Gilbert Hernandez, uno de los autores más clásicos del cómic underground, realiza su primer cómic para la línea Vertigo... y toca todos los temas que siempre le han gustado: el descubrimiento de la propia identidad, el sexo, las sectas, la vida en los suburbios de las grandes ciudades y las relaciones humanas.
Gilbert and his brother Jaime Hernández mostly publish their separate storylines together in Love And Rockets and are often referred to as 'Los Bros Hernandez'.
Gilbert Hernandez is an American cartoonist best known for the Palomar and Heartbreak Soup stories in Love and Rockets, the groundbreaking alternative comic series he created with his brothers Jaime and Mario. Raised in Oxnard, California in a lively household shaped by comics, rock music and a strong creative streak, he developed an early fascination with graphic storytelling. His influences ranged from Marvel legends Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko to the humor and clarity of Hank Ketcham and the Archie line, as well as the raw energy of the underground comix that entered his life through his brother Mario. In 1981 the brothers self-published the first issue of Love and Rockets, which quickly drew the attention of Fantagraphics Books. The series became a defining work of the independent comics movement, notable for its punk spirit, emotional depth and multiracial cast. Gilbert's Palomar stories, centered on the residents of a fictional Latin American village, combined magic realism with soap-opera intimacy and grew into an ambitious narrative cycle admired for its complex characters and bold storytelling. Works like Human Diastrophism helped solidify his reputation as one of the medium's most inventive voices. Across periods when Love and Rockets was on hiatus, Hernandez built out a parallel body of work, creating titles such as New Love, Luba, and Luba's Comics and Stories, as well as later graphic novels including Sloth and The Troublemakers. He also collaborated with Peter Bagge on the short-lived series Yeah! and continued to explore new directions in Love and Rockets: New Stories. Celebrated for his portrayal of independent women and for his distinctive blend of realism and myth, Hernandez remains a major figure in contemporary comics and a lasting influence on generations of artists.
Love and Rockets genius co-creator Gilbert Hernández's delightful silly, yet absorbing dark comedy, where an amnesiac turns up with a lot more 'skills' than the average person accumulate. I read the original Vertigo comic books. Definitely a book I want to re-read, especially since I last read it in 2013! A 7 out of 12 Three Star read. 2013 read
and in it I am reminded that in 2002 this story, Grip, was released in five separate color issues and told that a four page intro was added to give you some "explanation" or back story for the tale.
Grip is described as "genre-bending" and a "mashup" of genres. It is also described as "zany" and "mad-cap."
The subtitle is "The Strange World of Men," which, if you are a Los Hernandez Bros fan, makes you think of Luba and the many busty women he has drawn for more than thirty years in Love and Rockets and Heartbreak Soup stories, as in girl crazy men, but that is not quite it. There are one or two shapely women in this story--it's a Hernandez story, there has to be--and the women are typically the strongest and most interesting characters in the story. But this story is not primarily about men.
This is a suspense story, a zombie story, a sci fi story, a horror story. In it you are supposed to be "gripped" with fear, with passion, and so on. Does it work? I don't know. Not gripping. For me, it is just too crazy. Maybe if you read it in an altered state. I couldn't follow it very well, and in re-reading, just thought it was too strange to call it "zany." It's the Hernandez boys, crazy genre stuff is what they do as a kind of "side" project to their more realistic worlds in Palomar and LA.
I love the Heartbreak Soup stories. I love the Love and Rockets stories. They're reality based, with a little magical realism thrown in. They're edgy and rich with pathos and good humor. But I don't much like the sci fi stuff either of them do. I acknowledge their interest in genre, and their reaching out to fellow comics fans who are interested in various genres.
Brubaker and Phillips do genre mashups with usually great success. And their stories can indeed be gripping. But Grip is not gripping. It is more exasperating and silly than gripping. Not boring, never boring, but crazy. And not cool crazy, just baffling most of the time.
I only just recently began to see the worth of Beto's stories of Fritz's pulp movies, I get them as campy and also genre-honoring and a tribute to like-minded fifties and sixties films and comics. Things they grew up with.
But this? I dunno. Talk me into it. The art is always great, as always, and interesting, and the dialogue and characters are always pretty interesting, and I keep turning the pages, sometimes amused by the action, the gun play, the bizarre interactions, but in the service of what story? It's puzzling to me. Instead, give me Fritz and Luba and their world every time.
Grip has a lot of things in common w/the Daniel Clowes canon visually and thematically. Which is a good thing because that's about the only good part of this work. Other than solid, if not idiosyncratic, artwork, there's nothing else particularly redeemable about Grip: The Strange World of Men.
A lot of zaniness is tossed into an already over-boiling pot frothing with thematic resemblances to American soaps and screwball comedy films. While the latter continually amuse us with memorable characters and coherent plots, Grip has little in the way of either. Alongside these overzealous helpings of thematic insertions, an unnecessary helping of Science-Fiction (a la the Astounding pulps of the '30s) was unceremoniously tossed in. With clear allusions to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, this additive should have been left on the shelf.
