A Decidedly “Mexican” and “American” Semi [Er] Otic Transference more

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London €> 2002 by New York University "TheBuena Vista Social Club: The Racial Politics of Nostalgia" 2l»e by lanya Kalrri Heminde/ All rights reserved Library of CoBfHH CaUloging-in-Public* lion Data Latino/a popular culture / edited by Michelle 1 label 1-Palian and Mary Romero. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8147-3624-6 - ISBN 0-8147-3625-4 <pbk.) 1.1 lispanic Americans—Ethnic identity. 2.1 hspanic American-- and mavs media 3. Popular culture— United Stale*. 4. Hispanic American*— Social lile and customs. 5. Hispanic American arts. 6. Hispanic American athlete*. I Habell-Pallan, Michelle II. Romero. Mary. E184.S75 U554 2002 305.868073—dc21 2001007962 Nn» York University Press book* are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials an* chosen for strength and durability. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 987654321 12 A Decidedly "Mexican" and "American Semi[er]otic Transference Frida Kahlo in the Eyes of Gilbert Hernandez William A. Nericcio Passing through ostentatiously ... Had I a curtain ... bound looseness ... the coarse cells of my heart... subtle sting —Frida Kahlo CURIOUSLY ENOUGH, IT is m the artistic vision of Americans of Mexican descent, the spectacular semiotic hallucinations of Chicana and Chicano visual artists, that one witnesses the coming together of legacies and conventions of representation that all too often stay firmly anchored within their own isolated national, not to say nationalistic, es- tuaries. An examination of art, photography, and film by Americans of Mexican descent and by Chicanas/os (not always the same thing, as we know) reveals that those who wish to study arts created between and within Mexico and the United States need an eclectic and wide-ranging knowledge. For instance, in speaking to the rich graphic tendencies of late-twentieth-century Chicana/o art, one must be as sensitive of six- teenth-century Spanish altar design tendencies, and the adaptations these underwent in their introduction to the indigenous peoples of Meso-America via Cortes and Spanish Inquisition-era clerics as one must be of the impact Andy Warhol's Factory had on the First World art 190 Building C hi cam a/o Latina/o Communities Through Networking Empleo CeUnd.r Cslend.no Uferirltt itfCM CLNET Foaturo O law OpyIgN »wdjCMH» Connuilty COMWNM StttltIK* #& litadnticm Br«ue Pwi P*tlM3de Broact Budrth >N|H1» •Mil CLMT s*kn clnet || JOBS || MUSEUM || CALENDAR II LIBRARIES II COMMUNITY II FIG. 12.1. Rhonda Chabran, "1999 Logo," CLNet: Building Chicana/o Latina/o Communities through Networking. 14 December 2000, University of California at Riverside. Downloaded 30 May 2001, http://clnet.ucr.edu. market in the United States in the late sixties; as knowledgeable of the role retablos and loteria play in northern Mexican cultural communities as of the (some might say) similar role Elvis Presley played in the atomic-era, Ike, and post-Ike suburban culture of the United States. Consider, for instance, the semiotic etiology of the screenshot seized from the Chicano/Latino World Wide Web site at the University of Cal- ifornia, Los Angeles back in 1999 (figure 12.1). The visual dynamics of this particular image are dense and diverse; moreover, they span more than four centuries and at least two conti- nents. A sophisticated marriage of pictograph and ideogram in its own right, a Mexica graphic narrative couples with the graphic-user inter- face of the World Wide Web: brought through the eye, pre-filtered through an always already camera-inflected (or is it infected?) sense of spectacle, yielding what is, in essence, a late-twentieth-century mestizo Web page. With apologies to mathematicians everywhere, the semioti- cally tinged version of this equation might look something like figure 12.2, where [glyph] + [a computer] + [the eye/I] + [camera] = World Wide Web. 192 WILLIAM A. NERICCIO FIG. 12.2. Guillermo Nericcio Garcia, "Aztten WebEquation." ©2001. This awkward illustration does not appear here for merely melo- dramatic purposes—though I am aware of the potential for that kind of interpretation, and have, in the past, been guilty of such flourishes. The maladroit logic of this fabricated equation or attractiveness gestures at the kind of graphic fabrication that will be necessary on the part of the critical community to document usefully just what happens when the multivalent cultural legacies of the Americas are allied with an under- standing of how advances in visuo-information technologies impact on the