#26. Luba in America (Vol. 1 of the Luba Trilogy), by Gilbert Hernandez
#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.
Some background: Luba has been a central anchoring character of Gilbert's comics since he began working on Love & Rockets. His early strips were set in Palomar, a small town in Central America, where sexy young mother Luba first appeared as a bañadora (a professional bath-giver). Later she opened the town's first and only movie theater, and still later served for a time as alcaldesa (mayor). Luba is also sort of an earth-mother figure: although she does not have much in the way of maternal instinct, nor is she particularly responsible toward other people, she likes fun and men, and was devastatingly sexy in her youth (she had and still has enormous, multiple-G-sized breasts) and also inconveniently fertile. In consequence, she has had 8 children with a variety of fathers, most of whom were raised largely by Luba's grumpy, intellectual, long-suffering cousin Ofelia, who also raised the orphaned Luba herself from childhood.
Luba is half Indian, though she doesn't seem to feel any cultural affiliation for the Indians (unlike some other denizens of Palomar). In her youth she was involved, as the teenage bride of a connected musician, with some complex political, economic and criminal networks, none of which she understood very clearly at the time. She has little formal education but is resourceful and self-sufficient (Gilbert often shows her carrying a hammer, as a kind of attribute or symbol). Luba's now greying, with wrinkles around her eyes and her massive chest no longer so buoyant; we're told she's "past forty" but she looks at least in her fifties to me (although perhaps this is partly just the effect of spending one's life in a tropical zone, working hard and often outdoors.) She is also married to Khamo, one of her first lovers, whose beautiful face and body were devastated in a fire and who is the biological father of four of her seven living children (and a caring papa to all the children who have not yet left home), and she has recently been reunited with her two unknown half-sisters in the U.S., Rosalba (Fritz) and Petra, born to their mother Maria, who immigrated after abandoning Luba.
(Smells like melodrama? It is, somewhat. It's not all over the top -- some of it is very realistic and humanistic. But that element, and the tonal balance -- or imbalance -- with the story's human scale, is definitely a characteristic of Gilbert H.'s work.)
So. When this chunk of story begins, Luba has recently come to the United States -- I think she's moved permanently to Southern California, where she bought a house and started a storefront immigration agency, but I'm not totally sure on the geography of all this. The house, where Luba, Ofelia, and the four younger children live, was paid for by Doralís, an older daughter who is currently the star of a Spanish-language kids' TV show produced by Pipo, another émigrée from Palomar to L.A.
Gilbert's storytelling style is interesting, even curious: A lot unfolds in short vignettes, sometimes no more than a page long; it skips around a lot among characters, through time and through space. Yet there are overarching plot elements unfolding, and character arcs being developed through flashback as well as in "real time." The central motivating thrust of this volume is that Luba is trying to get her husband Khamo to be allowed to immigrate to the U.S., to join her and their children. But Khamo is implicated in a drug deal that went bad a number of years ago, so Luba finds herself obliged to seek out shadowy connections and negotiate with police and criminals alike to find out what she will have to do to keep her family united and safe.
Many of the shorter stories focus on slice-of-life stories about Venus, a ten-year-old niece of Luba's (the daughter of Petra), who is pretty, precocious, comic-book-loving, and somewhat spoiled (and a very likable child character). Venus writes letters about her life in L.A. to her cousin Casimira, one of Luba's daughters; in the background of these stories, discord is brewing between Petra and her husband/Venus' stepdad, triggered in large part by Petra's wandering eye. Other stories involve Venus in Fellini-esque adventures with Sergio, Pipo's son and an international fútbol [soccer] star; while others take us onto the set of Doralís and Pipo's show, where Doralís is giving Pipo hives over her desire to come out a a lesbian on the air. (An initiative supported by Doralís' lesbian older sister Maricela, but opposed on practical grounds by nearly everyone who wants the show to continue to make money.)
Other plot elements follow Fritz, Petra, and their (now-deceased) mother Maria into the past, exploring the semi-supernatural "family thing" -- a kind of spell of protection over their entire family, or at least the female members, which has been kept in effect both by a curious stone or wooden fetish, and by an "old man" who has acted as a kind of super-bodyguard. Still others get into the unmarried Fritz's multiple love affairs: with married men, with a supermodel, with Sergio the soccer star, at fetish clubs; and those of Pipo (who likes men with very large penises, and also has a bad crush on Fritz). And others follow Guadalupe -- another Luba daughter, and apparently the only heterosexual sibling -- and her husband and son. (The husband is Pipo's ex, and was Sergio's stepfather. Sergio is in love with Guadalupe. IT'S REALLY VERY TANGLED UP.)
Oh, and then there's some guy called Fortunato, with curly blond hair, who has sex magic. All women will sleep with him. ALL OF THEM. ALLLL.
That's about it for this volume. Moving on now to the next one, where we will see whether the story is still deftly enough woven for me not to get uncomfortable with all the Crumb-esque butts and thighs and gigantic racks and start feeling like it's crossed the line from "sexually charged storytelling" to "J.O. material with an excuse."
[Tags I wish I could add: a: hernandez gilbert, i: hernandez gilbert, magic realism, children [*not* "children's books"], california, disability]
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.
