Book-A-Day 2014 #176: Fatima: The Blood Spinners by Gilbert Hernandez

Gilbert Hernandez has not been shy about his love of pulpy stories -- his work is full of them, from the semi-series of "movies" that one of his "real" characters acted in (like The Troublemakers, Speak of the Devil, and Love from the Shadows) to Girl Crazy (Day 115, his first solo comic after Love & Rockets broke up in the mid-90s), and even his Love & Rockets work is full of gangsters and soap opera. He's never gone far from the great wells of mainstream storytelling, love and fear and anger and betrayal, and seems to be as happy to present them in lurid form as in a more refined style.

Fatima: The Blood Spinners, as you might guess from the title, is not one of the more refined books: it's a pure blast of pulp, set in a near future ravaged by a supposed wonder-drug that turns its users into mindless zombies. (And yet druglords still try to sell it, because that's what druglords do in pulpy stories -- never mind if killing their customers with the first dose is not a smart business practice at all.) Fatima is our heroine, the requisite killing machine whose heart is on the verge of breaking -- she's seen too much, done too much, and the man she loves, Jody, barely notices her.

But there's no time to dwell on any of that: there's spin addicts to kill, and their druglord suppliers to find and eliminate, horrifying double-crosses to survive, and -- most of all -- shocking revelations about the world to come out, as they always must. Fatima can't be the one perfect savior of a horrible world if that world doesn't keep getting ever more horrible, can she?

Fatima moves quickly, jumping from one dramatic, stressful situation to another -- both the book and the woman herself. It's not deep, and it's not serious, but if you like seeing that Beto inky blood spilling all over the lovingly rendered pages, this is a great dose off Hernandez pulp.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index