ranks among the most astonishing comics works I’ve ever laid eyes on.

Most of the elements that make Jaime one of my favorite cartoonists are present in “Flies on the Ceiling”:

– the achingly beautiful drawings that find the perfect mixture of realism and cartooniness, seemingly effortless in pulling from the best of both worlds

– the breathtakingly controlled compositions, with their deep blacks and bright whites, attention to both diegetic space and abstract negative space to create enviromental
verisimilitude and broad visual dialectics at the same time

– the ability to draw the most nuanced facial expressions in the history of comics, and to know exactly when to give them up for broad caricature

And, above all: the gaps.

Reading a Jaime comic brings to mind the old cliche about listening to Jazz – “It’s not about the notes they play, it’s about the notes they DON’T play.” Jaime’s work is full of sudden narrative gaps – abrupt jump cuts and unexplained transitions that, for me, are the most exciting element of the reading experience. I get a rush whenever my brain has to reconcile two disparate moments next to each other on the page. This page from “Flies on the Ceiling” is one my favorite comics pages of all time:

There’s another kind of exciting narrative gap in Jaime’s work, which has most recently been cited as the cartoonist’s greatest flaw by Robert Stanley Martin in his essay for the roundtable: the persistent referencing of past or future events between Locas stories.

As I said, my first Locas story was “Flies on the Ceiling,” which coincidentally Martin uses as his prime example of what he thinks doesn’t work in Hernandez’s stuff. Rather witheringly, he writes, “as anyone who’s been around a Trekkie knows, fannish types place particular value on details and resonances that casual audiences either miss or don’t understand. It’s sad that Hernandez, with all his talent, undercuts his work by catering to this proclivity at a larger readership’s expense.”

Now, I don’t know that I’m a casual audience (though my gut suggests I may qualify as a large readership), but I do know this: when I first read “Flies,” I could absolutely tell that there were details and resonances that I wasn’t fully understanding – and I considered that a feature, rather than a bug. There was already so much to tease out of the dense and fragmented structure of the story that it made perfect sense to me to also have to ponder after unexplained history. I enjoyed the friction of the unknown.

Similarly, and maybe more pertinent to the Locas stories as a whole (“Flies on the Ceiling” being in many ways a stylistic outlier), I read “Ninety-Three Million Miles from the Sun” with only a cursory non-textual idea of who Maggie and Hopey were, and no familiarity with any of the other characters aside from seeing the covers to some of the Penny Century comics. And I loved it – maybe as much for what I was missing as for what was there. The vibrancy of the characters and the visual mastery of the art was complemented by the vast ocean of story that appeared to float just beyond my reach, hinted at throughout but never fully explained.

And let me be clear: I’m not saying that I was excited because I knew there was a huge backstory that I could eventually catch up on. I was excited by the suggested existence of backstory that as far as I was concerned may or may not actually exist as drawn stories. What I respond to the most in Jaime’s work is the gap between the captured moment and the suggested context. This sequence from “Ninety-Three Million Miles” (this is the entire sequence, by the way – an example of Jaime’s abrupt cutting) encapsulates everything I love about Jaime’s work not already on display in the earlier page from “Flies.” The mixture of realism and cartoon tropes, the chaotic, fun, and funny relationships between characters, and the embedding of this moment in an unseen narrative context.

Even now, having read most of his work, there are still beautiful absences in the narrative understanding Jaime offers. One is the strange genre territory the Locas universe sits in, where someone like H.R. Costigan can exist alongside Ray Dominguez, where there can be rocket ships and super heroes and a mansion with 1000 rooms, and also the streets of Hoppers. Another is that, despite a voluminous body of work, Jaime has yet to exhaust the pasts or futures of his characters – witness the pairing of “Browntown” and “The Love Bunglers,” or the Lil’ Hopey sections embedded in “The Education of Hopey Glass” (the next book I read after “Ninety-Three Million Miles,” if you want to further chart the perversity of my Hernandez timeline). There are still things we can wonder after.

In theory, I understand that the continuity and references might keep some people from enjoying the work because they think that they’re missing something. But in practice, I have a hard time really accepting that as a legitimate complaint about LOCAS. For me, Jaime’s work isn’t a continuous narrative to be ingested in order and “properly understood.” It’s a web of moments, interconnected but not interdependent. Noah’s right in his article on nostalgia that “simply knowing there’s a whole is itself a delight,” but I think he misses (or simply disagrees) that the moments themselves are also a delight, and that the moments exist in a constant tension with the unseen whole that provides something more than merely nostalgia.