arts, and on the artists producing these works.1 To be Chicana/o and, more important for the purposes of this essay, to be a Chicana/o artist, is to live in the mix of more than two worlds, a rich fractious legacy where the courts of Spain, the mute, dark cham- bers of England, the dynamic cultural imperialism of the United States, and the fractious, revolutionary history of Mexico merge. Said merger is not without its profits. Let us now quickly dash from the abstract to the specific and to the work of Southern California native Gilbert Hernandez. We will narrow our focus even further, electing to examine how the work of Mexican arts diva/deity Frida Kahlo impacts on Hernandez's work. From the start, we might note that Hernandez is somewhat at a disadvantage, plying his trade in comic books, a genre most often associated with the banal exploits of leotarded, steroidally enhanced musclemen (Super- man, Spiderman, et al.), ditzy, hormonally gifted teenagers (Archie, Betty, and Veronica), and outrageous dysfunctional animals (Uncle Scrooge, Mickey Mouse). As such, he and his brother Jaime Hernan- dez's Dickens-like, fifteen-year serial graphic fiction project, Love and Rockets, has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves from the community of literary critics and art historians in the United States and abroad. Still, the Latino community as well as the Raza intelli- gentsia has been a bit slow to note Los Bros Hernandez' literary output. Jaime Hernandez is candid about this Raza indifference in a 1993 inter- view: "Disappointedly, we've had little response from the [Chicana/o] community. The response we've had is that very few Hispanics read our comic books, that we know of. There's no backlash either, because our comic book isn't that important so they don't bother about it."2 Frida Kahlo, of course, is another story. Few other artists of the late- twentieth-century have drawn the critical and popular acclaim this ec- centric, gifted luminary of the Americas has received. For an example of a flow of Mexican art onto and into the works of Mexican American artisans, there exists no better microcosm of the process of exchange than "Frida" (1988), the graphic biography of Kahlo authored and illustrated by Gilbert Hernandez: Kahlo, that most autobiographical of twentieth-century painters (only Van Gogh and Rembrandt come to mind as her competitors when it comes to the self- portrait), returns to us translated in a drawn biography by Hernandez, a Chicano born in Oxnard, California. "Frida" is Hernandez's homage to the dazzling Kahlo.3 Using Hayden Herrera's Kahlo biography (1983) as a skeleton of sorts, Hernandez renders Frida in words and, more important, pictures.4 And this is where illustrator Hernandez and biographer Herrera part company, for it is the autobiographical insights gleaned from Kahlo's paintings that guide Hernandez's drawing hand as he writes the life of the late Mexican painter, more so than Herrera's prose. If this is a novelty (a visualized biography of one visual artist by another), one wonders why. How better to render the life of a painter than in pictures? Hernandez's homage begins with a loaded frontispiece (figure 12.3)—the image is Bunuel-like in its subtlety, or better put, its lack thereof: Frida, in an adaptation of one of her many self-portraits, gazes out to us her spectators, surrounded by a constellation of symbolic keynotes (clockwise from top right): an allusion to Picasso's Guernica, which periodizes Kahlo in a world art context, a drawing of a bomb wrapped with a ribbon, a stylized ideogram of Andre Breton's now-fa- mous quote about the Mexican painter (note also how drugs linger just to the left of the neatly wrapped bomb, signaling Kahlo's use/abuse of the same in the course of her many illnesses), a semi-erect devil with a pitchfork. Moving to the bottom left quadrant of the opening panel, Hernandez adds a bottle of booze, a rendition of Chester Gould's Dick Tracy nemesis, Flat Top (which, like the Picasso allusion, periodizes FIG. 12.3. The first "splash" panel from Gilbert Hernandez's loving homage to the life and art of Frida Kahlo. