19. Locas in Love (Love & Rockets Vol. 18), by Jaime Hernandez

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#19.  Locas in Love, Jaime Hernandez (The Collected Love & Rockets, Vol. 18)
2000, Fantagraphics Books (material originally published in Penny Century, Measles, and Maggie & Hopey Color Fun, 1996-2000)

As I think I mentioned in an earlier post, I have loved Love & Rockets since I was about thirteen.  It's one of the great joys of my life that this series (that's what it is, a black-and-white comics series written and drawn by California-based Mexican-American brothers Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez) is, despite all odds, still going; that it has no obvious end in sight, and that I can imagine (though I realize it's unlikely) that it may be with me all my life.

My ability to follow the series closely has varied with my own circumstances, and with the circumstances of its publication.  Since about 2000, for various reasons -- the brothers were publishing several different series, the schedule was irregular, I was out of the country -- I have only been able to read issues every now and then, when I came across them in a shop; or, occasionally, spend several hours in a bookstore reading whatever recent compilations they had on hand.  With the double inspiration of this 50books project, though, combined with the realization last month that the university library to which I have access (through my job) is willing and able to get even graphic novels for me -- quickly and easily! -- through interlibrary loan, I've begun a binge of catching up.  This is freaking awesome, people.

So, even though I have already read Vol. 22 (Ghost of Hoppers, which I own), and the last post I made was on Vol. 20 (Dicks And Deedees), this post is about backtracking all the way to Vol. 18, Locas In Love, which I figured I should read anyway because I thought there might be some material in there I'd missed.  (I'm only talking about even-numbered ones here because those are the ones collecting Jaime's work and storylines; the odd-numbered ones are Gilbert's collections.  Um, I realize this is incredibly involuted.  That's because I'm a comics dork, OK???  And I own all the volumes up to #15, Hernandez Satyricon, so...  OK YES I AM A DORK!)

So anyway.  Below are some spoilers.

( Spoilers, spoilers... )

I LOVE LOVE & ROCKETS, PEOPLE.  And I still hold out hope that someday, someday, those stupid MacArthur people will get their heads out of their butts and do something for the Hernandez Brothers.

[Note: Tags I would like to add, when it becomes possible: superheroes; magic realism.]

20. Cathedral Child, by Lea Hernandez

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[Note: Tags I would like to add, when it eventually becomes possible: a: hernandez lea, i: hernandez lea, steampunk.]

#20.  Cathedral Child, Lea Hernandez
Cyberosia Publishing, 2002 (?)

Cathedral Child is a very curious graphic novel of somewhat confusing provenance.  It is also, I think, unfinished.  I gather that it was meant to be the first volume of a series that Hernandez called "Texas Steampunk Trilogy," but there were a long series of delays in publishing the book and I don't think the second and third volumes were ever produced.

Which is a pity, because Cathedral Child is full of interesting ideas, and has a unique sensibility and a lot of heart.  The ending is very confusing to me, but I don't know how much of that comes from its being supposed to continue on later, or perhaps from the artist having been obliged to cram some extra plot points in where they hadn't been planned.  (Babylon 5 season four, anyone?)

So anyway, I can fault this book on several counts of clarity and pacing. On the other hand, conceptually it is fantastic.  It is set in nineteenth-century West Texas, where a white engineer, Nikola (I see what you did there!), and his investor/partner, Stuart, have set up shop to build an "analytical engine," which in this setting seems to mean an AI. 

They are building their AI inside a mission-style Spanish church, which is referred to as Cathedral, and the "machinists" and "tutors" -- who do the work of teaching and training the young artificial intelligence --  come from among the ranks of the so-called natives, who seem to be Hispanicized Indians.  (This is not entirely clear to me, but on the other hand I am not entirely clear on the distinction between "Hispanicized Indians" and the people we now call Mexicans, so maybe that means I have to do some more research myself.)   In any case, they are brown people, with Spanish names.  And there are really not nearly enough representations of brown people with Spanish names in steampunk at all, much less drawn in a manga-influenced American style, so even if it were just for this I applaud Lea Hernandez a lot.

I won't summarize the whole story here -- I guess I should just recommend reading it yourself, if it seems interesting to you.  I do admit I find the book somewhat confusing.  Some of the story concepts aren't as clearly brought through as they should have been, and I think that unclearness resides both in the storytelling and in the artwork.  On the other hand, I like many of the characters, and some of the ideas are just sublime.  It's really too bad the trilogy seems never to have been finished.

