Comics Review: Speak of the Devil, Gilbert Hernandez

This is a slightly revised version of a review that was originally published, in somewhat abridged form, in The Comics Journal #298 (May 2009).

One can’t help but worry about Gilbert Hernandez these days. For over two decades he’s been one of the accomplished and dependable cartoonists working. But apart from a collaboration with his brother Mario, his contributions to the first issue of Love and Rockets: New Stories were an embarrassment: a series of undeveloped, one-off strips best described as sketchbook fare. I rationalized my disappointment in an online review by convincing myself that he was coming off a full-length project with Speak of the Devil and needed to recharge his batteries. However, I hadn’t read Speak of the Devil at that time. I’ve since sat down with it, and my reaction is one of shock. It is, by far, the worst extended effort by Hernandez that I’ve read. If it weren’t for the fluid assurance of his cartooning, this inchoate mess of a story would have me wondering if he’s lost all sense of pride in his work.

The main character of Speak of the Devil is Val Castillo, a champion high-school gymnast. Her parents are divorced, and she lives with her father and stepmother in suburbia. She’s also developed a strange compulsion. At night, she dons a devil’s mask and black clothing and heads out to peek in windows throughout her neighborhood. Her favorite is the window to her father and stepmother’s bedroom, where, at various times, she watches her stepmother masturbate, have sex with her father, and walk around half-naked while talking on the phone.

Hernandez never takes the reader inside Val’s pathology. The story doesn’t develop; it just gets more convoluted as it goes. Val’s stepmother, Linda, is turned on by the knowledge that a peeping tom is watching her. And Val’s boyfriend, Paul, abandons his hesitations about their relationship after he discovers that she and the peeping tom are the same person. As the story continues, Paul dresses up as the peeping tom in order to seduce Linda. Val quickly discovers the two of them have begun an affair, but once she gets past her initial jealousy, the three decide to become a team and head off, willy-nilly, on a gruesome murder spree. The latter scenes are an orgy of bloodletting that would make most splatter movies seem restrained, with stabbings, a beheading, throats being cut, and most often, eyes being gouged out. We also get a fight to the death between Val and her mother that mixes up knives and gymnastic kicks.

Hernandez kills off virtually the entire cast before he’s through, and he ends with a final “twist”: a gymnastics rival of Val’s is shown carrying the peeping-tom devil mask in her athletic bag. The cycle of perversion and death begins anew--in other words, the most hackneyed ending imaginable. It’s bewildering to boot. Hernandez doesn’t offer any real insight into what started Val down her path, so why should one care if this rival, whom the reader has been told next to nothing about, follows in her footsteps?

The book feels like Hernandez was making it up as he went, without any consideration as to whether what he shows makes any sense. When Val discovers that Paul and Linda are having an affair, she attacks him with a knife. All the stabs and cuts are underneath his clothes, but there’s enough blood loss for it to be splattered all over the room. Why isn’t an ambulance called once Val is subdued? One would think it imperative, as that much blood means at least a vein or artery was cut. Professional medical attention is going to be required to get the bleeding under control, including stitches. But Paul’s not much worse for wear; Linda just takes him into another room and bandages him up. Hernandez seems to want to have his cake and eat it too with the violence in this scene. He wants the sensationalistic charge that comes from showing a bloody knife attack, but he doesn’t want to inconvenience the story with the logical consequences of it. In real life, with even a fraction of the amount of blood shown, Paul would have been hurt badly enough to require hospitalization. There would be an inevitable police investigation, with Val all but certainly ending up in a psychiatric ward or the juvenile justice system. It’s also safe to say that Linda’s infidelity to Val’s father would become known. But if Hernandez had played out the aftermath of the attack realistically, he wouldn’t have much of a book left.