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books. Kahlo, while also signaling Hernandez's autobiography, or, better put, auto-ergography, his own debt to a tradition of comic art in the United States). To close, the frontispiece also displays a chimera-Diego Rivera (frog and man), a Soviet hammer and sickle (glossing Kahlo's commit- ted socialist politics), and last but not least, one of Mexican graphic artist Jose Guadalupe Posada's calaveras—Posada's works an inspira- tion for Kahlo and Hernandez alike. Diligently working through the sources and inspiration for this portrait of Frida by Gilbert Hernandez, one sees at once the impact of Mexican, European, and American artists on the work of a Mexican American visual artist. Chester Gould, Andre Breton, Frida Kahlo: the rich, diverse tapestry fueling Hernandez, driving him to draw through A "MEXICAN" AND "AMERICAN" SEMI[ER]OTIC TRANShbKbNCt 173 and, through our acts of curation, monumentalize the legacy of our Americas. What I like about Hernandez's "Frida" is the way it problematizes the divide between the autobiographical and the biographical while also efficiently and succinctly retelling the life of a prominent twentieth- century artist. In painting, the self-portrait is the counterpart of autobi- ography in nonfiction prose—and certainly no little amount of ink has been spilled connecting the trajectory of Kahlo's development as a painter with the contours of her life history But in painting Kahlo's story, Hernandez takes counsel as much from Frida's oeuvre as he does her published biographies, as much from his own experiences and de- velopment within the eclectic domain of comic book publishing as from Kahlo's self-portraits. Dick Tracy's "daddy," Chester Gould, has every- thing to do with Hernandez and almost nothing, save for chronology, to do with Kahlo: at once, biographical and autobiographical categories are fused as Hernandez retells the story of Kahlo's life even as he sig- nals autobiographically his debt to Frida Kahlo. Adapting here a smidgen, a semiotic tactic culled from the pages of bookmaking machine Jacques Derrida, we might venture that Gilbert Hernandez conjures the space of a collaborative semiotic hallucination wherein he and Frida reside and frolic simultaneously: "What we are talking about here is hallucination in painting. Does painting have to let a discourse be applied to it that was elaborated elsewhere, a discourse on hal- lucination. Or else must painting be the decisive test of that discourse, and its condition."5 Displacing, however temporarily, the pages of Kahlo's various biographers, Hernandez creates a dizzying play- ground where both illustrators' lives and works speak or show themselves simultaneously. FIG. 12.4. A detail from Her- nandez's Kahlo biopic—here Chester Gould's Flat Top character appears armed, dangerous, and bracketed by a bottle of booze and a wine glass. Courtesy of Fanta- graphics Books. 196 WILLIAM A. NER/CC/O One of the most noted elements of Frida Kahlo's life is her contentious, erotic, and outrageous relationship with the inimitable Diego Rivera, who alternatively wore the hats of her mentor, lover, husband, friend, and nemesis through the years. In figure 12.5, Hernandez pictures the curious, bellicose, yet symbiotic links Kahlo shared with Rivera ("Frida," 36). Positioning both artists before unseen canvases—empha- sizing momentarily their personal bonds as opposed to their aesthetic connections—here Hernandez literalizes the fusion of the two Mexican artists' twin destinies. In a way Hernandez's illustration can be seen to suggest something about Kahlo and Rivera's relationship that was al- ready quite clear from Kahlo's oeuvre: that any permanent separation FIG. 12.5. A devotee of expressionist and surrealist tactics, here Hernandez lit- eralizes Diego and Frida's symbiotic ties that were both sexual and aesthetic. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books. FIG. 12.6. Kahlo often used blood in her paintings as a metaphorical symbol and literal organic object; enacting a semiotic transference with Kahlo, Her- nandez here pictures Kahlo's communist allegiance with a bleeding hammer and sickle tatoo. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books. of the two could only come as the result of death. But, of course, there is even more going on in the panel: the various shapes Hernandez in- cludes present also at once a mise en scene that evokes Kahlo and Rivera's symbolic universe (skulls, shadows, canvases, a discarded lover lurking in the background)—a uniquely Mexican aesthetic cos- mos dominated by the artists themselves oddly frowning and smurking in the foreground. Just as one would be at great pains to extract the affective coordi- nate of Kahlo's world from that of its aesthetic domain, one finds it equally difficult to tear the fabric of Kahlo's political intrigue from her aesthetic and libidinal drives. It is this fugue of politics, art, and desire that guides Hernandez's hand in our next panel where the Agoura, California-born seer renders that moment in Frida's life, Au- gust 22,1940, when one