This is what happens when Techland goes to the comic book store: we end up talking about what we picked up. This week, Douglas Wolk, Evan Narcisse, Mike Williams, Lev Grossman and Graeme McMillan discuss Love & Rockets: New Stories, vol. 3 and X-23 #1.
LEV: I read the first story [in Love & Rockets: New Stories vol. 3]. I WANT TO UN-READ IT NOW PLEASE.
GRAEME: I think that’s a fair appraisal of a lot of Gilbert Hernandez’s stories, to be honest. Or, at least, his “fictional Fritz movies”.
MIKE: Wow, I wasn’t ready for that.
LEV: I’m out. I can’t read any more of that.
DOUGLAS: And you guys play how many first-person shooters?
GRAEME: I forget about that whole “First-person pedophile alien shooters and by shooters I mean with my penis” thing ALL THE TIME. That said, the Jaime stuff this issue is spectacular.
DOUGLAS: Y’all are lucky I didn’t ask you to read Prison Pit.
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GRAEME: It’s actually kind of funny, the disconnect between the Gilbert and Jaime stories – especially in this issue, as both seem weirdly connected, in some way (both provide stories with father/daughter themes, both have moments that are surprisingly violent), but miles away from each other in almost every way. When it comes to the Hernandez Bros., I’ve always been Team Jaime… Not just because his artwork is way more pleasing to my eye – This issue, how beautiful is “The Love Bunglers”? Just look at how simple it looks, but how perfectly he captures Ray as he has dinner with Maggie, it’s so incredibly good – but because his writing is a lot more subtle, and interested in the small, subtle things, that Gilbert’s, if that makes sense. It feels as if, increasingly, Gilbert is working more and more from his fetishes and desire to… shock, maybe? Or do something “different,” for better or worse. But it leaves me cold. I didn’t find Gilbert’s contributions shocking or particularly distasteful, just oddly desperate and disjointed, which I feel more and more with his recent stuff. Jaime’s work, I could read forever and always want some more, but the more I see of Gilbert these days, the more I think I’ve seen enough.
DOUGLAS: I’m both a Jaimeist and a Gilbertist, but right now I kind of feel like Gilbert’s work is going through the third of its transitional phases. The first one was at the beginning of L&R–“BEM” and the Errata Stigmata stuff, before he hit a groove with the Palomar stories that built into “Love & Rockets X” and “Poison River”; the second was the exploratory and experimental pieces in the final issues of the first L&R series and the New Love era, which turned into the (I think) even higher peaks in Luba and High Soft Lisp. I gather that he’s been producing way more material than can fit into Love & Rockets proper, and has substituted stories at some point in production at least once–if I’m remembering correctly, one of the initial stories he drew for this issue was an all-dialogue thing that was replaced by “Killer/Sad Girl/Star,” and is actually going to be running in next year’s issue…
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And I do really like the fact that Gilbert is trying his damnedest to push away from the “respectable,” “literary” stuff he’s got a reputation for, and not to repeat himself. He’s always had a taste for stories and devices that are trashy and low-budget and vivid. When that works out, we get things like Speak of the Devil, which I liked a hell of a lot (one of my friends says it’s her favorite comic ever). When it doesn’t work out, we get… “Scarlet by Starlight,” which reminds me that when you set out to write a deliberately weak plot you tend to end up with a weak plot (it’s supposed to be a grade-Z sci-fi soft-porn movie, but still). Plus Gilbert has noted that it and last issue’s “Hypnotwist” “will be later collected together as a ‘double feature’ with added pages of pretty strong sex.” Oh boy.
GRAEME: Maybe that’ll make “Scarlet by Starlight” seem less… gratuitous? Perhaps? I get that he’s trying to be purposefully lowbrow and everything, and I’m sure there’s an audience for it somewhere – Although I can’t help but feel that the audience for it would prefer that Gilbert drew more like Adam Hughes or someone similarly glossy and cheesecakey – but it just feels very out of place next to Jaime’s stuff, and not in a “Hmm, interesting contrast” way.