It almost goes without saying that Hernandez hasn’t researched his characters. Val is supposed to be a top high-school gymnast with a solid chance of winning the state championship. However, Hernandez clearly doesn’t know much about high-school athletics. He certainly has no idea what the life of a top competitor would be like. Val’s daily routine wouldn’t be as brutal as the kind endured by elite gymnasts like Nastia Liukin or Shawn Johnson, which makes Marine boot camp seem like a picnic, but she’s not going to have much in the way of leisure time. A typical day would be school and three to four hours of practice and training, with hopefully enough time to finish her homework before she has to go to bed. She’s also going to be on a fairly strict diet. Alcohol is a major no-no, as it can play serious games with one’s metabolism. But the practice sessions in the story are portrayed so offhandedly that they feel like last-period gym class during balance-beam week. Hernandez also doesn’t appear to find it the least bit peculiar when Val heads off with a group of boys to hang out and drink beer. (I was surprised they would even have her along. I was friends with a champion swimmer in high school, and everyone was conscientious of her training needs without having to be told.) Linda is a ditz, but no matter how dumb she is, it would be pointed out to her that she shouldn’t be constantly offering to fix Val something to eat. The life of a champion high-school gymnast would make big demands on Val and everyone around her, but Hernandez is oblivious to that and everything it implies.

These complaints may seem pedantic, but they point up the fact that Hernandez’s laziness cuts him off from opportunities to give the story some depth. Couldn’t there be a connection between Val’s compulsive and violent behavior and the pressure she’s under? Fellow students and school personnel invariably treat star athletes like celebrities, with almost everyone looking to vicariously enjoy their success. It’s not unusual for them to feel like they live under a glass for everyone to see. Might the voyeurism be a way for her to turn the tables on everyone? Everyone just does what they do, and she gets to be the audience for a change? Perhaps Val’s deteriorating sanity might be reflected in problems with grades or substandard performances in practice or competition? (A twisted ankle sidelines her at one point, but the cause is unknown. It doesn’t appear to be the result of her neglecting her training.) Val’s coach is barely a presence in her life, which is also strange. One would expect the two to have a significant relationship. For someone like Val in real life, her coach would almost be more important to her than her parents. What might we discover about Val from the coach and their interactions? Hernandez doesn’t dignify the role gymnastics plays in Val’s life, so I don’t know the answer to this or any of the other questions. He cuts off a major avenue of insight into her character. It raises the question of why he made her a gymnast in the first place. I suspect the answer is that he just wanted to draw muscular girls in athletic poses.

That sort of attitude might explain some other odd elements, such as why Linda is shown working as a Playboy-bunny-type server in a local nightclub. Val’s father is well off enough to afford a good-sized suburban house and go golfing on Sundays. If suburbanites are conscious of anything, it’s appearances. He’s not likely to be tolerant of his wife working in a place where part of her job is to be ogled, no matter how tight the household income. Her work outfit is also an anachronism. Clubs haven’t had their wait staff dress like that in decades. But hey, it’s fun to draw voluptuous women in one-piecers, complete with fishnets, faux tails and high heels, so why not?

Hernandez can’t even keep his mind on what he presents. At one point, Paul recounts a horrific discovery while helping his father clean up an abandoned house. It’s clearly intended as a metaphor, which one expects to lead to an epiphany about Paul or the other characters in the book’s second half. But the epiphany never comes. Hernandez seems to forget about it in the midst of the massacres. Speaking of which, the ineptitude of the police investigation into the murder spree is beyond belief. The killings have almost identical m.o.’s, but the investigating detective can sincerely say “We’ve no conclusive evidence that they’re all linked.” He even says Val is not a suspect. However, forensic specialists are nowhere to be seen, much less the FBI, which is generally called in to investigate serial killings. In the age of CSI, with all the attention given to the ubiquity and exactitude of modern forensic investigation work, how does Hernandez expect anyone to accept what he shows? Val can’t even bother to wipe for her fingerprints.

The skill of the cartooning belies the laziness, stupidity and lack of depth in the story. As one expects from Hernandez, the characters are visually distinctive, the action is clear, and the pacing never lags. He probably enjoyed drawing it, which could have been all that mattered to him. But for a reader, Speak of the Devil is a terrible disappointment. The release of the giant Palomar collection a few years back prompted claims to the effect that only Robert Crumb, Jules Feiffer, and Art Spiegelman ranked him among living U. S. cartoonists. His more recent efforts have one wondering if he is going the route of Bob Dylan, who responded to similar plaudits by foisting album after album of self-indulgent crap on the public. Dylan’s fans ultimately saw it as contempt, and they responded by turning their back on him. After a few more works like Speak of the Devil, one would expect Hernandez’s fans to do the same. I never thought I’d say this about him, but these days he’s just filling up pages and cranking it out.