(Also: this book, and its writer, raise a "Who's P.O.C.?" question for me.  Is Lea Hernandez a writer/artist of color?  I am assuming, from her name, her place of origin, and -- here's where it gets really tricky -- from the content of her work, that she is Hispanic, and probably Mexican American.  But does that mean she's necessarily a person of color?  I don't know.  All the (smallish) photos of her I've been able to find online show her with blonde hair.  But I don't know if that means anything; many Mexicans have blonde hair... So here I am, including her, but without really knowing.  For all I know, I could be wrongly assuming.  And we all know what assuming does.  I could be making a ming out of my ass.)

21. !Ask a Mexican!, by Gustavo Arellano

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21. !Ask a Mexican!, Gustavo Arellano
2007, Scribner

I actually finished this book months ago, but I couldn't figure out what to say about it.  I guess I still can't, really.  There are some things I really like about this book, and some things I find very disappointing, so I guess I'll just talk about that.

The book is centrally made up of a collection of columns by Arellano, who writes a kind-of-advice column for the OC [Orange County, CA] Weekly, whose putative mission is to answer questions from clueless gabachos (white people) about Mexican culture and mores.  That's a part of the country where many Mexican immigrants and their Mexican-American descendants live side-by-side with white (and other) Americans, and where there seems to be a virulent ongoing culture clash, fueled in part by arguments about immigration policy and illegal immigration, and in part by the stuff that fuels any culture clash (confusion, fear, tribalism, bigotry, language barriers, racism, and all the rest of that awesome stuff).   So tensions can run high there, and if one can judge by the tone of the questions The Mexican gets asked -- if even one-third of them are actual questions written in by actual white Californians -- there are lots of people who are happy to let their racism just hang out.

Given that background, I admire Arellano's "straight-talk" approach, which deals candidly with insults, epithets, stereotypes and racist language, in order to talk about them.  Wab and gabacho (insulting words for "Mexican" and "white person" respectively) are frequent in the column.  Questions like "Why do Mexicans have so many fucking kids?", "Why do ghetto-poor people spend money on their trucks instead of their families?," "Why do your women insist on wearing low-riding jeans with their fat bellies spilling out?," or "Why don't you illegal immigrants have enough respect for the United States to learn English?" -- these questions get serious answers.  Arellano doesn't spend a lot of time berating anyone for intolerance or racism; the premise seems to be that the racism is obviously there, that's the ground-zero starting point, so let's talk about the actual questions.  He maintains his dignity by addressing his interlocutors in the same tone -- which is not particularly polite -- but the answers often have a lot of actual content: Arellano talks about cultural, social, and historical issues and themes in Mexican culture, and frequently quotes sociological studies and government demographic data (Arellano has an MA in sociology).  That's presumably the aspect of his approach that merited the cover blurb from the L.A. Times, "A sassy mix of Lenny Bruce rant and civil rights manual."  For my part, it reminds me of the early days of Dan Savage's "Savage Love" sex-advice column, when he invited -- nay, demanded -- that his interlocutors address him as "Hey, Faggot!"  The theory again being: we both know you have private opinions about me, so let's get it all out there up front so that it won't become the subtext to the rest of our conversation.

I was disappointed, though, by some aspects of Arellano's answers.  For one thing, he doesn't always address the actual question asked: sometimes you can see him quickly veering the discussion around to fit in with something he apparently really wants to quote or write about that day.  That's not great advice-columnist manners, I think: dude, it's not all about you.  Also, some issues that questioners bring up he just kind of fails to deal with.  The ones that were of most interest to me -- where I happened to notice him falling down or just evading, over and over again -- were the ones that had to do with ingrained gender inequality in Mexican culture, and the ones relating to homosexual behavior and attitudes toward it.  He just kind of evades, man, over and over again -- and every now and then he says something that's just concretely insulting.  "As for the Mexican women being sultry and spicy -- that's all documentary, baby."  "Any man who breaks the shackles of propriety and... grabs his crotch is the kind of immigrant we want... Wolf-whistling Mexican men are our modern pioneers, and gabachas are their new frontier, their virgin soil."  "As for our young men's current fascination with pansy-ass K-Swiss sneakers and the color pink... blame metrosexuality, the biggest threat to machismo since the two-income household."  You know what, man, fuck you, too.