DOUGLAS: Jaime’s stuff this issue, on the other hand, is totally great. I don’t even know if Calvin Chascarrillo has been mentioned before or if he’s a continuity implant, but the story is just one emotional gut-punch after another. (Rereading it, a lot more pieces fall into place–that scene where Maggie hands Calvin a banana and tells him he can’t stick around is a killer. The guy’s spent his entire life destroying himself trying to keep his sister safe.) So many amazing details–the crying moon over Maggie’s apartments, her offhanded admission to Ray that she’d asked Reno first, little Perla’s historically accurate rainbow shirt, the winking mechanic on the “Career Days” parade float, Nacho freaking out after his daughter’s been talking to his mistress… plus I don’t think I’ve ever before seen a Gary Stu artist character who makes much, much worse art than his creator, you know?
EVAN: I’m very fuzzy on my L&R characters and continuity. But the thing I’ve always appreciated with the serials the Bros. have told over the years is that you can pretty much enjoy the stories as discrete entities.
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I liked Gilbert’s first sci-fi story–”the movie” of “Scarlet by Starlight”–a lot more before the sex actually happened on panel. When it was just tension and innuendos, the threat of threshold-crossing was part of the enjoyment. Once the graphic stuff started happening, it felt like all he could do was escalate the blood and shtupping. That said, I’ve always like the way Gilbert mixes camp and sex and genre fiction tropes. He kinda doesn’t privilege any of them and flattens them into these really surreal yet grounded tableaus. When he gets the balance wrong–as I felt “Killer*Sad Girl*Star” did–the work seems to be just more self-indulgent of his predilections.
Jaime’s stuff has always struck me as more naturalistic, with such great linework and rhythm. His art style lives on the border of finely rendered and cartoony, and the characters seem much more rounded for it. The furtive slip of the banana at the end of the first part of “Love Bunglers” was just so quiet and perfect. And the sense of community in the “Browntown” story felt really rich. In another writer’s hands, all of the hormones and angst would just be bad melodrama. But Jaime makes it feel universal and relatable. And it all makes the act of violence in “Browntown” all the more painful.
MIKE: I am a first-time reader of Love and Rockets (despite the fact that I’m reasonably sure that I own a volume somewhere in my stacks) and I didn’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t this. I guess I thought this was going to be some Napoleon Dynamite-ish small-town awkward love story? Does that make sense? Of course I was thrown unapologetically into this bizarre Hanna-Barbera neckerchief space drama and I had to adjust quickly.
I had no idea, and it’s still not clear to me now, if these stories (especially “Scarlet by Starlight”) are part of a larger continuity. I just sort of accepted that gears were going to switch fast around here and I should just sit back and go for the ride. And then some new panel featuring sodomy would pop up and I’d have to make sure I still wanted to turn pages.
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Having said all that, I think I’m in agreement with the club about enjoying “Browntown” and “Bunglers” more. I wasn’t quite sure if Gilbert’s stories were supposed to be satirical commentary or not. And if they were satire, what were they lampooning?
It was all interesting enough, however, to make me want to go out and get volumes one and two. There is a one and two right?
DOUGLAS: There are indeed two earlier issues of this version–this is actually the third Love & Rockets series. (The first one was 50 magazine-sized issues, the second was 20 comics-sized issues.) I wrote a “where to start” piece here a few months ago!
And yes, the stories are part of a larger continuity… sort of. Jaime’s “Browntown” and “The Love Bunglers” are part of the great big story of Maggie Chascarrillo’s life that he’s been doing since the beginning of the series–45-year-old Maggie in “The Love Bunglers” is the same character as 9-and-11-year-old Perla in “Browntown.”
Gilbert’s stuff is a little more complicated. “Scarlet by Starlight” is an adaptation of a movie in which his B-movie actress character Fritz appeared. Dora a.k.a. “Killer,” from “Killer/Sad Girl/Star,” is the granddaughter of Fritz’s half-sister Luba, the protagonist of a lot of Gilbert’s stories from L&R volume 1.
DOUGLAS: Speaking of comics involving briefly glimpsed chess games, here’s X-23 #1!