Comics Review: American Presidents, David Levine

This is a slightly revised version of a piece was originally published in 2009 in The Comics Journal #296, their annual best-of-the-year issue. It was written in response to the question, “What Is the Most Overrated Book of 2008?") It was first published online on Pol Culture.

I had to pass on submitting a “Best of the Year” list. (I don’t follow the field closely enough, and anyway, I’m behind on my reading.) However, I’m more than happy to submit my candidate for the year’s most overrated book: American Presidents, by David Levine. This collection of his political caricatures goes a long way towards establishing Levine as perhaps the most overrated U. S. cartoonist of the last century.

There’s no denying that Levine is an impeccable draftsman, or that his sculptural pen-and-ink rendering style is gorgeous. But he’s a terrible political cartoonist. The book shows he is neither a thoughtful nor knowledgeable commentator about politics, and he does not, to put it mildly, have a very sophisticated sense of satire. Most of the more pointed images are just cheap insults, like showing Bill Clinton with an elephant trunk instead of a nose, or depicting Jimmy Carter as Mad magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman. Other pieces just make no sense whatsoever, like the depiction of LBJ as King Lear and RFK, Hubert Humphrey and Wilbur Mills as his daughters. Can someone please enlighten me as to who of the latter three is supposed to be Cordelia, and which two Goneril and Regan? In this context, Levine’s most famous images, such as LBJ with the Vietnam-shaped appendectomy scar (used for the book's cover), seem increasingly like examples of a broken clock being right twice a day.

American Presidents is a poorly edited book as well. Some images are accompanied by prose commentary while others are not, and some of the most bewildering--like Carter as Emperor Nero--are those that go without. The prose commentaries in other instances inadvertently make the case for the pieces’ exclusion: they reveal just how badly some images have dated. In retrospect, likening Nixon to Herbert Hoover for downplaying the 1969-1970 recession just seems obtuse, particularly in light of the more severe economic downturns since. And really, shouldn’t someone have prevailed upon Levine to not call Condoleezza Rice “Congaleeza”? The book implies this was one of George W. Bush’s notorious nicknames, but that isn’t the case. Everyone would have been better off if Levine had kept his racist epithets to himself.

Comics Review: Deitch's Pictorama, Kim Deitch, Simon Deitch, and Seth Callan Deitch

This is a revised version of a review first published in The Comics Journal #296. It first appeared online on Pol Culture.

Kim Deitch and his brothers team up in an ostensible effort to combine comics and prose fiction into a new form. But apart from an elegant autobiographical piece by Kim, the book never really comes together.

The five stories in this collection of work by Kim Deitch and his brothers Seth Deitch and Simon Kallan Deitch aren’t really comics; they are prose pieces that occasionally try to combine the two media. In his introduction, Kim writes that his ambition for the book was “to contribute toward a hybrid medium for graphic novels, better merging the written fiction and comics mediums [sic].” Kim’s “The Cop on the Beat,” which deftly mixes prose exposition with cartooned scenes and asides, is the only piece that succeeds in this regard. “The Sunshine Girl,” adapted by Kim from interviews with story protagonist Eleanor Whaley, handles the blending of media far more awkwardly. And “Unlikely Hours,” a prose story by Seth that Kim attempts to shoehorn into the format, would have been better served if it had been left alone. The interplay between prose and pictures often seems gimmicky. Worse, it frequently disrupts the flow of the story. “The Golem,” written by Seth with art by Simon, is an illustrated story in the traditional sense. Seth’s “Children of Aruf” is all but exclusively prose; the only illustration is Kim’s frontispiece.

