| May/June 2006 |
by Frederick Luis Aldama
Diversity in comic books is here to stay, a recent article in
The New York Times suggests (May 28, 2006: AR 25). It would seem this hails good tidings for Latinos long absent from the usual mainstream fare. Tejano Jaime Reyes is DC's new Blue Beetle, a character whose title comic sold over 50,000 copies in its first run in April 2006. Mixed Puerto Rican/Mexican character Anya Corazon continues the matrilineal combat duties as a Spider Hunter who battles it out with the Sisterhood of the WASP in Marvel's 2005Araña. On the not-so-distant horizon lies Marvel's revivedWhite Tiger as a street smart, gutsy Latina. With Chicano Adam de la Peña on board, Cartoon Network'sMinoriteam features a deliberately supersized sombrero-wearing Latino, El Jefe, who fights evil with his galactic black hole-sucking leafblower. And this is only to mention a few at the tip of the mainstream iceberg. There are many other Latino comic book creations by independents who have moved into the limelight: Frank Espinosa's double Eisner nominatedRocketo; Oakland-based Chicano author ofPablo's Inferno; Rhode Montijo's comic-book inspired Simon & Schuster publicationCloud Boy; Javier Hernandez's blockbuster adaptation of his macabre-styled Chicano loner,El Muerto; Laura Molina's contract to revive and serialize her Chicana superhero,The Jaguar…. And now we can add to this laundry-list Jaime Hernandez's recent spin inThe New York Times Magazine: "La Maggie La Loca."|
Jaime Hernandez, “La Maggie La Loca,” |
I already mentioned that, in terms of style, "La Maggie La
Loca" stands in sharp contrast to the more sanitized Ware
story. Here we have a more heavily-inked line, a more solid
yet subdued blue, yellow, green, mauve, brown palette of
colors, a more deliberate space-to-space pace and linear
temporal flow (Ware's is a splash of simultaneity gone
wild), and a singularly character driven story. As far as
the verbal narration goes, bubbles never appear only
sub-panel boxes with Maggie's interior monologue: "I WOKE
UP IN THE MORNING…." Its verbal-narrative flow never lets
us outside of Maggie's head. Panel by panel, all these
parts begin to cohere as a gestaltic whole; they impress
upon us a storytelling mood and feeling about character.
Their accretive coherence leads to deeper cognitive and
emotive investment.
All these elements give shape also to our sense of an
author—not necessarily the flesh-and-blood Jaime Hernandez
who exists as more than the author of “La Maggie La Loca,”
but rather that sense of a master of control who
orchestrates in particular ways how the elements of the
comic balletically pull together. It's the style of "La
Maggie La Loca" coalesced around a signature, "Xaime," that
leads us to return time and time again to the comic books
we like.
This said, while this might be the
gestaltic
Let's say we do, however. Let's assume that the colors,
pacing, and voice, do appeal—that the comic’s internal
narrative logic works. We would necessarily become invested
in Maggie; we would begin to ask questions: why is she so
paranoid and suspicious? why so apathetic? why resistant to
Rena's invitation for a visit, was she a former lover? why
so easily swayed by Hopey? why does she seem to always be
eating? does that pinch of her tummy reveal a weight
concern and might this reveal something about her sense of
self? And when questions remain unanswered, we long for
more—more of the way this particular comic book
author/artist combines the different storytelling elements
in his will to style.
This leads me to the element of the double narrator: the
visual-narrator and the textual-narrator. The story of La
Maggie unfolds simultaneously along a visual and a textual
narrative register. Within the first series of panels, our
brain has already cognitively mapped the verbal-narrator's
past tense, first-person voice to the visual-narrator's
focus on the character Maggie. And here things begin to get
interesting. The visual-narrator can describe Maggie—facial
expression, gesture, behavior—in ways that emphasize and/or
conflict with the textual-narrator's voice. One can depict
happiness and the other frustration; one comfort and the
other paranoia. In such cases Hernandez challenges—and even
plays havoc with—the reader's cognitive schemas that work
to infer interior state from outward gesture and allow one
to determine form a smile, a state of pleasure or
contentment.
There's a certain pleasure derived from figuring out how
Jaime creates verbal-narrator and textual-narrator
tensions; we can begin to read—and even delight in—an
unreliability in Maggie's voice. In spite of the primacy
given to Maggie's interior thoughts and impressions, such a
pendular cognitive movement between the verbal- and visual-
narrators creates certain tensions that allow us to step
outside of her perspective (to perhaps not use her as the
standard of measure for judging a character like
Rena).
For a first-time reader (or any reader for that matter), to
follow "La Maggie La Loca" is a cognitively complex feat.
Much is going on upstairs when we move from panel to panel,
when the reader establishes the relationship of form in the
pendular motion between visual-narrator and the
text-narrator, and when the reader uses memory to sustain
the plot narrated by both. (Even though Maggie is drawn
slightly differently panel to panel and part to part, we
still recognize her as Maggie.) The more the story demands
that we keep track of its verbal and visual
configurations—how they are related and separate and how we
have to keep them together as a whole—arguably leads to a
greater cognitive pay-off.
All cartoonists have the choice of how they want to
configure the verbal-narrator and the visual-narrator, and
Jaime Hernandez has total artistic control over his. It
could be that they exist in harmony, in tension, and/or
even where one is much more diminished than the other.
(Peter Kuper's a case in point here.) A heavier or lighter
presence of either will affect not only the pacing and
rhythm of the story, but the feeling we have when
encountering individual panels. Too much of the
verbal-narrative element within a panel can create a sense
of claustrophobia; little to none, a sense of
expansiveness, for example. The choice also effects how big
the panels might be and how many are used per
page—decisions that also affect the story's mood, and by
implication, that of the reader/viewer. Los Bros Hernandez
can choose to lean more on the image-narrator or on the
text-narrator in their total artistic control over their
work; as such, they can vary the rhythm of their narrative
both in the way their image-narrator conveys meaning, in
the size of the lines used to ink the images, and in the
degree of proximity to the objects within the mise-en-panel
(blow up, close-up, medium shot, distant shot).
The double narrator determines how we are to cluster
together traits for scenes, characters, events, to prime
fragments of memories (our own and those of others) and
thus how, in our synthesis of the schemas, we are directed
to respond in specific ways to the characters. The way the
visual-narrator and the verbal-narrator prime our memories
of behavior and action deepen our understanding of La
Maggie; they complicate our inference of other characters’
actions as mediated through her consciousness.
In closing, let me return to points made at the beginning.
That I'm a Chicano who reads
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Of course, Jaime has been around since (comics) time immemorial; he and his brothers (more Gilbert than Mario) have been at this since the early 1980s. And arguably, Los Bros Hernandez's various Chicano storyscapes single-handedly kept Fantagraphics in business alive in the publication world. What's different is that Jaime has moved out of the Fantagraphics publishing frame and has succeeded Chris Ware's metafictional "Apartment Stories" in the new “Funny Pages” section. Beginning April 23, those expecting Ware's cross-sectioned domestic spaces, ironic witticisms, and connect-a-dot, zip-lines style opened to Jaime's solidly framed and colored, rather straightforward day-in-the-life tales of Maggie. After reconnecting with an old friend, Tse Tse, one thing leads to another and she ends up sojourning with another long lost friend, Rena, who lives in some Island Otherland; dialogue deficient, the audience is privy only to her impression, reflections, and subdued revelations.
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