Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories

AUTHOR: Hernandez, Gilbert

ARTIST: Gilbert Hernandez (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Fantagraphics Books

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1982-2003

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2003

Publication History

Palomar is a compilation of work previously published in the successful Love and Rockets series between 1982 and 2003 and traces the lives of the residents of Palomar, a fictional Latin American village. A primary example of the alternative comics revolution of the 1980’s, Love and Rockets started as a self-published work by Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario Hernandez in 1981. By 1982, after a short stint as an independent, alternative publication, Love and Rockets was picked up by Seattle-based Fantagraphics Books, which has continued the successful publication and distribution of Hernandez’s work.

In 2003, seeking a wider audience, Fantagraphics released ambitious collections of work by the Hernandez brothers: LOCAS for Jaime and Palomar for Gilbert. At the time, a six-hundred-page hardcover comics title was an industry novelty. Nonetheless, both volumes brought national recognition to the brothers. Thanks to its commercial success, Palomar was reissued in 2004 and 2005. In 2007, in celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Love and Rockets, abbreviated volumes were published presenting the Palomar Stories in chronological order.

Plot

While the stories created by Jaime center on the characters of Maggie and Hopey and are strongly evocative of Southern California’s punk scene throughout the 1980’s, Gilbert’s stories exhibit a bond with Latin America and constantly seek a redefinition of the migratory experience. As a compilation, Palomar adds to the coherence of Gilbert Hernandez’s work, since it collects stories that jump back and forth within the story of the village. Luba, a matriarch and guiding force behind the town, serves as the axis for the narrative, which begins with her arrival in Palomar and ends with her departure.

The story follows the tension between Luba, who lands in Palomar seeking to remake her fortune, and Chelo, the local bañadora, a woman who makes a living by bathing men. When Luba arrives and sets up a competing bañadora business, Chelo trades jobs and becomes the village sheriff. Eventually, Luba’s business prospers. She buys an upscale home and the village theater and upgrades her bathing business. In the meantime, she has a series of affairs with locals and with visitors and gives birth to multiple children whose upbringings add to the charm of the story. Eventually, she becomes Palomar’s mayor and settles her differences with Chelo.

The volume is divided into chapters, each comprising a different episode of Palomar’s history. However, these installments are compilations of narratives that appeared in a more disjointed fashion in Love and Rockets.

“Chelo’s Burden” introduces Chelo and many of the main characters who were born during the early years when Chelo worked as a midwife. It also traces the village’s origins and recounts Chelo’s family history and her place in the history as a descendant of Palomar’s founders.

“Sopa de Gran Pena” includes the love affair between Pipo and Manuel, Gato’s unrequited love for Pipo, and Tipín Tipín’s passion for Zomba. Also, it introduces the local gang of teenagers: Heraclio, Jesús, Vicente, Israel, and Sakahaftewa (also known as Satch). It covers the deaths of Toco, Jesus’s younger brother, and Manuel, the local Casanova.

“Act of Contrition” chronicles Luba’s economic ascent and her relationship with Archie, a mortician. It also depicts the travails of Heraclio and Carmen as a young married couple and the adventures of some of Luba’s children, Guadalupe and Doralis.

“Ecce Homo” narrates the story of Jesús Ángel, who is sent to prison after suffering a nervous breakdown. It also introduces Tonantzin and Diana, the Villaseñor sisters, and covers Pipo’s return to Palomar from the city of San Fideo after marrying Gato and giving birth to Manuel’s son, Sergio.

“An American in Palomar” tells the story of Howard Miller, an American photographer who visits Palomar. It focuses on Tonantzin, who makes a living selling fried slugs; the affair between Luba and Heraclio, who fathers Guadalupe; and Diana’s obsession with running.

“Love Bites” covers Jesús’s time in jail and develops further Heraclio’s life with Carmen. Along the way, it advances the general story of the village.

“Duck Feet” narrates the events surrounding a visiting witch and further develops the story lines for many characters, such as Israel, who embraces his bisexuality while in San Fideo.

“Human Diastrophism” is a lengthy chapter that starts with a story from Vicente’s point of view. It describes the time when Palomar was plagued by monkeys and recounts Luba’s affair with the handsome Khamo who fathers Casimira and Doralis. It also includes the episode of Tomaso Marín, a serial killer who becomes the subject matter of Humberto’s art, Luba’s dalliance with Borro, and Khamo’s affair with Pipo. In the end, it hints at Luba’s rise to mayor.

“Farewell, My Palomar” opens with Jesús’s return to Palomar. It develops the story of Casimira, who loses her arm in an accident, and chronicles Pipo’s financial success in the garment industry in San Fideo. It also traces the story of Pito, a town elder, and introduces the mystery of statues at a nearby lake.

“Luba Conquers the World” introduces characters like Petra and Fritz, Luba’s sisters, who come to Palomar. Several stories are resolved such as Guadalupe’s marriage to Gato and Luba’s eventual settling down with a disfigured Khamo.

“Epilog: Chelo’s Burden” tells of Palomar’s destruction. Ultimately, Luba moves to California when it becomes evident that gangsters have come to Palomar to settle old accounts.

Characters

Palomar has an almost dizzying array of characters. Some of the main ones are listed below.

•Luba, the protagonist, is an extremely well-endowed woman of Indian descent. Her arrival to and departure from Palomar signal the story’s beginning and end. Her progeny is bountiful and exclusively feminine, marking a lengthy lineage of strong female characters. In sum, she is the axis of a matrilineal order. She is usually the active partner in relationships, and her lovers are, quite frequently, younger men.