First order of business for a first issue: make me care. The point is that Laura wants to be regarded as a real live person and not a soulless killing machine, right? OK, that’s clear. But it gets hammered in with a long conversation with Storm, then a conversation with Wolverine, then a Scott-and-Emma scene, then a bunch of “Laura’s actually not socializing very well” sequences, plus an introductory fantasy sequence that seems tacked on to establish that this is a tie-in to Wolverine’s adventures in Hell, and a closing sequence that comes out of nowhere and has no context at all. I have a sense of the one-dimensional thing she’s trying to get away from, but not what she’s trying to move toward, or why she bothers hanging out with the X-Men at all–and I still haven’t been shown why I should care.
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Also, I understand why it’d make sense for the backup “history of X-23” piece to be written in Wolverine’s voice, but “using the find/replace function to replace every occurrence of ‘and” with a-n-apostrophe” is not the same thing as “writing in Wolverine’s voice.” Plus there’s now a Wolverine line at Marvel? I suppose if he’s appearing in 19 titles a month, that exists de facto, but it still seems like a bad idea for reasons I can’t quite articulate.
MIKE: OK, here is my official apology for recommending X-23!
And by that I mean that I actually had faith in X-23 as a viable character. This young clone of Logan had some stories in her–I was sure of it. It’s clear now that every time she steps into a lead role of any kind someone is going to have to overdo her anti-social characteristics and possibly even bring up the ridiculous ‘trigger scent” story.
I guess the story I’d like to read would be the Logan family reunion. Or, more specifically, it would be her, Logan and Daken as the sole members of X-Force. Now that would be fun. Watching X try to fit in with the New Mutants (or any team really) is not what I’m signed up for. If I ever see X as a regular member of any of the Avengers teams out there I’m not going to be happy.
As for the future of this ongoing series, I might give it a second issue to turn it all around, but this was basically the complete opposite of what I wanted so far. In the meantime I will go and watch more gameplay videos of X in the new Marvel vs Capcom 3 game. (http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=28350)
GRAEME: My problem with X23 was more along the lines of “Please stop talking about all of these comics that I haven’t read before.” It felt like this wasn’t a story at all, but a place to reference lots of other stories, instead – Laura was part of X-Force: Go read their comic! Wolverine may or may not be in hell: Go read his comic! And so on. I may have been looking deeper than was intended by the creators, but I actually did enjoy the fact that it was the other female characters in the book who seemed to be the only ones who identified Laura as a person in her own right, as opposed to a weapon/girlfriend/thing to pity. If the book suddenly turned into something about gender politics within the X-Universe, that’d be an interesting direction that I’d want to read more of, but that’s very, very unlikely to actually happen, sadly.
I don’t know – I don’t think I could actually call this a “bad comic,” because it seemed so slight. It didn’t even provoke enough reaction in me to think it was bad, instead, it just felt like a continuity plug-in for an audience that I am definitely not a part of.
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(I thought that the back-up with Wolverine narration was a good idea, but done very badly – Firstly, if it’s supposed to be Wolverine narrating, actually saying that at some point would’ve been useful. Secondly, holy CRAP, but the character’s had a ridiculous history already. I actually felt less connected or interested in her the more I found out about her. Surely there was a better way to tell her story?)
EVAN: I liked this issue of X-23 more than I was expecting to. I mean, it was drawn well and the dialogue wasn’t terrible. Liu showed an understanding of the characters’ inter-relations and of Laura’s existential plight.
But nothing in here makes me want to care. I felt like I saw all of this with Logan 25 years ago, or however long it was. The big difference here is that Laura’s a lot younger and that she’s a girl. The fact that Cyclops is just as culpable in her weaponization as the bad guys were just doesn’t matter much. And I agree with Mike: unless all the Wolverine characters are playing off each other, they’re far less interesting in their own comics. Logan’s repentant, Daken’s a schemer, Laura’s the girl interrupted. I almost feel like you NEED to throw them together. But, inevitably, such a storyline would come with all the continuity baggage that deadens the proceedings in this issue.