While a certain excess of thematic elements should have been withheld in order to focus on cohesion and focus, so too does the comic suffer from an overwhelming plethora of characters. Although the book opens with a clear main character, he's quickly swept up into a cacaphonic whirlwind of conflicts and peoples, into which he's lost just as quickly as he was inserted. Much like another zany work I reviewed recently a lot of threads are tossed around that don't really coalesce into anything. Only the most drug-addled conspiracy theorist (thumbtacks, cork-board, newspaper clippings and all) would be able to connect the (non-) existent dots in Grip.
"So Mr. Judge," what's the verdict?
"For crimes against cohesion, decency, and a besmirchment of Daniel Clowe's excellence, the jury (of Goodreads) hereby finds Gilbert Hernandez guilty as charged!
"Delirante y entretenido. Eso sí, espero que llegando al final, varias cosas terminen de cobrar sentido." Dije antes de terminarlo. Al final, las cosas cobraron sentido nomás. Y el viaje hasta ese momento fue muy entretenido, original y delirante. Pero, al menos en una primera vuelta, falla un poco en lograr una lectura cómoda y fluida. Quizás esa sea la intención del autor, pero sigue sin cerrarme que recién se entienda cabalmente el gran plot cuando se llega al final. Estoy casi seguro de que en una segunda vuelta se gane una estrellita más, porque tiene todos los elementos para llegar a un 8 cómodo: buenos personajes, buenos dibujos, buen hilo conductor, buena expresividad (pese a su onda caricaturesca, los personajes parecen actores, mucho más que los de otros dibujantes con estilos más "realistas") y un buen armado de página general. El potencial está ahí, quizás me falta a mí saber despertarlo. Evidentemente me gustó lo suficiente como para hacerme fan del autor con sólo esta historia leída (sin contar algunos capítulos de Birdland que leí medio a escondidas en mi adolescencia). Un poroto de plata para Beto.
Oh boy...what can you say about this book? I first read Grip years ago, in serial form (coming out through Vertigo). I even wrote about this in an essay I published on Gilbert Hernandez's methods of serialization. It had been a long time since I last read this, and I forgot how whacked out this story actually is. I'm glad that they have finally collected the entire series in book form. However, I wish they had reproduced it in color, as we have in the original series. Our discussion of it on The Comics Alternative can be found at http://comicsalternative.com/episode-....
Gilbert's Heartbreak Soup stories are some of my favorite things ever, but when he heads into the surreal... I want to go with him, but the stories often don't work for me.
Grip is - kind of - an exception. I mean, that shit was crazy, and if sense or meaning is what you're looking for, put the book down and move along. But Grip has a blend of crazy pulp verve and utterly ridiculous dialogue that I kind of dug. It reminded me of Repo Man in a way, which is maybe faint praise but there you have it.
¡Vaya ida de olla maravillosa de Beto Hernández. Y en color! La película Under The Silver Lake bebe de este cómic, pero sin enanas sexies. Mira Beto, a ver si algún día tiene usted la capacidad de decepcionarme
Good old "Heel-Beer-Toe" has interspersed some fun and great books throughout his "soap-opera fantasy" oeuvre but none are both.
This lip-giggler belongs to the top tier of the former since he restrains his abstractions enough to let the of humor, in the words AND the art, overcome the bizarre. He predictably uses one of his worn-out and tiring signatures, the comically-obese breasts, but makes them SEEM fresh because they are (for once) funny and interestingly pertinent to the story.
The latter are sad, discomforting, dark and/or disturbing but none-the-less brilliant. My favorite is "Chance In Hell" which is all four of those.
I'm not going to pretend I comprehended enough detail/reference/intention/message of this book to qualify as understanding₁ but I heartily enjoyed its zaniness and the keenly-represented focus on romance which was well-distributed, heart-warming and sometimes hilarious!
0⁰º°¡°º⁰0≈I ESPECIALLY ADORED the personalities, relationship dynamic and quirky rendering of the "balance-advantaged" couple≈0⁰º°!°º⁰0
₁ = Anyone who says that they understand the others of which I speak, which you can identify by the angry confusion you were burdened with, is one of those fluffy-brained fart-lipped popinjays who think that pretending more than surface knowledge of a book written by a "big name" award literary respect. The problem is that they are correct more often than not if they have prior (deserved or not) literary ethos. Ask them your questions on the spot and if their response makes sense to you then it's not one of the ones I speak of.
->Either way, whatever insight (not to be confused with comprehension) is worth hearing and may even be impressive. OPEN DIALOGUE with people about books mutually read -no matter "where you stand" on them- don't just read reviews!
I got this book randomly on a complete whim. Never heard of the author or any of their books. I was looking for a comic that was not a part of any series and that wasn't about superheroes. As such, I had basically zero expectations.
Which means I'm not disappointed, just really, really puzzled.
The blurb at the back of the book mentions search for the protagonist's true identity, criminal gangs, crime fighters, swapping skins and bizarre powers.