Some background: Luba has been a central anchoring character of Gilbert's comics since he began working on Love & Rockets. His early strips were set in Palomar, a small town in Central America, where sexy young mother Luba first appeared as a bañadora (a professional bath-giver). Later she opened the town's first and only movie theater, and still later served for a time as alcaldesa (mayor). Luba is also sort of an earth-mother figure: although she does not have much in the way of maternal instinct, nor is she particularly responsible toward other people, she likes fun and men, and was devastatingly sexy in her youth (she had and still has enormous, multiple-G-sized breasts) and also inconveniently fertile. In consequence, she has had 8 children with a variety of fathers, most of whom were raised largely by Luba's grumpy, intellectual, long-suffering cousin Ofelia, who also raised the orphaned Luba herself from childhood.
Luba is half Indian, though she doesn't seem to feel any cultural affiliation for the Indians (unlike some other denizens of Palomar). In her youth she was involved, as the teenage bride of a connected musician, with some complex political, economic and criminal networks, none of which she understood very clearly at the time. She has little formal education but is resourceful and self-sufficient (Gilbert often shows her carrying a hammer, as a kind of attribute or symbol). Luba's now greying, with wrinkles around her eyes and her massive chest no longer so buoyant; we're told she's "past forty" but she looks at least in her fifties to me (although perhaps this is partly just the effect of spending one's life in a tropical zone, working hard and often outdoors.) She is also married to Khamo, one of her first lovers, whose beautiful face and body were devastated in a fire and who is the biological father of four of her seven living children (and a caring papa to all the children who have not yet left home), and she has recently been reunited with her two unknown half-sisters in the U.S., Rosalba (Fritz) and Petra, born to their mother Maria, who immigrated after abandoning Luba.
(Smells like melodrama? It is, somewhat. It's not all over the top -- some of it is very realistic and humanistic. But that element, and the tonal balance -- or imbalance -- with the story's human scale, is definitely a characteristic of Gilbert H.'s work.)
So. When this chunk of story begins, Luba has recently come to the United States -- I think she's moved permanently to Southern California, where she bought a house and started a storefront immigration agency, but I'm not totally sure on the geography of all this. The house, where Luba, Ofelia, and the four younger children live, was paid for by Doralís, an older daughter who is currently the star of a Spanish-language kids' TV show produced by Pipo, another émigrée from Palomar to L.A.
Gilbert's storytelling style is interesting, even curious: A lot unfolds in short vignettes, sometimes no more than a page long; it skips around a lot among characters, through time and through space. Yet there are overarching plot elements unfolding, and character arcs being developed through flashback as well as in "real time." The central motivating thrust of this volume is that Luba is trying to get her husband Khamo to be allowed to immigrate to the U.S., to join her and their children. But Khamo is implicated in a drug deal that went bad a number of years ago, so Luba finds herself obliged to seek out shadowy connections and negotiate with police and criminals alike to find out what she will have to do to keep her family united and safe.
Many of the shorter stories focus on slice-of-life stories about Venus, a ten-year-old niece of Luba's (the daughter of Petra), who is pretty, precocious, comic-book-loving, and somewhat spoiled (and a very likable child character). Venus writes letters about her life in L.A. to her cousin Casimira, one of Luba's daughters; in the background of these stories, discord is brewing between Petra and her husband/Venus' stepdad, triggered in large part by Petra's wandering eye. Other stories involve Venus in Fellini-esque adventures with Sergio, Pipo's son and an international fútbol [soccer] star; while others take us onto the set of Doralís and Pipo's show, where Doralís is giving Pipo hives over her desire to come out a a lesbian on the air. (An initiative supported by Doralís' lesbian older sister Maricela, but opposed on practical grounds by nearly everyone who wants the show to continue to make money.)
Other plot elements follow Fritz, Petra, and their (now-deceased) mother Maria into the past, exploring the semi-supernatural "family thing" -- a kind of spell of protection over their entire family, or at least the female members, which has been kept in effect both by a curious stone or wooden fetish, and by an "old man" who has acted as a kind of super-bodyguard. Still others get into the unmarried Fritz's multiple love affairs: with married men, with a supermodel, with Sergio the soccer star, at fetish clubs; and those of Pipo (who likes men with very large penises, and also has a bad crush on Fritz). And others follow Guadalupe -- another Luba daughter, and apparently the only heterosexual sibling -- and her husband and son. (The husband is Pipo's ex, and was Sergio's stepfather. Sergio is in love with Guadalupe. IT'S REALLY VERY TANGLED UP.)
Oh, and then there's some guy called Fortunato, with curly blond hair, who has sex magic. All women will sleep with him. ALL OF THEM. ALLLL.
That's about it for this volume. Moving on now to the next one, where we will see whether the story is still deftly enough woven for me not to get uncomfortable with all the Crumb-esque butts and thighs and gigantic racks and start feeling like it's crossed the line from "sexually charged storytelling" to "J.O. material with an excuse."
[Tags I wish I could add: a: hernandez gilbert, i: hernandez gilbert, magic realism, children [*not* "children's books"], california, disability]