MYTHCOMICS: "EXTEND THE HAND..." (GOODY GOOD COMICS #1, 2000)

Prefatory note: the full title of the story under discussion is "Extend the Hand of Love to All Who Can Use It," and it's the longest story in the stand-alone issue of GOODY GOOD COMICS. The cover illustration-- which is the only free image I found on the Net-- has nothing to do with "Extend," though the image of a robot munching on a meaty rib fits the ironic nature of not only this story, but the whole oeuvre of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez.

In fact, I've recently thought that the best way to sum up the worlds of the Hernandez Brothers is that of "Betty and Veronica trapped in the nauseous world of Sartre's Roquentin." I've expressed my admiration for the best of the Hernandez's work, but much of their appeal grows out of their mastery of the kinetic and dramatic potentialities. Neither artist is particularly good at the more abstract potentialities: both seem to have no deeper understanding of didactic concepts than warmed-over Marxism, and their ability to evoke mythopoeic ideas is often short-circuited by their over-reliance on pseudo-literary absurdism. I pointed this tendency out in my review of Jaime Hernandez's TI-GIRLS project:

When I read the original serial in LOVE AND ROCKETS: NEW STORIES 1-2, the story seemed random and unfocused.  For the reprint volume Jaime added 30 new pages which went a long way to providing closure to the story, though there are still plenty of surrealistic moments where strange things happen and the only response is, "who can figure comics?" For instance, Santa Claus appears in the story briefly, to little purpose except so that Jaime could indulge in a little whimsy not connected to the usual fantasy/SF tropes of superhero comics.

Like Jaime, Gilbert Hernandez has often dipped his toe into SF-fantasy of the absurdist kind. Usually, though, his efforts (and Jaime's) lead to more "random and unfocused" fantasies, as with a Gilbert story in NEW COMICS #1, where two obscure Martin-and-Lewis clones get shunted to an alien planet and have a lot of silly adventures.

"Extend," though no less absurdist than other Gilbert works, is one of the artist's tightest stories in a mythopoeic vein. The story's protagonist Roy has appeared in assorted stories, where he appears to be an ordinary fat Earthman with a Beatles haircut. I've read some of the other Roy stories and I was not especially impressed.

"Extend," however, is a pretty strong satire of space opera, particularly in terms of Gilbert showing off his penchant for gory effects that don't appear in the more mainstream SF offerings. With no explanation, Roy is first seen wandering around an alien world. He's apparently been there for some time, for he pals around with a diminutive alien friend whom Roy calls (for unknown reasons) by the name "Homo." He's also not thrown for a loss when he spies a group of three uniformed women, who are seen making enormous leaps over the countryside, which might be a reference to Burroughs' jumping-jack hero John Carter, or to Buck Rogers and his anti-gravity belt, or both. Roy refers to the women as "the Leapin' Elitists," but they don't stop to converse with him.

When Roy goes hunting for food, he accidentally spooks the mount of a young local ruler, whom I will denote as "the Good Boy King." The young "despot" (as Roy calls him) gets his knee wounded, and in seconds, the wound expands to a huge boil. At the king's insistence, Roy takes up a sword and slices the boil. However, with the usual lack of explanation, a fully formed clone of the Good Boy King springs from the bloody wound, swipes the sword and kills his double, thus establishing himself as "the Bad Boy King."

Gilbert's intention is clearly to satirize the adventurous fantasies of normative space opera. Roy passively allows the Bad Boy King to take him prisoner and bring him back to the Good Boy King's city, where the villain has no problems posing as the real ruler. When Roy is contacted by two of his friends from the Leapin' Elitists-- who are monitoring the situation but don't actually intend to rectify it-- he does at least tell them about the clone. The two females, rather than helping him, conduct Roy into a dark tunnel where he sees visions of his lost Earth-life, whereon he moans about being a coward:"That's why I couldn't live in my own skin." Then he exits the tunnel into an arena, and is gorily killed when the Bad Boy King sics a monster onto Roy.

However, after Roy has died, the Leapin' Elitist girls suddenly feel free to resurrect him, even though one of them thinks it may be a contradiction of their non-interference policy. Whatever the girls do to Roy not only reconstitutes his own body, but also releases a clone of Roy-- again born from a swelling in the knee. Just as the Bad Boy King was the opposite of the original, Roy's copy is a courageous fellow who says things like, "The air of freedom stirs me as I re-enter the world, ready to do God's work." The Roy-clone ends up by perishing as he kills the king-clone, and Roy awakens, none the wiser for all the drama happening around him. He ends up re-uniting with Homo and the two of them ride off on the back of an alien beast.

In contrast to some of Gilbert's other attempts at satire, this spoof of space opera works in part because he adroitly mimicks the genre's penchant for over-ripe phrases, as seen in the story's title. The chimerical idea of having clones erupt from people's knees bears a nodding resemblance to the archaic story of Dionysus's unusual birth. In this tale, the God of Ecstasy has yet to be born from his mortal mother Semele, but his father Zeus accidentally incinerates Semele, and the Father of Gods can only save Dionysus by sewing the fetus into Zeus's own thigh. Gilbert's use of "knee-wounds" to spawn clones is first and foremost a way of using gore to besmirch the squeaky-clean facade of the space opera. But it's also a visual motif of unnatural birth, which provides the most compelling image of the author's ironic domain, wherein all the rules of "serious" tales have been turned topsy turvy.

