Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature

3. A Broader Canvas: Gilbert Hernandez’s Heartbreak Soup

68 CHAPTER 1 A BROADER CANVAS GILBERT HERNANDEZ’S HEARTBREAK SOUP Between its launch in 1981 and its fissioning into separate projects in 1996, the anthology Love & Rockets broke new ground for comics in terms of both content and form. Created by brothers Gilbert, Jaime, and (occasionally) Mario Hernandez,1 Love & Rockets fused underground and mainstream traditions , in the process reaching new audiences for whom such distinctions were moot. Though it at first built on such shopworn genres as superheroics and romance, Love & Rockets transcended these conventions, revitalizing long-form comics with new themes, new types of characters, and fresh approaches to narrative technique. In so doing, it became the quintessential alternative comic, indeed gained the status of a brand—so much so that, in 2001, after a five-year hiatus, the Hernandez brothers yielded to reader demand and once again brought their work together under the Love & Rockets banner. (Volume 2 of the series continues as of this writing.) The thematic and formal innovations of Love & Rockets were of a piece: what the series had to say and how it went about saying it were knotted together. This interrelation of theme and form stands out most clearly in Gilbert’s cycle of stories about the fictional Central American village of Palomar, a series most often referred to as Heartbreak Soup. Over its thirteen years (1983–96), Heartbreak Soup yielded a wealth of stories and achieved a novelistic breadth and complexity to which few comics aspire. (Of course it did not do so alone: Jaime’s Locas series, the “other half” of Love & Rockets, is gutsy, complex, and heart-rendingly beautiful—also beyond our present scope, alas.) The Palomar tales demonstrated, bountifully, the art form’s potential to evoke complex settings and characters—and to address thorny sociopolitical issues. Indeed Heartbreak Soup, at its height, seems nothing CHAPTER THREE GILBERT HERNANDEZ’S HEARTBREAK SOUP 69 less than a profound meditation on the social responsibility and political efficacy of comics. Happily, readers can now discover the whole of Palomar in one monumental volume, titled simply Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories (published in 2003). This single, definitive volume is the best way to dive into Gilbert Hernandez’s work. Yet the collected Palomar in effect denies its own origins, for it hides the way serialization both enabled and constrained Hernandez’s creative process. The growth and eventual contraction of Heartbreak Soup, the series, epitomize the challenges faced by long-form comics. Though Hernandez successfully exploited serial publication to give his stories a broader canvas, and in the process developed radical new ways of evoking space and time in comics, serialization also curbed and directed his work, forcing him to confront , in the novel Poison River and subsequent efforts, the limits of periodical publishing. The story of Heartbreak Soup, in short, is the richest, also one of the most complex and problematic, examples of alternative comics in the long form. BREAKING NEW GROUND Love & Rockets announced its difference from the outset: in magazine (roughly 8.5-by-11-inch) rather than comic book form, it introduced themes and characters hitherto unknown in American comics. Specifically, Jaime and Gilbert evoked Southern California’s punk rock scene, capturing its rough-andtumble nature while applying its DIY (do-it-yourself) aesthetic to their own work. (Rock ’n’ roll remains a constant reference point throughout L&R.) At the same time, Los Bros Hernandez (as they became known) pushed back the horizons of U.S. comics by portraying Mexican-American culture with sensitivity and candor, thus bringing to comics a new sense of (multi)cultural diversity, vitality, and tension. Social and political life in California’s barrios, and in the provincial villages of Latin America, became their abiding concerns, indeed the wellsprings of most of their work. In addition, Los Bros defied the longstanding masculine bias of comic books by focusing on distinctive and complex female characters. These characters, as they matured, mixed caricature, lowkey realism, and a refreshingly inclusive sense of beauty. As such, they broke with the fetishism of both mainstream adventure comics, with their feverish celebration of the disciplined, superheroic body, and most underground comix, with their scabrous, at times misogynistic sexual satire. The brothers’ thematic innovations—the punk milieu, their eagerness to explore their Latino roots, and their regard for women—inspired fierce loyalty among their readers. For many, alternative comics began with Love & Rockets. Letters from fans in early issues of L&R (1983–86) testify to this loyalty. For example, in issue No. 12 (July...