Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

 #30. Luba: The Book of Ofelia (Vol. 2 in the Luba trilogy; Vol. 21 in the Complete Love & Rockets)

2005 (material originally published 1998-2005), Fantagraphics Books

Warning: Long and obsessive plot details ahead!  This is a crazy long book -- 240 pages -- and incredibly dense, for a graphic novel.  Also, the storytelling modalities are highly refined and self-referential, full of interweaving, flashback and allusion; and also it's Part 2 of a three-part series-within-a-series.  So I take these reviews as an opportunity to parse the plot, to assure myself that I've actually followed what the hell is going on.
 

So!  This is the second part of Gilbert ("Beto") Hernandez's trilogy about the latest adventures of Luba, his protagonist, in America.  (For basics about Luba, you can see my earlier post about the previous book in this series.)

At this point in time, Luba and her children are in the United States, but her husband Khamo is stuck in immigration limbo.  Luba continues her quest to figure out what she must -- or can -- do in order to untangle his shady past, police record, and hazy criminal associations, so that she can bring him to join them.  (Like most of Luba's accomplishments, this is not really hindered -- and is perhaps made more impressive -- by that fact that, like some of the other main characters living in the United States, she still can't speak a word of English.)

 

Much of this section's narrative mechanics is fueled by the announcement that Ofelia, Luba's long-suffering older cousin, has decided to finally try being the writer she has always wanted to be.  This in-progress "book of Ofelia" gives, perhaps, the collection its title, although the phrasing also seems to imply (in its Biblical cadence) that she is instead the main subject of the book.  (Except that she isn't, really; she's not present throughout.  I keep thinking about the way that, in Spanish -- as I think I understand it, anyway -- this phrase, "el libro de Ofelia," does not make a distinction between the book *by* Ofelia and the book *about* her.  So this book, perhaps, is both.)

 

(On that note: one other thing I like is how much of the book's dialogue and internal thought-monologues are in Spanish.  The switches back and forth are frequent but consistent: the Latin American-born children tend to speak in fluent English to each other, but use Spanish with their parents, and to think in it when introspection is called for; the American-born children and adults think in English, although they frequently and fluently use Spanish with their relations.  Hernandez indicates the switches with the widely used comics convention of putting the "second-language" dialogue within brackets (and, in this book, some double-bracketing for other languages, like French).  When Hernandez' stories were set entirely in the Central American village from which many of the characters hail, he used to just put a note at the bottom of the first page that everything was in Spanish unless otherwise indicated -- a convention that Jaime has also sometimes used, e.g. in stories set among recent immigrants and jornalero workers -- but now that they've migrated to America, there's a lot more use of both tongues.)

 

So.  What's happening in the Book of Ofelia?

 

 

( Obsessive plot details! Avoid if you fear spoilers! )

 

[Tags I'd like to add: a: hernandez gilbert, i: hernandez gilbert, california, children [*not* "children's"], magic realism, disability, meta-literature]

#26. Luba in America (Vol. 1 of the Luba Trilogy), by Gilbert Hernandez
2001 (material originally published 1998-2000), Fantagraphics Books

Ha!  Man, I just never stop referencing myself, do I?  (Well, well: the internet wouldn't be as much fun if it weren't so easy to be intertextual.)

This is the third Love & Rockets book I'm reviewing, since I am indulging in a catch-up binge on my favorite comics series after years of only-sporadic reading.  The first two I reviewed were by Jaime Hernandez, the half of the Hernandez brothers whose work I consistently adore. Luba in America, by contrast, is by Gilbert Hernandez, whose stories, characters, style and subjects are quite different.  In an earlier post I discussed my feelings about Gilbert's work, including and especially my ambivalence about his increasingly sexual and sexualizing vision of his female characters' lives.  

But, heh, Gilbert was also a bold, compassionate and masterful storyteller at one time, and perhaps is still.  If his "weird id display" (as a previous commenter called it) doesn't put you off, there is still a lot of story to admire.  So here I am: taking a careful breath, and plunging into the now-complete "Luba trilogy" to see what Gilbert has recently been up to.

( Venga conmigo! )

Dicks and Deedees: Vol. 20 of The Complete Love & Rockets, Jaime Hernandez
2003, Fantagraphics Books (Material originally published 1999-2002)

Where can I even begin about Love & Rockets?

Love & Rockets is... this art form that we don't have very much of in the United States, and maybe not anywhere else.  And it's difficult to come up with analogies to explain it.  What Love & Rockets is, is a creator-owned comic that has been written and drawn by the same two guys -- Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, a pair of brothers from Oxnard, CA (outside Los Angeles) -- ever since it first began publication in 1982.  So it's kind of like a soap opera, except it's on paper.  And it's a little like a superhero comic, except it is not about superheroes.  And the most, the most important thing about it, in terms of distinguishing it from these other forms and media, is that it has never, never been a product created by committee.  It is a story -- or, rather, a set of interrelated stories -- created by two authors, each one drawing and writing the histories and vignettes of his own characters, against the backdrop of the world and setting he created, moving forward and backward in time, deepening, developing, experimenting, extrapolating.  So each half of this story, what it is, is most like a book -- a drawn one -- that has been being written for over twenty years. 

(So, as a reviewer put it once, and I thought at the time he was being flip, but I think I see now his authentic meaning: what it is actually most like is life.)

( This is gonna be a long review, so here for the cut. )