MYTHCOMICS: "DUCK FEET" (LOVE AND ROCKETS #17-18, 1986)

The serial narratives by the duo known as “Los Bros,” Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, have a better claim to the status of “art” than most of the works that get labeled "art-comics." I have to specify, though, that this is the type of art I call “the art of thematic realism,” a.k.a “play for work’s sake.” In this argument I cited Faulkner’s LIGHT IN AUGUST as a narrative primarily defined by work, but with many imaginative elements of play that gave it depth and balance. Today I'd say that the elements of play supplied the story with an underthought that served as a counterpoint to Faulkner’s overthought; i.e. his “serious theme.”

Not all of Gilbert Hernandez’s stories about Palomar—a small Mexican town inhabited by a host of bizarre, often tragicomic characters—are equally meritorious. However, the two-part story “Duck Feet”—originally serialized in two issues of the LOVE AND ROCKETS magazine—was widely hailed as an exemplary work, even by critics who had never worked for Hernandez’s publisher Fantagraphics.

For a story whose title references supernatural folklore—the widely distributed idea that magical beings, particularly witches, have animal-feet instead of human appendages—“Duck Feet” begins in a thoroughly mundane manner. Chelo, sheriff of  Palomar, rousts the local whorehouse in search of fugitive Roberto, who has recently killed his irritating grandfather. In three short pages Roberto clubs Chelo and flees to the rooftops of Palomar (a trope that seems borrowed from big-city chases, where it makes much more sense than in a small town). As a result of Chelo’s pursuit, Roberto falls to his death, but an odd detail intrudes: he dies with his head turned completely around.

Thus the story begins with violence perpetrated in defense of the community, and Roberto’s death has future consequences for Chelo and other characters, though it’s not the literal source of the ORESTES-like contagion that soon dominates Palomar. Though many of Hernandez’s regular characters make appearances in the story, the narrative revolves principally around three characters: Sheriff Chelo, local “loose girl” Tonantzin, and Guadalupe, the grade-school daughter of Luba. Luba herself, who's often a main character in the Palomar stories, is conspicuously sidelined in a sitcom-like situation worthy of Lucille Ball (I LOVE LUBA?). This places the narrative’s focus more upon Guadalupe as she tries to deal with situations brought on by irresponsible children and adults alike.

Shortly after the death of Roberto, a dark-clad woman enters Palomar. Some of the local kids believe that she’s a *bruja,* whose inhuman nature can be disclosed if one gets a look at her pedal extremities, her "duck feet." The unnamed woman’s feet are never seen, though when she has her feet washed by Chelo—who formerly held the occupation of a *banadora,*  or professional body-washer—Chelo shows no unusual reaction to what she sees. The “duck feet”  rumor, however, inspires one of the kids to steal a pouch set aside by the alleged bruja. The pouch contains a skull-- apparently that of a human baby, though one of the kids isn't entirely sure about that identification. The first chapter ends as the old woman misses her property and turns her evil eye upon Chelo.

At the beginning of Part Two, Chelo has fallen ill, as have various other citizens of Palomar, as the bruja—whose nature is no longer seriously in doubt—wanders the streets wailing for the skull of “mi hijo.” Thus does Hernandez creatively interbreed the widespread cultural trope of the contagion-bringer with that of the specifically Hispanic folktale of La Llorona, the Wailing Ghost. That said, the contagion is erratic in its effects. Guadalupe gets the sickness, even though she was only a witness when one of her play-mates stole the skull. The illness does not strike Tonantzin, and though she and Chelo have an adversarial relationship—the sheriff frequently chastising the young hottie for wearing revealing garments—Chelo deputizes the leggy beauty, which makes for some nice comic byplay.

I won’t detail all of the humorous and/ or horrific incidents that transpire while the bruja’s spectre haunts Palomar, but as noted before, Roberto’s death has consequences, inspiring his brother Gerlado to seek vengeance on Chelo. Guadalupe’s illness causes her to have weird fantasies about her mother, suggesting that Luba has something of a witchy aspect. Possibly Hernandez had this similarity in mind when he made Luba the inadvertent means by which the bruja gets back her prized skull.

If I should boil down the underthought of “Duck Feet” to an ersatz theme-statement, it might be to say that the community’s effort to remain cohesive by violence ends up bringing it close to total dissolution.  Palomar is spared the abyss, though, because once the bruja gets back her baby's skull, the contagion simply disappears and she takes her leave. The only permanent result of the witch’s visit, oddly, is that happy-go-lucky Tonantzin loses an innocence not connected with her sexuality. Tonantzin becomes politically radicalized by her contact with the cop-hating revolutionary Geraldo—an event which plants the seed for a future plotline of a tragic nature.

If the process of contagion-by-violence is the story’s underthought, what is the overthought? “Duck Feet” is not a political story, but other stories by Hernandez focus explicitly on his characters’ political beliefs. Hernandez plays it for laughs when Tonantzin fantasizes about shooting down invading U.S. soldiers. Yet her later rant against having her destiny controlled by “Libya and the U.S. and the U.S.S.R” captures a strong sense as to how denizens of the Third World feel about the cold-blooded machinations of the Great Powers.

Gilbert Hernandez’s work as a whole may not be strongest in terms of its political commentary. However, I credit him with finding an artistically resonant way of seeing political belief within the spectrum of ordinary—and even extraordinary—life-events—which is a compliment I can’t pay the next target in my line of fire.