And yeah, the book has all that. This could have been something dark and weird and gritty and sexy like Frank Miller's Sin City, and I *think* that's what it's going for. But it falls way too short in every aspect. All the ingredients are there, but they're not really combined in a way that makes any sense.
Apologies for the pun, but the book completely failed to grip me. It starts with an amnesiac so you know things are going to be confusing, but the first quarter dialed that up to eleven without introducing anything that would actually pique an interest.
I mean, other than the weak "surely, this all must be going somewhere?" which did keep me going however weakly. Characters are introduced, mysteries occur, weird stuff happens, but none of it really seems to bring anything to the fore.
Add a pretty weak dialogue, diverse characters that somehow amazingly fail to evoke any intrigue and an extremely heavy-handed exposition (when it finally comes) and you're left with something that's just completely bland. The book is quite short -- if it were much longer than this, I would have just dropped it.
But since I didn't, I can say that the eventual revelations, the inevitable circling back and the overall resolution left me absolutely lukewarm. Not angry, sad or really feeling anything at all.
In this one instance, I think you can judge the book by its cover (and title).
An expectedly gonzo, non-Love and Rockets offering from Gilbert Hernández that focuses on an amnesiac man whose skin and skinless body start having separate existences. There's also a secret government facility, a stripper/bouncer duo, organized crime, mystery women, and scads of paranormality. It's a complete work that makes sense (which is not always true of a Gilbert Hernández story), but it felt slight with little emotional impact. If anything, it's more like a crime caper novel told with the Hernández aesthetic, so you get a combination of silly and creepy.
I re-red this to see if I want to keep it in my collection, and I decided not to.
In a lifetime filled with much reading--with many hundreds, probably thousands, of tales textual and graphical--this is one of the strangest stories I've ever encountered. I love Gilbert Hernández' artwork, and it is excellent here as well, but I just can't figure out what the hell is going on in Grip: The Strange World Of Men. There are some cool characters in Grip, and some passages are darkly funny. And while it is baffling, it is not utterly incomprehensible. I did enjoy it on some level. Nonetheless, I couldn't get enough of a grip on the story (*heh*) to fully embrace the book.
One of Gilbert's more bizarre books, and if you have read Gilbert's work before, you know that is saying a lot! The plot is just straight up bonkers with Messianic figures, weird crime fighting (or possibly causing) groups, strippers, a drawf couple, and more! It's pretty weird. I think the best part of the book is that it just shows a very talented artist doing whatever he wants and pushing his story to the very limits.
Strange, surreal, totally bizarre. I'm not sure if this was originally meant to be a Fritz B movie, but it definitely reads as such. Heavy on the scifi and the unexplained. While Fritz is not in it, GH couldn't seem to resist writing in another large breasted woman, almost as if Fritz had been the original intended actress, but declined to participate citing retirement. At the same time, the story also strangely echos GH's True Love characters, up to and including Venus.
By far one of the craziest things I have ever read!! However, I love surreal, wacked out plots and zany dialogue. This whole book was so much fun and I loved it!!
One strange book. I was surprised to find this is one of the top graphic novel/alternative cartoonists! He definitely posesses a superb sense of classic cartoon stylizing. Everything is hyper-realisitic if contorted and spatially disjointed, as comics generally are, but the narrative is no ordinary progression.It consists of a phantasmagoria of classic and crass comic-book tropes parading (think lots of big busts, sunglasses and cool cookies, big-faced kids) through physical and dimensional impossibility and horror beyond possibility. Many will find this incomprehensible (unless I no longer understand people's capacities). I find it all suggesting that real experience, especially uncomfortable reality, is rendered nonexistent. Parallels with our blurred media and entertainment maybe? Grip's whole journey seems to be to prove that all that happens along the way as well the main character himself, does not exist and intends not to, and that is truly macabre!
When Grip first came out I bought the entire series because it provided a rare glimpse to read a full-length Beto Hernandez work in color. Unfortunately this compilation is in black and white, and oddly enough something gets lost in the translation. I think the color gave the story some much-needed extra dimension.
Grip is a hard story to describe other than its about an other-worldly civilization that escapes destruction by transporting themselves to planet Earth. There were a lot of surrealistic touches to the story, in fact it became so dazzlingly confusing by the end that it lost a star for its absurd density.
The story featured a little girl with a powerful retina, a dwarf couple, skin swapping, Abraham Lincoln paintings on every page, and a bunch of other stuff that may enhance the story if someone can explain it all to us. It's a little too much oddness for one man.
Try though I might, I just have not been able to get excited about some of these compilations of Beto's work that have been published the past few years. The art is interesting, make no mistake, but the story not so much - the mish-mash of elements from different genres comes off as more scatterbrained than purposeful.
via NYPL - A curious mystery thriller with supernatural/mystical reality overtones. It's intriguing, good art, compelling mix of characters, twisted plot and layered storytelling require attention. Worth a look, but not among Beto's more essential works.
Publicado en la Colección Vertigo #266. Edición española que traduce la miniserie Grip. En inglés no sería recopilado hasta diez años después, el año 2014.