The Hernandez Brothers: Love, Rockets, and Alternative Comics by Enrique García

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Hernandez Brothers: Love, Rockets, and Alternative Comics by Enrique García Alicia Muñoz KEYWORDS Hernandez Brothers, Comics, Intertextuality, Latino, Parody enrique garcía. The Hernandez Brothers: Love, Rockets, and Alternative Comics. U of Pittsburgh P, 2017, 192 pp. The publication of Enrique García’s The Hernandez Brothers: Love, Rockets, and Alternative Comics provides a much-needed introductory book to the work of these established Latino comic writers. Inspired by the late 1970s/early 1980s California punk scene, Mario, Gilbert, and Jaime Hernandez introduced new aesthetic and narrative styles into the alternative comics scene. The controversial nature of their content, specifically in terms of sex and violence, and complex narrative world can make the comics difficult to digest. Through a personal anecdote about his graduate classmates’ antagonistic reactions to one of the Hernandez Brothers’ comics, Love and Rockets, García communicates the pedagogical intention behind his own book: to address the exploitative and sexualized storytelling for which the Hernandez brothers have been critiqued while recognizing their artistic narrative style and nuanced ethnic and gender representations. Focusing on Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, García explains the value of these comic artists: “I personally believe that Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez are two of the greatest Latino creators in the US because, as ethnic auteurs, they have been able to create narratives that subvert hegemony without falling into the didactic tendencies of many writers. More importantly, they have been able to avoid the ‘ghettofication’ of their subjects and to create a complex intertextuality that could only be completely understood by a reader that can decode both Latino references and the visual narratives of the Anglophone American industry” (3). García divides his study into an introduction and three chapters, the third of which is actually a transcription of an interview with the two brothers that García conducted in 2013. The interview is a valuable addition and is organized by the central topics of the book. Following the introduction and chapters 1 and 2, García includes short “Spotlight” sections that each detail and analyze a different story by the Hernandez brothers that complements previous themes. The unique format provides readers with a brief respite while expanding their familiarity with the brothers’ artistic production. Moreover, it fits with the overlapping, interwoven style of the book. The chapters are not siloed, but build on one another in such way that the reader gains confidence in their familiarity and ability to interpret the many layers of the Hernandez brothers’ works. García repeats the themes and arguments of the book with persistent signposting throughout the chapters, to the point of being at times excessive. Yet such explicit repetition is quite helpful for undergraduate readers and allows for excerpting for pedagogical purposes. Beyond providing a synopsis of the book, the introduction eloquently situates the work of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez within the context of US comic books as it highlights how the industry was shaped by the control and manipulation of the identity and physical organization of distribution spaces. Furthermore, García explains the impacts of the Comics Code Authority of the 1950s, which imposed restrictions on any content that defied national morality, such as crude violence, sex, and horror subject matter. Stunted by this code, mainstream comics largely consisted of superhero storylines set in utopian versions of the nation. In the [End Page 246] 1960s and 70s, an underground comix movement resisted through the parody and deconstruction of these conventional narratives, further infusing their work with content deemed inappropriate by the code. It is against this backdrop and influence that the Hernandez brothers’ Love and Rockets anthology emerges. García uses the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Frank D’Angelo, and Linda Hutch-eon as a theoretical framework to explain the intertextuality of the Hernandez brothers’ comics. Indebted to other American comic artists, such as Harvey Kurtzman and Robert Crumb, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez’s narratives function as complex postmodern pastiches that subvert and manipulate genre conventions through parody. To demonstrate this point, the first chapter provides an in-depth analysis of Gilbert’s “BEM” and Jaime’s “Penny Century, You’re Fired” and “Mechan-X.” García does not miss an...