Gilbert Hernandez « The Hooded Utilitarian

“Lightning Only Strikes Twice Once, Y’Know”: Phallic Mothers, Fetishism, and Replacement in the Comics of Los Bros Hernandez (Part I)

Freud, Gilbert Hernandez, and the phallic mother

August 22, 2011
By Noah Berlatsky
Blog
237 comments

Hiroshima Tit Nepotism Summer Reading

A story of world-historical import and great human tragedy is always improved by warmed-over melodrama, poignant irony, and random fisticuffs.

January 5, 2011
By Noah Berlatsky
Blog
24 comments

Form, Fetish, and Diastrophism

In our blog roundtable on Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics there was much discussion of Gilbert Hernandez’s Human Diastrophism. At the time of the roundtable, neither Caroline Small nor I had read the entire work. So we decided to do so, and then talk about it. Page references are to the 2007 Fantagraphics edition. _______________________________________ Noah: [...]

Blog vs. Professor: On Surface Pleasures and Digging Oneself Deeper

We’re coming to the end of our multi-week roundtable on Charles Hatfield’s book Alternative Comics. Yesterday, Charles wrote a post defending Gilbert Hernandez from…well, mostly from me and Robert Stanley Martin. In this post I’m going to try to clarify my position somewhat, and also try to tie this discussion into why I thought it [...]

Gilbert Hernandez and the “Pornography” of Images

Don’t play with me, cause you’re playing with fire… I hadn’t expected that a roundtable on my book Alternative Comics would become a referendum on Gilbert Hernandez’s work. But something like that happened last week, thanks to the one-two punch of Noah and Robert and their comments about my book’s investment in Hernandez, followed by [...]

Blog vs. Professor: What’s in a Name?

Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, published in 2005, arrived at a time of immense excitement in the comics culture. The international new wave of comics had been changing the way we read and thought about comics for a good decade and were gaining an increasing institutional foothold, most notably in the cultural consolidation [...]

<i>Human Diastrophism</i> Revisited: The Penultimate Page

Human Diastrophism Revisited: The Penultimate Page

[Note: This is a blog interlude pending the publication of Matthias Wivel's discussion of Charles Hatfield's Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature] Of the comics which emerged through the independant press during the 80s, few comics have acquired as high a reputation as Gilbert Hernandez’s Human Diastrophism. The recent roundtable on Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An [...]