The Palomar Series

It is rare that I pick up a classic movie or book to review unless it has somehow been re-contextualized, unless it is somehow new all over again. This could be a movie with new scenes added or an album with some good unreleased tracks thrown in. Still it is hard to find a better reworking of classic material than what Fantagraphics Books is doing with the work of the Hernandez brothers, reprinting their scattered stories in some semblance of chronological order. Not only is it easier than ever to read their collected works, but the books are also thick, durable and cheap. Personally I picked up three volumes for under $35, making for an epic read.

For this review I’ll be critiquing the Palomar series collected in Heartbreak Soup, Human Diastrophism and Beyond Palomar. This series spans several generations of inhabitants of some small fictional border town and their occasional incursions into the US. The graphic novels have been compared to the Gabriel Garcia Marquez masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude for good reason as it mixes mundane drama with dreamlike segments creating a world that is both painfully real and strangely magical. The first book starts with Chelo, who I consider the backbone of the Palomar’s huge cast. She is a tough woman, both in body and spirit. Not only does she make money bathing the cities residents but she has also delivered most of them as a midwife. Still her business starts to wane when the gorgeous Luba moves in and opens up a bathhouse of her own. And while this feud plays itself out other small dramas erupt on the sidelines, such as the love triangle between Soledad, Pipo and Manuel. As the years pass both Chelo and Luba gain a good foothold in the city and several of the children from the first book become parents by the second. One of my favorite couples in the series is Heraclio and Carmen who you also get to follow from childhood to old age. Heraclio is the intellectual of the series, an accordion teacher with an appreciation for fine arts. His wife Carmen is an orphan raised in part by Pipo and also the town’s main source of gossip and folk cures. Together they are adorable, and as the reader spends both good and bad times with these characters they really grow on you.

I do realize it is completely hopeless to try to list every character in the series, so I might be better off talking about individual storylines instead.  Heartbreak soup is a story of love lost and the complicated coming of age of the series main cast. An American in Palomar follows a photographer with national geographic ambitions as he interprets the simple life of Palomar as poverty and ignorance he can market. Human Diastrophism is perhaps one of the best though, framing a serial killer thriller in the rich world of Palomar with well earned results. Unfortunately I was not nearly as fond of Poison River, the back-story behind Luba. Perhaps it is that it lacks the series rural charm or maybe it is just a little bit too self aware for my tastes, layering too many sexual, narrative and stylistic themes to keep track of. The transsexual variety show or the mob story alone would have worked better, but every single character has just so much baggage that it feels like a chore to read more than 10 pages at a time.

Still the one thing that remains consistently amazing through the series is the art of Gilbert Hernandez. It is extremely versatile oscillating between cartoon abstraction and technical realism without taking you out of the story. In fact I think he is one of the best in the business when it comes to characterization, everyone in his cast of hundreds is instantly recognizable thanks to his grasp of facial features and subtle anatomical differences. So specific his is style for each character that you can easily recognize most of them and even intuit who they are related to within the many family trees of Palomar. Honestly I can’t wait until this book achieves required reading status and at its current price I doubt even the most starving college student would complain about having to buy a copy.