Ramon Mercader viciously murdered the ex- iled Russian Communist Leon Trotsky—a man with whom Kahlo had shared time, ideas, dialogue, debate, and, not unimportantly, her body. Needless to say, Kahlo was shaken terribly by the dastardly act, the twelve hours of police questioning that followed doing nothing to sooth the mourning artist. Hernandez's version of the event (figure 12.6) tells us all this and more—communicating the violence of the as- sassination while simultaneously underscoring via the bleeding tat- too on her forehead Kahlo's links to Soviet Communism and Marx. I 70 VVILLIHIVt M. FIG. 12.7. Dada meets The Brain That Wouldn't Die meets Mexico. Worthy of Bunuel, his attested muse, Hernandez produces his most eloquent, moving, and disturbing portrait of Frida Kahlo: decapitated, intoxicated, wounded, and, most importantly, a spectacle! The stick figure peering through the win- dow proxies our own witnessing subjectivities. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books. Hernandez's bleeding india inked shadows—clear political iconogra- phy sloppily dovetailing with a melodramatically rendered blood- stained hint of romance—provide a ready point of entry for a markedly important incident in Kahlo's life. From politics, violence, and the libido, Hernandez's illustrated bi- ography moves forward to consider the practice of autobiography in Kahlo's work. Our next sampled panel (figure 12.7) finds Frida Kahlo (circa 1946) during that late period of her life when her health was rap- idly diminishing. Hernandez's rendition of this painful scene ("Frida," 37) artfully renders Kahlo's divided, decapitated body, simultaneously revealing the split self of an increasingly tortured artist. But even as he renders this scene, Hernandez belies his kitschy, Southern California, Hollywood sensibility as the template for this moving portrait of Frida comes from director Joseph Green's 1962 schlockfest/ drive-in B-movie, The Brain That Wouldn't Die; a detail from the poster for this cold war classic reveals Hernandez's unlikely source (figure 12.8). The most plaintive, pathetic figure in Hernandez's panel is the sketchy, confused protagonist, gawking at Frida through the window. This stickman (a proxy for you and me?), startled yet attentive, peers upon a fascinating, surreal scene. Note that the table on which Frida's head sits is a stylized altar of sorts—with Frida's head as chalice, flanked not by candles but by empty bottles of booze. ALIVE... WITHOUT A BODY FED BY AN UNSPEAKABLE HORROR FROM HELL! FIG. 12.8. Rex Carlton, The Brain That Wouldn't Die (sinage, detail), in Daddy- O's Drive-In Dirt: The History Behind the Movies and Shorts on Mystery Science The- ater 3000. Downloaded 30 May 2001, http://www.mst3kinfo.com/daddyo/ di_513.html. One of the original cine- matic sources for Hernandez's mestizo imagination. We begin to understand how Hernandez's pen marries the visual archive of Hollywood black and white schlock films to the sensual contours of twentieth-century Mexican oil paintings. 200 WILLIAM A. NERtCCIO FIG. 12.9. Frida Kahlo, detail from The Little Deer (1946), Museo Dolores Olmedo Patino, Downloaded 23 October 2001, http://www.arts-history.mx/ museos/mdo/okahloin2.html. Moving briskly on this tour, with me your obedient prose docent, let us now jump between two illustrations, one a detail of a painting by Frida Kahlo, The Little Deer (1946); the other, an evocative riff played off the original, used by biographer Hernandez in "Frida" to bring off his narrative denouement (figures 12.9 and 12.10). Note the movement from autobiographical self-portrait by Kahlo to the biographical portrait by Hernandez. A facial expression of angst in the first panel emerges remade as peaceful sleep in the second as Kahlo's documentation of an increasingly torturous life is recast by Hernandez as the no-less-violent yet somehow also hopeful scene of Frida's death. Note also how Hernandez has removed the deer's right leg to signal Kahlo's July 27, 1953, amputation, still on the horizon when The Little Deer was completed in 1946. Hernandez's comic book biography again tells the remarkable life of Frida Kahlo, but he also accomplishes much more. This consummate Chicano narrative wiz- FIG. 12.10. Hernandez's transformation of Kahlo's Little Deer—note especially the amputated hind-leg which alters Kahlo's original painting but obeys the chronology of Kahlo's surgeries. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books. ard delivers what the French used to call a haute nouveaute (a superior, high novelty). Of course it is not just Mexican artists who impact on Mexican American artistry. In Hernandez's Blood of Palomar (published in the United Kingdom as Human Diastrophism), Gilbert writes and draws the story of a serial killer run amok in Palomar, a fictional Central American community (imagine Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha south of the Rio Grande in Garcia Marquez's Macondo).6 But just as impor- tant in the novella (which appeared serially over a two-year period) is the coming-of-age story of Humberto, the literal portrait of an artist as a young man. Humberto's artistic talent is the featured sub- plot of this singular detective story/psychological novel, underscor- ing in an odd way the novella's concern with documenting the im- pact of murder on a small, insular (which is not to say provincial) community. 202 W'LUAM A. NERICCIO Figures 12.11 and 12.12 document the impact of Picasso, Grosz, Kandinsky, and modern primitivism on Gilbert Hernandez's India- inked lines. Picasso's hand in this stew is also quite interesting and noteworthy. Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in 1881 in Malaga, An- dalucia, Spain; his father was an art teacher and the precocious scrib- bler's first art instructor. In Blood of Palomar it is Heraclio, Hum- bert's friend, who plays master to the young talent, bringing him books by Mary Cassatt, Paul Klee, and Picasso to educate his young charge. Readers, screeners, seers all, we are confronted at once with a FIG. 12.11. Hernandez's Picasso-influenced portrait of Luba, one of sev- eral key characters from his ongoing series of illustrated stories. This appears as the full-color, back cover of the novel-length tale Blood of Palomar: Human Disastrophism. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books. FIG. 12.12. Heraclio, a teacher, marvels at Humberto's artistic range in a key panel from Blood ofPalomar. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books. decidedly delicious semio-/geo-logicultural menage a trois: Oxnard, Califas (California, where Hernandez was born), Mexico (Kahlo's crib, though her father's German lineage ought to be thrown into the mix), and Spain, Mexico's motherland, Mexico's mother-tongue, that European behemoth responsible for remapping the globe in the fif- teenth and sixteenth centuries. Look carefully at figures 12.13, 12.14, and 12.15. I have sandwiched Gilbert Hernandez's drawing (in Blood ofPalo- mar, it is an over-the-shoulder glance at a page from his budding artist/protagonist Humberto's sketchbook) between Kahlo's singular Broken Column and Picasso's ubiquitous Don Quixote and Sancho Panza so as to play up the intrigue amidst these three panels, one an oil paint- ing, the second ink on paper, and the third a lithograph. This triptych evidences the depth of these circuitous allusions: the fractured, elided pudenda of a half-man, half-woman serial killer, Humberto's portrait of "Tomaso" in the center panel is informed by the syntax of fractured sub- jectivity Hernandez had learned from a careful perusal of Kahlo's oeu- vre where Kahlo's broken, bifurcated nude form figures her torn psy- che/matrix. Similarly, it was to Picasso's experimental pen strokes that Hernandez turned to represent the incipient talent of Humberto in his story. In Gilbert Hernandez's imagination and in the strokes of his pen, the lush sensual angst of Frida Kahlo is reimagined through the playful lens of Pablo Picasso's paintbrush—with the leering gaze of Miguel de Cervantes, an artist himself rather adept at wrestling with and mani- festing the peculiarities intrinsic to the concept of representation, hov- ering just above this unlikely trio. WILLIAM A. NLMLLIU FIGS. 12.13, 12.14 & 12.15. (left to right): Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column (1944), Museo Dolores Olmedo Patino. Downloaded 23 October 2001. http://www .arts-rustory.mx/museos/mdo/okahloin2.htrnl. Gilbert Hernandez, two pan- els from Blood of Palomar (1987), india ink on paper. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books; Pablo Ruiz Picasso, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (1955), lithograph. © 2000 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Kahlo, Hernandez, and Picasso, a decidedly curious and utterly Chicano menage a trois. AFTERWORD The borders dividing and defining Mexico and the United States as well as those no less real borders dividing high culture and popular culture cannot stop the surging of ink, the dance and coupling of photons as they bounce off canvases and comic book pages into the willing and willful eyes of their readers and viewers. La migra's starched green uni- forms, those natty, nifty, and reactionary rostumes, wardrobe progeny of the spume of Mussolini's fashion fascists, cannot bar the cacophony of the semiotic intercourse between Mexico and the United States. EXERGUE In an interview with Gary Groth and Robert Fiore, Gilbert Hernandez recalls the origins of his love of comics: "Our mom collected comics in the 1940s, and it's the old story, her mother—our grandmother—threw them out, so she didn't have any left and she'd always tell us about the old comics."7 A writer of a different age and the distinct cultural space of Texas, I walked a different path: It is the hot summer of 1966 in Laredo, Texas, and a four-year-old boy and his seven-year-old sister are playing on the bed of their father's mother. Our grandmother's name is Ana Juarez de Nericcio, and among the curious ceramic animals, old photographs, and dainty artifacts, we find a treasure chest of new and old comic books. Archie and Jughead, Betty and Veronica, Hot Stuff, Casper, Richie Rich—an odd Superman, Little Dot and Big Lotta; occasionally a Sad Sack falls our way. Here my sister Josie and I play and laugh and break things—Ana's precious little ceramic dog whose head I broke and Ana patiently repaired; I never remember her getting mad. Here I learn to read; here I learn to read another way—like Jose Arcadio Buendia with Melqufades, like Shelley's voyeur Wretch within his hid- den cave. In the dark safe confines of my father's mother's house I am FIG. 12.16. Ana Juarez de Ner- iccio, c. 1921. Photographer unknown. An I.D. photo, 1925 of my grandmother Ana Juarez de Nericcio, who intro- duced me to the world of comic books and forever in- fected me with curiosity for both the printed word and the printed image. 206 WILLIAM A. NERICCIO forever initiated into the sensual and colorful semiotic and semantic mishmash of word and image- Gilbert Hernandez's evocative canvases send me back to this now lost Utopia of outrageous plots, garish colors, and yellowing cheap paper. It is a world as well of chocolate milk and hamburgers and the singularly selfless love of a beloved grandmother and my always spe- cial sister. The latter taught me to read and the former provided the fuel to consume that everlasting spark. The elegiac majesty of this reverie runs through my past and present, a pleasure- and pathos-filled bor- derzone of chaos. NOTES 1. I address this more fully in William A. Nericcio, "Artif[r]acture: Virulent Pictures, Graphic Narrative and the Ideology of the Visual/' Mosaic: A journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 28, no. 4 (December 1996): 79-109. 2. Arthur Goldstuck, "The Brothers Speak," The Unlovely Love and Rock- ets Home Page, 1993, available http://www.web.co.za/arthur/losbros.htm (3 June 2000). 3. "Frida" is one of several experimental short stories by Gilbert Hernan- dez also collected in Flies on the Ceiling: Volume Nine of the Complete Love and Rockets (Seattle: Fantagraphic Books, 1991), 29^40. Page references in text will be to this edition. 4. Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991). 5. From "Restitutions," the last section of Derrida's La verite en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod as The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 366. 6. Journalistic accounts of Gilbert Hernandez's literary roots repeat time and again the connection between the magic streets of his Palomar and those of a now legendary Macondo invented by Garcia Marquez. Jaime Hernandez, Gilbert's artist-brother, bursts our osmotic-sensitive sensors: "[he] read [Garcia Marquez], but he didn't know about him till someone told him that they wrote similarly. It was really ironic: Gilbert had never read him but people were telling him this. I think it was more being raised on the same wavelength" (Goldstuck 2000). What Garcia Marquez and Gilbert Hernandez do share is a fascination with the Latin American motherlands, the Latino mother tongue. In Gilbert Hernandez's own words, "The interest was always there. But I . . . refined it doing stories about the old country, doing stories about the old people, and the stories of Hispanic culture, particularly Mexican, I think it has me thinking about it every time I draw." On another note, for a first-rate recent critical con- A "MbXICAN AND "APIbKICAIN it I'l 1 [ r r\ J W I l>_ IIVAIMJI LI\LI»LL sideration of Hernandez's Palomar series, see Charles Hatfield, "Heartbreak Soup: The Interdependency of Theme and Form," Inks: Cartoon and Comic Art Studies 4, no. 2 (1997): 2-17. 7. Gary Groth and Robert Fiore, eds., The New Comics: Interviews from the ages of "The Comics Journal" (New York: Berkley Books, 1988), 302.