The story quality is mixed. “The Cop on the Beat” is the best of them. It’s an autobiographical piece about an unrequited romance of Kim’s that shifts into a discussion of the musicians Kim loves from the 1920s and ‘30s. It ends with an amusing epiphany that ties the two parts of the story together. “Children of Aruf,” which imagines a world in which dogs can talk, is the most enjoyable of Seth’s contributions. “The Sunshine Girl” and “Unlikely Hours” are ostensibly autobiographical pieces (“as told to” with the former) that veer into wild fantasy, and they both have the same problem: the stories don’t effectively prepare the reader for the outlandish climaxes. This makes them seem absurd. “The Golem” recounts the Hebrew legend (in a Holy Land setting instead of Prague); its only distinction is in using shifting points of view to tell the familiar story.

The lettering in the book is a distracting flaw. Kim’s stories are both hand-lettered, and given the sloppiness, typesetting would have been preferable. There are numerous problems with baseline adherence, word spacing, and size consistency. The lettering also occasionally butts up against the pictures. These may seem like minor matters, but they make the book a needlessly bumpy ride.

Comics Review: Jessica Farm, Volume One, Josh Simmons

This review first appeared, in somewhat different form, in The Comics Journal #295. Material that had been deleted for publication has been restored, and other minor revisions have been included. It was originally published online on Pol Culture.

The first volume of Josh Simmons' scatological fantasy-picaresque is a tired, amateurishly drawn rehash of dream-surrealist tropes.

The episodes of Josh Simmons’ Jessica Farm are constructed around the dynamic of Snoopy Syndrome. In Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts, the Snoopy character has an active fantasy life. Living the stultifying life of a suburban pet, he imagines himself in more glamorous scenarios, such as being a World War I flying ace, or the ultra-hip college lady-killer Joe Cool. But he never finds satisfaction; his daydreams always end in disappointment. As the flying ace, his nemesis the Red Baron always shoots him down. And as Joe Cool, the “chicks” always ignore him. Jessica, Simmons’ protagonist, is repeatedly frustrated in her fantasy world as well.

She does find some enjoyment, such as when miniature musicians perform for her. But most of the scenes follow the Snoopy Syndrome pattern. Her favorite stuffed animal--it talks, of course--turns up butchered. A beefcake fantasy lover becomes a self-pitying crybaby just as their make-out session heats up. She is reunited with her grandparents, but their meal together is disrupted by Mr. Sugarcock, a naked weirdo with man-boobs who continually gropes his genitals and “seasons” the soup by dunking his scrotum in it.

Jessica Farm has pretensions of being a Surrealist piece, and it includes such hackneyed tropes as climbing darkened stairs and endless falls through space. Simmons, though, has a ways to go to catch up with Salvador Dalí, Djuna Barnes, or David Lynch. His narrative is clear, but it lacks tension, and the book is aimless and tedious. His art isn’t compelling, either. Simmons has a solid understanding of composition, and he’s a passable cartoon draftsman, but he hasn’t mastered treating the inking as part of the drawing process. His inept brushwork sits lifeless on the page.

It’s certainly possible to create a successful surrealist picaresque in comics. Just consider Chester Brown’s Ed the Happy Clown. But this requires stronger cartooning chops than Simmons demonstrates, and the story needs a sense of urgency. Simmons reportedly cartoons Jessica Farm at the rate of one page a month (this volume contains the first 96 pages of a projected 600), and he seems to forget the why of the story in between pages. The Snoopy Syndrome dynamic of the episodes seems more reflective of habit than intent. Jessica Farm doesn’t appear to know where it wants to go, and it doesn’t give the reader any reason to tag along.

Comics Review: Swallow Me Whole, Nate Powell

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Nate Powell’s Swallow Me Whole is a tremendously affecting coming-of-age story, but it is not a hopeful one. Most work in this vein fits a particular pattern. It begins with the protagonist as a child or adolescent, and follows him or her through various travails and conflicts. The character comes out the other end as a capable, functioning adult. But Powell’s two protagonists, the stepsiblings Ruth and Perry, have a more difficult road than most. Both suffer from schizophrenia, and while they navigate their way through the usual stages of growing up--first love, the initial steps down the road to a career--they also have to live with the prospect of their condition taking over and destroying what they have. Worse, there is the prospect of going willingly down a self-destructive path if or when the time comes. And there is always the danger of being misdiagnosed, improperly treated, or an emotionally upsetting experience undoing everything medical treatment had largely set right.

