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.
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Noah: So one of the discussions we had in the roundtable with Charles Hatfield was about the use of fetishization in Hernandez’s work. And after reading this book, I have to say that I”m more than ever convinced that fetishization is just absolutely central to his comics in a way which I often find both ugly and hypocritical.
As I said before, the fetishization is sometimes worked through in terms of pin-up art; the Dan DeCarlo zaftig curves on Luba, or Pipo or Tonantzin’s perfect proportions. But I think it touches all of his female characters. The cornucopia of body types he presents (tiny Carmen, body-builder Diana, va-va-voom Doralist) or his obsession with imperfections (characters without arms, or with scarring) — there’s just a very insistent emphasis on defining people by surfaces. And I think that ties in to the way Palomar works in general; it’s very much a world of surface; you very rarely get internal monologue or a sense of what’s happening inside character’s heads. Instead, you get caricature and theatrical gesture. And there’s also, as Charles pointed out in Alternative Comics, a insistent formalism — Hernandez leaping from time to time or character to character, fracturing the narrative so that you feel it as narrative construction. The result is for me that the characters don’t have independent life; that Hernandez is pushing them about the board hither and thither for his own amusement. All the frantic insistence on interconnectedness and infidelity and the wonderful variety of people and bodies — the point seems to be “Look at this wonderful web of life!” But to me it feels cynical and dead, the characters worn flat by his obsessive need to run his hands over them.
In that sense, there’s something queasily apropos about Humberto’s statues of all the townspeople sunk beneath the lake. In “Chelo’s Burden,” one of the later stories included in the “Human Diastrophism” Fantagraphics volume, Petra demands to know how Humberto can reproduce people if they haven’t sat for him, and he says he can instantly size people up. “I have a very strong vision for beauty, Senora” he explains, while his coconspirator Augustin agrees and checks out Petra’s chest. Basically, Humberto’s artistic process involves a facile empathy in the interest of creating a world of collectible, “beautiful” fetish objects. It’s condescending…and not the less so because Hernandez is also (perhaps self-reflexively) condescending to Humberto.