I think part of the reason Jaime’s work functions this way for me is the much-ballyhooed “realism” of his characters. I’ve lost track of what everyone means by “real” or “authentic” in these discussions, so to clarify: I mean that the characters in LOCAS exhibit an emotional verisimilitude that convinces me above and beyond suspension of disbelief for the purposes of a story that they “exist” in some way. Jaime’s mastery of body language and facial expression is part of it, as is his finding that sweet spot between specific realistic draftsmanship and universal cartoonish simplicity. But it’s also in the way his characters act towards one another, the way they speak in the sometimes-clunky but always genuine dialogue. There’s no good way to put it that doesn’t sound fannish or essentialist, but Jaime’s characters just convince me. So much so that in any given moment of a Hernandez comic, I feel as if I’m stealing a glimpse of a fully formed reality, the rest of which is just concealed from view.

(I know Caro has asked, rhetorically, why “real” should count as an inherent positive quality of a fictional character when we are all surrounded by actually real people who would be more deserving of our attention if what we’re looking for is emotional verisimilitude. To me, this is a false equivalency. A person is a person and a character is a character. I don’t watch my friends and family with an omnipotent eye for my own entertainment. There are inherent responsibilities and detachments, different empathies that come into play, interacting with a fellow real human being. The purpose of a “real” character isn’t to supplant real life, but to reflect it, offering you a way of experiencing and thinking about people that actual people can’t ever supply. Conversely, real people offer experiences that fiction can never supply. That’s why we need BOTH.)

(I also don’t quite understand or believe Caro’s comment that “Emotional verisimilitude and compelling characters and being real are just the bare minimum I expect of competent fiction. It’s not what gets you praised; it’s what gets you published.” There’s a difference between a character being well realized enough for you to go along with a story; another for you to be truly convinced of the character’s inner life. If the latter is really as ubiquitous as she seems to imply, then she exists in a literary universe I am unfamiliar with.)

Lastly (and this is a point too important to bury at the end of an overly long and discombobulated essay, but here I go anyway) Jaime’s work sends me because I have an inherent love for the aesthetic of comics themselves, and his comics exalt those aesthetics. This is a position our host tends to disagree with – it seems (and Noah, please correct me) that he places more value on plot and character choices independent of form than on the ways in which formal choices craft plot and character. I camp out on the opposite side of that formulation. For example, in his Jaime essay, Noah called attention to this two-panel sequence in order to say of it, “You see Maggie from a distance, and then in close up. It’s not an especially interesting or involving visual sequence…”

Whereas, to me, there’s a wealth of information in these two panels. In the first panel, Calvin is standing between the young kids and the young adults. He’s clearly apart from both, but he’s turning away from youth and facing a sexually fraught tableau – his blossoming older sister flirting with his rapist. The dark shadows on the underside of the tree make the scene in the distance forbidding but also contrasts with and then highlights the two figures below. The second panel is dramatic not for its shifting perspective, and not for the readers seeing Maggie as post-pubescent for the first time (as Noah posits), but for Calvin seeing his sister as a complex and somewhat frightening part of a world he doesn’t understand but which causes him pain and humiliation. It’s Calvin seeing the laughter in her eyes next to the older boy, and it’s the dismissiveness of her words cast against Calvin’s confused feelings of jealousy and protectiveness towards her. These are all present in the form itself, and are inseperable from the content.

The greatness of Jaime’s characters and storytelling has as much to do with the way his drawings exist on the page as with the particulars of his plots. To me, there is joyful aesthetic purpose in characters existing inside stark black-and-white fields, in characters existing simultaneously as realistic and cartoonish, and in the composition and arrangement of images on a page to create a sense of movement and life. These elements are just as much a part of “who” these characters “are” as their actions within the plots they inhabit. Just spending time with these drawings – with these characters (same thing) – is enough for me to say that Jaime is one of the best.
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The index to the Locas Roundtable is here.

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Hinkley Had a Vision

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In the spirit of our Jaime roundtable, a punk rock mix. Download Hinkley Had a Vision.
 
1. Capybara — Shonen Knife
2. Another Genius Idea From Our Government — Erase Errata
3. Marmoset — Rapeman
4. Human Fly — The Cramps
5. Down on the Street — The Stooges
6. Tight Black Plants — The Plasmatics
7. Neanderthal Dike — Tribe 8
8. Hate Breeders — The Misfits
9. It’s Halloween — The Shaggs
10. Radio G. String — Bow Wow Wow
11. Pretty Vacant — Sex Pistols
12. New Breed — Pussy Galore
13. Hinkley Had a Vision — The Crucifucks
14. Institutionalized — Suicidal Tendencies
15. Life Sentence — Dead Kennedys
16. Screaming at a Wall — Minor Threat
17. Who Am I — D.R.I.
18. Radiation Sickness — Repulsion
19. White Riot — The Clash
20. The KKK Took My Baby Away — Ramones
21. Too Bad on Your Birthday — Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
22. Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing — Minutemen
23. Thank You — Swans
24. Hot Topic — Le Tigre

Locas….Y La Loca Perdida

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My first exposure to Love and Rockets came as a surly adolescent girl trapped in a level of Hell that Dante didn’t foresee—the suburb-meets-desert outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona. You can read virtually any recent news article about the place to imagine what a fun childhood that was sure to be for any kid surnamed “Gonzalez”—particularly one who oscillated between dysfunctional introversion, temperamental outbursts and endlessly sardonic sarcasm. (Given some of the racially based rudeness I was exposed to from both other kids and adults though, I regret nothing!) But after a divorce, remarriage, and determination to reinvent life someplace far, far away from New York in both geography and spirit, this was the place my (Irish-American) mother brought me to, to live out my teenage years as a Hopey Glass-type personality already on her way to an Izzy Ortiz adulthood.