That said, I did learn a lot from this book.  One of the most interesting parts are the longer "investigation" pieces Arellano wrote for the book, and includes at the end of each chapter.  A lot of them include discussions with currently living-illegal Mexican immigrants about issues like living on a tiny budget or doing jornalero work (manual day labor).  The most amazing one, for me, is undoubtedly the ten-page essay on the huge Mexican and Mexican-American fan base of Morrissey.  (Yes, Morrissey, the fey, depressive Englishman, who remains sexually ambiguous decades after it's stopped being cool.  THAT GUY.  Morrissey and Mexicans?  I would never, in a thousand years, have guessed that one.)

So anyway.  As you can see, this book gave me quite a lot to think about. 

Below is a short sampling from it, to give an idea of Arellano's style:

Q: "Why are Mexicans known as greasers?  Is it because they spread rancid lard from their dirty kitchens all over themselves after bathing instead of baby oil or cologne the way clean, civilized Anglos do?"

Dear Gabacho: Mira, güey [Look, man], the only grease we put on ourselves is the Three Flowers brilliantine Mexican men use to lacquer up their hair to a shine so intense astronomers frequently mistake the reflection off our heads for the Andromeda Galaxy.  That puts us in brotherhood with the 1950s gabacho rebels whom mainstream society also denigrated as greasers.  But the reason greaser maintains such staying power as an epithet against Mexicans -- etymologists date its origins to the 1830s -- is because it refers to, as you correctly imply, our diet. Sociologist Irving Lewis Allen devotes a chapter in his 1990 compendium of linguistic essays... [Etc.]

What Fire Cannot Burn

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20)What Fire Cannot Burn by John Ridley is the sequel to his mutant-hunting novel Those Who Walk in Darkness, which I reviewed here a while back. And in many ways, it's more retcon than sequel. Its structure is very unsatisfying, with the novel's most important event taking place at the midpoint and the rest of the novel feeling like anticlimactic denouement. But it does address many of the problems I complained about in reviewing the first book, and takes an aggressive approach to fixing them.

The moral difficulties that I spoke of, brushed over in the first book, are given fuller attention here. There is not a cleaner resolution of the issues, but there is a more satisfying resolution. And Soledad's emotional unavailability isn't solved here, but Ridley figures out how to find closure for that story and move on to characters and emotions he finds more interesting.

If you've read the first book, I'd recommend reading the sequel. But there's not much here for you otherwise.

Good Enough; The Whale Rider

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27. Good Enough, by Paula Yoo

YA novel about a Korean-American girl whose parents push her to take all AP classes, get at least a 2300 (new scale...) on the SATs, etc. so she can get into an Ivy League college. She's also a very talented violinist, and her parents push her to achieve as much as she can in music so it will look good on her college applications.

She meets a boy at All-State orchestra rehearsal that she's very attracted to, and over the course of the book she gets closer and closer to him, sneaking out to his house to play music with him when her parents forbid her to hang out with boys or to waste any time that she could be spending studying. He teaches her about improvisation and the value of rock music, and helps her realize how truly passionate about music she is (he encourages her to apply to Juilliard behind her parents' backs).

And then, of course, there's the climax where they sneak out to a concert, she gets caught, there are consequences... and then it all wraps up nicely in the end. (I don't think I need to give a spoiler warning for any of this; how could the ending be anything else?)

I liked this well enough. The author's a musician and gets the music parts of the story exactly right (I'm picky about that sort of thing). And she gets math much better than Justina Chen Headley (although the part where the protagonist says that she doesn't have enough time to solve the last problem on her extra credit homework, d/dx(sin(x²+5)) or something like that, between homeroom and when she has to hand it in in the middle of the day... came off as false - how long could it really take her? 30 seconds?)...

And there is not too much girliness.

28. The Whale Rider, by Witi Ihimaera

I thought this was just lovely. I decided to read it after reading a friend's review of the movie, in which she said that the movie's message seemed to be inconsistent - that it seemed to be alternatingly sending the messages "The hope of indigenous peoples is returning to the Old Ways" and "Sexism is bad, and the Old Ways are sexist," when it should have been a real examination of how to keep indigenous cultures alive, living, evolving to survive in their times.

The book didn't seem to me to have that inconsistency at all. It actually seemed to be exactly what my friend wanted to see... except that it was less an examination and more that... both themes, returning to the ways of the Maori people and letting those ways evolve, were just there, pervading the book. The sexism of some of the traditions was challenged, but that challenge came from within the culture; it was not imposed on it from outside. This was not about a conflict between The Enlightened White Conception Of Human Rights and Our People's Cultural Identity And Traditions. Not at all.

Once again... lovely.