Love From the Shadows

By Gilbert Hernandez (Fantagraphic Books, $19.99).

Gilbert Hernandez has done more to articulate the social dilemmas of large-breasted Hispanic women and nerdy space aliens that any other writer I can think of. One half of the legendary brother combo who created the indie-pioneering Love and Rocket comic book, Gilbert is much more prolific than his brother Jaime, having ventured solo in mainstream comics series, graphic novels, even a wacky public access sci-fi TV series.

 

Much more than Jaime’s more grounded, more realistically drawn social dramas, Gilbert uncovers galactic conspiracies, massive frauds against family members, wild flights of imagination which alter the universes of key ongoing characters, then alter them again, then bring them back to earth as if nothing had really happened.

But the more he exaggerates the real world, the more mystical his stuff becomes. In his erotic series Birdland, characters had flashes of cosmic understanding in the midst of orgasms, only to completely forget the revelations immediately afterwards. In his Love and Rockets stories, characters hold lifelong obsessions that result in massive physical changes and major psychic obstacles. The narratives are propelled more by the forces of the universe than by any plot points.

Love From the Shadows is the third in a series of hardcover graphic novels Hernandez has published since 2007 through Fantagraphics (the longtime publisher of Love and Rockets, the acclaimed indie comic Gilbert does with his brother Jaime). There’s a related volume, Speak of the Devil, which came out via Dark Horse Comics in 2009. The main trilogy stars Rosaldo Martinez, nicknamed Fritz for her resemblance to the knock-out aunt of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy. Fritz has had a long history in the Hernandez canon. She was in a devastating codependent S&M relationship with a self-help guru. She has been visited by space aliens on numerous occasions. She has been a B-movie goddess and a psychiatrist. Hernandez has described these latest adventures as adaptations of the movies in which Fritz has appeared, then clarified that these are not style parodies or meant to show any specific cinematic influence. In fact, they’re elaborate, complex, open-ended psychodramas which, thanks to the comics medium which Hernandez has long since mastered, add a dreamlike and ever-mutating quality which refreshingly distorts and expands any attempt at a conventional narrative. Some panels of Love from the Shadows are hazy and twilit and ruled by nature, others are uncomfortably confining. There are casual sidewalk dialogues and suspenseful journeys into caves. There are intimately familiar characters and maddeningly distant ones. There’s magic.

You can gobble up a Hernandez story in no time, leaving you wanting more. Luckily, he’s one of the most prolific artist/writers in the indie comics realm, so there’s always more to scarf down. Fritz, last seen shuddering tensely on street corners, then vanishing naked into a yawning chasm, may have been betrayed once again by those she’d come to trust, but she will live to love another day.