Love & Rockets came into my hands not through the local comic shop, where it was kept on an 18 & up shelf, but the zine rack of a Tempe based punk/alternative/whatever record store called Zia’s. Both Jaime and Gilbert’s work was wonderful, but the stories of the gang from Hoppers, the Locas, resonated with an immediacy to my adolescent self, due to the more recognizable factors – they were Latinas, but American ones as well, existing within both those cultures, as well as in the punk subculture. And did I mention that Hopey Glass was also of mixed parentage? An identity that was one, the other, both, none,a fact usually ignored but that could also be a source of contention.

It was all too easy to see where the punk scene could appeal to someone like Hopey in that respect, as well as the occult-obsessed and mentally unwell (see I told you I was well on my way) Izzy. Or even the constantly flustered Maggie (I know I haven’t mentioned her till now, but she never captured my imagination the way the others did. Young adult literature was already full of Awkward Insecure heroines who everyone secretly thought was a real Swell Gal.) When I was young, and those characters not much older, punk, death rock, et al were viewed as a mythical “safe zone” where it didn’t matter if you weren’t quite “right” or having an identity crisis. In theory it was the place to not only be a social outcast, but to make it yours on a whole other level. Even if that theory didn’t always work out in practice.

So there were these relatable elements, to be sure, but to me Jaime blended them with something beyond that yet also familiar (as is it’s nature) – magical realism, a style associated with, though not exclusive to, Latin American writing. This was especially prevalent in the earliest work, where fantastical elements would be introduced into the story in a naturalistic way, and it seemed that in Las Locas’ world, robots, dinosaurs, superheroes, and spaceships were viewed as though they were as ordinary as a weekend punk gig or a dramatic scene with your girlfriend or boyfriend. If anything, the latter seemed to have greater impact in the course of the story. Which I suppose gives weight to the critique that it’s essentially a punk-rock version of a soap opera, and I wouldn’t argue that point in the least. In several places the story seemed to dovetail from slice of life into again these fantastic elements, but in a way that seems highly self aware, as if it is the intent to create—not-a parody—but almost a meta-referencing of telenovellas, or of both American and Spanish comics. Rand Race in particular emphasizes this. If the Locas were relatable to me, Rand was a stiff cardboard cut-out of a human, a square-jawed, muscular male lead of the sort that would be found either in an adventure comic or a soap opera. And of course there’s Penny Century, a headstrong, adventurous young woman who can have nearly anything she wants—and who wants nothing more than to be a superhero. And hell—he even got in a classic feet-up “Condorito” iplop! here and there!

This blend of the familiar and the fantastic did for me what magical realism is supposed to do — gave me a sense of a world where there was so much possible beyond the mundane existence of my surroundings. Did I believe I would find a world of spaceships and dinosaurs? Well, no. But that I would leave Arizona, that there was a full spectrum of experiences to be had beyond what the majority of the culture around me was telling me I was limited to, and that even when I wasn’t sure if my demons were real or figments any more than I was about Izzy’s, it would be part of the full tapestry of being.

And maybe someday, I’ll find rockets, tambien.
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The index to the Locas Roundtable is here.

Utilitarian Review 3/24/12

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On HU

In our Featured Archive post this week, Caroline Small explained why Jaime Hernandez is (unfortunately) not like a soap opera.

I reviewed albums by two punk rock girl bands: Shonen Knife and Forever.

I reviewed a book about rock and the apocalypse and argued that rock realy is the devil’s music.

Most of this week was devoted to our ongoing Jaime Hernandez roundtable. This week we had posts by Marc Sobel, Derik Badman, James Romberger, and Richard Cook. You can see an index for the whole ongoing roundtable here.

And finally Monika Bartyzel explained why Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Xander Harris is a sexist ass.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today, I talk about trying and failing to vote for Romney in Illinois.
 
Other Links

Eli Zaretsky on Obama and the limits of reason.

A nice post on Chet Baker.

On defiling Corto Maltese.

Robert Stanley Martin and Tom Spurgeon talk about Watchmen, canons, and Calvin and Hobbes here and again here. As a bonus, Tom explains in some detail why he despises HU in general and me in particular.