•Chelo, the town sheriff, is a natural antagonist to Luba. Her ancestors founded Palomar, and her mother taught her to be a midwife. Her sense of authority emanates from her sheriff’s badge and the fact that she has known most of the population since they were born.

•Pipo grows into a gorgeous woman and is initially seduced by Manuel. She eventually marries Gato, moves to San Fideo, and then gives birth to Manuel’s son, Sergio. When she and Gato separate, she returns to Palomar. She eventually sets up a business in San Fideo and becomes a successful businesswoman.

•Tonantzin Villaseñor is another beautiful woman in the town. In the beginning she makes a living by selling fried snails. Next, she starts dressing in native clothing and is viewed as mentally unstable. She then becomes obsessed with Howard Miller, the photographer who visits Palomar and whom she thinks will take her to Hollywood. Ultimately, once she has eloped with Khamo, she sets herself on fire during a political demonstration.

•Heraclio is perhaps the most emotionally balanced of Palomar’s male characters. Luba seduces him when he is a teenager, and he fathers Guadalupe. His marriage to short, strong-tempered Carmen is, in comparison with other relationships in the story, a model of stability. He is the resident teacher in Palomar.

Artistic Style

Hernandez is well known for a style of drawing that evokes the aesthetics of teenage comics of the 1950’s and 1960’s. The panels are orderly and the images are in black and white with little shading or scratching. In terms of imagery, Hernandez’s style of illustration mixes the appearance of post-World War II romance comics such as Rex Morgan, M.D. and Mary Worth with the playfulness of Bob Montana’s Archie. His basic scheme resides in narrating unconventional stories by traditional means. While the art emulates the wonders of suburbia, plots are set in cities or far-away villages and contain convoluted story lines, atypical social dynamics, and transgressive sexual politics.

Hernandez offers much more than an Americanized view of Latin America. Hernandez’s art is eclectic and mixes aspects from his upbringing and youth with elements from his formal education, which serves to highlight a more complex way of imagining Latin identity in and outside the United States.

As Hernandez has matured as a cartoonist, he has turned more playful. His stories in Palomar go back and forth in time, demanding the reader’s constant attention, and embrace different points of view in episodic fashion, adding tidbits of information that gradually complete the picture. Palomar comes across as almost a direct challenge to chronological order. Many of Hernandez’s techniques are evocative of late modernism, and if his drawing style evokes in us a time when the United States was naïve and candid, Hernandez’s story lines expose the reader to the fissures and cracks in contemporary society and culture.

Themes

Palomar revolves around a set of recurrent themes, the most prevalent of which is one of strong women who dominate and govern society. Luba and Chelo anchor most of the stories, while Pipo and Tonantzin provide diversions. In contrast, the lives of Heraclio, Jesús, or Israel seem less mandated by their own independent decisions but rather are guided and orchestrated by the women around them.

Despite the loose personal bonds and the muddled way in which many characters combine with each other, another ruling premise of Palomar is the importance of family and friendship. Whether they are the product of a long-lasting, stable relationship or the consequence of an improvised spontaneous fling, Hernandez’s characters share an inordinate appreciation for loved ones, which perhaps hints at their longing for more conventional interactions.

Another key theme of Palomar is the transition between the countryside and the city. The city of San Fideo plays the role of alter ego to the entrenched lifestyle of Palomar, where there is a slower pace and life seems to last longer. Moving to the city means negotiating between the preservation of one’s heritage and practical survival. Modernity mixes with customs and rituals to form an elaborate mix, giving the overall impression of an attempt to find a balance between the intricacies and challenges of living in the modern world with new possibilities for maintaining cultural tradition. In this sense, one must not read Palomar simply as a picturesque imagining of Latin (or Latin American) identity; rather, the book’s main concern is to suggest a pragmatic, less superficial explanation for cultural history while rationalizing a new way of being American.

Impact

As part of the Love and Rockets saga, Palomar shares a great deal of responsibility for the modern graphic novel boom. In the course of a decade, Hernandez went from being a lesser-known Mexican American cartoonist, who published work independently with the help of family, to being hailed as a master by the likes of Time magazine and TheNew York Times. A persistent presence at renowned comics conventions is solid proof of a growing and endearing popularity.

A thorough assessment of Herdandez’s work has emphasized the multifaceted nature of his production and has given way to several of the author’s post-Love and Rockets titles, released by Dark Horse Comics, Eros Comix, and DC Comics. Hernandez has launched a Love and Rockets collection titled High Soft Lisp (2010) and the third installment of his “Fritz B-Movie” series, Love from the Shadows (2011).

Further Reading

Hernandez, Gilbert. Beyond Palomar: A Love and Rockets Book (2007).

Hernandez, Gilbert, and Jared K. Fletcher. Sloth (2009).

Hernandez, Gilbert, Jaime Hernandez, and Mario Hernandez. Love and Rockets (1981- ).

Bibliography

Caturani, Khadijah. “Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories: A Love and Rockets Book.” Review of Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories, by Gilbert Hernandez. Library Journal 129, no. 1 (January, 2004): 80.

Flagg, Gordon. “Story Behind the Story: Hernandez’s Palomar.” The Booklist 100, no. 11 (February 1, 2004): 963.

Hernandez, Gilbert. “Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar.” Interview by Heidi MacDonald. Publishers Weekly 250, no. 42 (October 20, 2003): S12.