The book begins with the two, both of middle-school age, taken by their parent and stepparent (her mother and his father) to see Ruth’s grandmother in the hospital. The old woman is suffering from dementia, but her delusional ramblings strike a chord with Ruth. When the family goes home for dinner that evening, we see why. The dissociative episode she has at the dinner table is only the start. Later, when she has gone to her room for the night, she compulsively reorganizes the jars of insect specimens she collects as a hobby. The specimens talk to her. At one point Ruth muses, “This has been happening all my life. It’s the only way I know our world. Makes sense to me.” The words hang over everything that happens, and they feel achingly true.

Perry has similar problems: a wizard figurine he keeps on the end of his pencil talks to him, and orders him to draw things. He occasionally feels the need to talk back to it, but, in general, his condition is nowhere as extreme as his stepsister’s. However, by the time the two are in high school, her dissociative spells are combining with depression, and her compulsive behaviors border on the debilitating. Following a terrifying hallucination in which she is overwhelmed by flies, her condition is diagnosed and she is prescribed medication to control it.

Ruth, though, is more fortunate than Perry. A doctor he sees around the same time attributes his hallucinations to stress. It’s a painful irony. Perry can function far better without medication than Ruth, but she is the one who receives it, along with the hope of a life unhindered by their condition. And in the months that follow, we see how that plays out. Perry is fairly aimless, while Ruth begins acting on her ambitions and laying the groundwork for a fulfilling life in college and beyond. But Powell's view of Ruth and Perry’s condition to sophisticated to leave things there. The illness can be controlled, but it cannot be cured. The possibility of the disease recurring or worsening sets the stage for a series of reversals that ends in tragedy. One of the stepsiblings ends up “swallowed whole” by madness, while the other will forever live in fear of the same fate.

The story is sensitively realized, and at times Powell’s handling of it seems almost miraculous. He doesn’t play things safe with a detached perspective or polite, understated visuals. He embraces an expressionistic approach that takes one right inside the protagonists’ diseased perceptions. It’s a method that is always at risk of lapsing into sensationalism, but he never falters. The hallucinations and delusions are frequently nightmarish, but they feel as organic a part of the characters’ lives as the more down-to-earth joys and disappointments. The handling of the book’s climactic sections is especially impressive. The descent into madness is given the pacing of a thriller, and the nightmarish climax manages to be both over-the-top and exactly right.

The secret to how it all works may be that Powell’s cartooning style tends to avoid emphasizing a dramatic point. Usually, a cartoonist’s approach to designing panels and pages is to convey exactly what one is to be paying attention to and how one should react. Powell doesn’t do that; his pages and panels are constructed around the principle of indirection. With many of his images, one’s eye has to wander around the composition a bit before one can determine what element one is supposed to be looking at. And if it is immediately clear what information is supposed to be taken in, the overall page design works against the presentation from seeming too pushy. Large areas of black, hatching, or white distract one from giving a particular panel one’s full attention.

Powell has shown no interest in large character ensembles or genre deconstruction, but in many ways his style is similar to filmmaker Robert Altman’s. Both favor unfocused compositions and staging, and Altman’s use of lavish visuals and sound recording to decenter narrative is remarkably similar to Powell’s design strategies. The audience is deliberately given more information than they can immediately process. And Altman and Powell get the same overall effect; their work has a lifelike texture and rhythm that surpasses anything one sees from their peers.

The foundation this style gives Powell allows him to handle just about anything successfully. He can make the quiet and everyday vividly true-to-life, but he can also introduce fantastic and melodramatic elements without making them feel discordant or overwrought. This capacity extends to the inclusion of abstract and hallucinatory imagery. Both are featured in Swallow Me Whole, and both feel organic to Powell's presentation. The ability to slow down the audience and make them work also gives him a remarkable control over pacing; when he shifts from the more meditative moments toward making the narrative hurtle forward, the contrast makes the latter all the more effective. The technique on display is brilliant, and Powell makes it serve his material all the way through. Swallow Me Whole is much more than an affecting look at growing up, or a powerful treatment of the tragedy of mental illness. It is the work of a blossoming comics master.

