Word: hernandez
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...move that seems more like a smart company's buy-in rather than an artist's sell-out, DC comics has just finished publishing Gilbert Hernandez' five-issue "Grip: The Strange World of Men." With his brother Jaime, Gilbert's work on "Love and Rockets" set the benchmark for an entire generation of post-underground comix artists. (They were selected as one of TIME's 21st Century Innovators.) Though the publisher better known for its superhero "properties" clearly didn't know quite what to do with it, Hernandez's "Grip" combines all the elements that have gone into making...
...Grip" uses the 1950s crime, horror and sci-fi genre comicbooks as the guide for a new, postmodern comix narrative. Hernandez sets the tone by beginning each of the five issues with a full-page mock cover of a 10-cent pulp book: "Grip of Fear," "Grippingly Romantic Western Mystery," etc. But once inside, the rules have clearly changed. Freaks, unrepentant violence, monsters and sex have been jumbled into a dizzy story that sends up the genres it revels in as much as it honors them...
...asks, "What??" It's an appropriate question for a guy who doesn't know who he is or how he got there, and it's a question we'll be asking ourselves many times through the course of this series. But this sense of disorientation never feels out of Hernandez' control. Bouncing between the present and the past, the characters come on thick and fast: Tigre and Sammy, the tiny couple of questionable morals; Joe Hook, sporting a fu-Manchu and looking to boost his petty criminal rep; the Overboys, a criminal gang; the Mystery Girls, a crime-fighting...
...Echo makes a friend in Gilbert Hernandez' "Grip...
...know; this tale doesn't really add up the way Hernandez' similarly deconstructed storylines have in the past. Nor does it have the emotional depth of his other stories. Still, Hernandez has a lot of fun spicing up the old conventions with farcical sex and violence. Like Robert Crumb, Hernandez seems to be blessed with the ability create things mostly for his own turn-ons that also work as art. Though a bit undeveloped in this series, he has always had a way with women characters in particular, somehow indulging in every imaginable fetishist "type" (included here: the voluptuous dwarf...