Comics Review: The Lagoon, Lilli Carré

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

(Note: A somewhat revised assessment of The Lagoon appears in my review of the cartoonist's "The Thing About Madeline." Please click the link at the end of this post.)

The most interesting aspect of Lilli Carré's The Lagoon is its principal formal affectation. The story is paced through the use of sounds: the ticking of a metronome, taps on a window, the hooting of an owl. These and others are used to punctuate the story and set its rhythms. One has come across this technique here and there in various comics stories over the years. The two instances that immediately come to mind are the asylum-cell scene in Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's Batman: The Killing Joke, with the smacking of playing cards against a tabletop, and Neil Gaiman and Mike Dringenberg's "The Sound of Her Wings" from The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, in which dialogue is juxtaposed with the sounds of a soccer ball being kicked around a park. But The Lagoon is the first story I can recall in which the technique is used to structure the entire piece. I was especially taken with the counterpoints Carré develops between the various percussive noises and more "melodic" sounds, such as the characters' dialogue, the yowling of a group of cats in unison, or the siren song of a swamp creature. Carré brings a whole new meaning to the notion of "orchestrating" a story.

It's not hard to imagine the technique giving a striking texture to a great comics story down the road, but the reason it's so conspicuous in The Lagoon is that there's nothing else of interest going on. The story is otherwise shapeless. It's ostensibly a slice-of-life piece about a three-generation household on the outskirts of a swamp, but Carré doesn't establish much in the way of conflicts or a dynamic between the characters. The most memorable scene involves members of the family and their neighbors gathered around a pond to listen to a swamp creature's singing, but the set piece is mostly notable for its weirdness. There doesn't seem to be any point being made, and when the siren-like song leads two characters into the waters--never to be seen again--the moments of their descending are completely affectless. The characters aren't defined enough for the reader to care what happens to them. Carré also inexplicably ends each chapter with full-page panels of, at different times, a grove of trees, underwater bubbles, and a dwindling woodpile fire. One assumes they're metaphors, but the analogies are opaque. Carré doesn't do much to develop them as tropes during the story. As a literary effort, The Lagoon is a wash.

One appreciates Carré developing a complex technique to construct her stories with, but one wishes she would develop a story worth telling. I look at the work of her and so many of her contemporaries, and I can't help thinking that we have a generation of cartoonists who have no idea of how to create a story that's effective in dramatic terms. They don't know how to build a narrative through conflicts or contrasts, nor do they know how to effectively develop tropes. These ambitious talents, admirable in so many ways, seem to turn every story into an inchoate meander, and The Lagoon is no exception.

Reviews of other work by Lilli Carré:

• "The Carnival"
• Nine Ways to Disappear
• "The Thing About Madeline

Comics Review: Love and Rockets: New Stories #1, Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, and Mario Hernandez

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

The first issue of Love and Rockets: New Stories, the latest incarnation of the showcase anthology periodical for Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez's work, finds them both at a low ebb.

Gilbert, in particular, appears to be just blowing off steam. Since the previous Love and Rockets series ended last year, he's completed a full-length graphic novel in Speak of the Devil, and it's easy to see the nine pieces he contributes to this issue as fun-to-draw, for-the-hell-of-it efforts meant to recharge his batteries. They include three oddball strips in the daily-newspaper format, a goofy funny-animal story featuring a gambling kangaroo, and a madcap tribute to Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis imitators Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, done up in the sort of story one might expect in the DC Comics Martin & Lewis series from the 1960s. The experimental piece "?" plays around with aspect-to-aspect panel progressions and Caligari-style surrealistic distortions. "Victory Dance" is apparently a send-off for Juan Julio, a featured character of Gilbert's in the last Love and Rockets series. The most interesting moment in the piece is the ending, which arbitrarily ties into the ending of another story. "Papa" is a meandering effort that looks like it could intersect with the Palomar material but never does. These strips aren't much of a read, but they fly by quickly enough, and Gilbert's cartooning is as energetic and expressive as ever.

"Chiro el Indio," which Gilbert cartooned from his brother Mario's script, is the most entertaining story in the issue. Set in what appears to be a 19th-century Central American village, it's an amusing slapstick piece that pits traditional Latino Indian religion against the governing Roman Catholic faith. The main characters are the forever squabbling Indian couple Chiro el Indio and Preciosa, and much of the story revolves around their arguments over who will bring rain if prayed to: the "Beer Hen" Mary or Quetzaquatl, divine king of the Toltacs. The central joke is that everyone defines his or her life through religion without having anything resembling a spiritual connection to it. The various characters--the impulsive, high-strung Chiro, the cynical-but-gullible Preciosa, Chiro's sexpot "savage" sidekick Moom-Fah, the randy monsignor, and the exasperated town mayor--show comic potential that would seem to go beyond this one short, and one looks forward to Mario and Gilbert doing more with them.

The story that dominates the issue--it takes up half of the hundred pages--is Jaime's "Ti-Girls Adventures No. 34." It's a remarkably vapid strip that reimagines the superhero genre with Jaime's standard-issue fantasy girlfriend characters. Jaime's central flaw as a cartoonist is that he doesn't really write stories; he commits his daydreams to paper. (He may load them up with grit and angst, but they're daydreams nonetheless.) His pieces are rarely worked out in terms of dramatic conflicts or narrative effects; one thing just happens after another, and the reader's interest is largely defined by how much one shares Jaime's infatuation with the girls he depicts. I quit finding the ding-a-ling behavior of late teenage girls charming somewhere in my mid-20s, when my hormones cooled down enough to look at them and not fight the temptation to drool. Jaime's pushing 50, and he still hasn't gotten over them. His delight is palpable in moments like the one when two girls are putting on make-up and happily exclaim, "Oh, look at us. We're so gonna look like whores." And he's obsessed with their bodies; he rarely indulges in drawing overt cheesecake, but one can tell he's thought out every aspect of their figures and poses, and with a big grin on his face the entire time. I have no doubt his favorite visual detail in the story is how one girl's skin-tight top keeps riding up over her belly. "Ti-Girls" seems like a complete waste of time, largely because it doesn't feature much of the well-observed social detail that helps one through the "Locas" material. It also doesn't have any characters like Izzy Reubens or Terry Downe, who have an urgency for Jaime that snaps him out of his daydream mode and compels him to think like a proper storyteller. "Ti-Girls" is just a jokey good-girl superhero piece, and it evaporates while one is reading it. The story's supposed to continue in the next issue, but I doubt anyone will care if Jaime drops it in favor of something else.

It must be said that Jaime's art is phenomenally good, though. I prefer Gilbert's looser, more expressive style, but Jaime's draftsmanship is just astonishing. As impatient as I get with his story material, there's no denying the skill and sophistication of his visual treatment. His sense of black-and-white design is peerless, as is his precision with delineating character expression and gestures. The action is clear and uncluttered, and there's not a lapse anywhere in the drawing of figures or settings. So much ability that so little worthwhile is done with. Jaime is alternative comics' answer to Alex Toth, another masterful cartoon dramatist who wouldn't have known a good story if it hugged him.

A number of reviewers have observed that Love and Rockets: New Stories harkens back to Gilbert and Jaime's earliest efforts at the start of the 1980s--pieces like "BEM" or the Maggie the Mechanic material. There may be something to that; the key difference with Jaime's "Ti-Girls" piece, at least, is that the execution is much more polished. But the Hernandezes' reputation was built on their expanding comics' capacity for handling extended realist narratives. They may have gone as far with that as they can go--it's always possible the realistic material might stop having expressive urgency for them. But one hopes the first issue of the New Stories doesn't signal a new direction for their work. It's hard to feel they're doing anything here besides spinning their wheels, which is guaranteed to get everyone nowhere fast.