Obviously, a healthy person would not spend time on anything like that, but I am a blogger, and so clearly not that healthy.
So my first question after reading Gilbert Hernandez's standalone 2013 graphic novel Julio's Day was whether it really counts as Love and Rockets. Oh, sure, two excerpts from it appeared first in the New Stories paperback series, but most of this story didn't, and it has no connections with any of his other L&R work. (On the other side of the argument: a lot of his L&R work has no connection to the rest of his L&R work; he's been more likely to go off on tangents than his brother Jaime.)
Since I'm writing this here now, you've probably already assumed that I decided it counted. And I did. But I had to worry the issue for a while first.
The next big question is whether it's way too reductive to call Julio's Day the story of the hundred-year-life of a completely closeted Mexican gay man. And that's a nice label, but it doesn't reflect what the book is actually about. Julio himself isn't really all that central to his own story to begin with: he's pretty colorless for a Gilbert Hernandez protagonist, overshadowed his entire life by the more vibrant members of his family.
As usual for Hernandez, "vibrant" is not at all the same thing as "positive." Julio's uncle Juan is one of the most distinctive characters here, and he's a deeply damaged person, compelling to sneak away with baby boys and do unspecified things with them. The rest of Julio's family, and the few others they interact with, are quirky in similar Gilbert Hernandez ways, but Julio himself remains transparent, the void at the center of his own story.
Like Palomar, this town is somewhere in Latin America. Also like Palomar, Hernandez will not be any more specific than that. Julio's life matches pretty closely to the twentieth century, from small bits of internal evidence, but that's all background: Julio is not involved in any great issues, and barely any small issues. He just lives here, for a long time, while other things happen around him, mostly far away.
There's a hundred pages of incidents and no real overall plot: this is a story of episodes, moments over a hundred years when Julio was there to witness them. (Or was somewhere else: the two pieces published in L&R follow other members of his family on journeys, first his father and then his grand-nephew.)
In typical Hernandez fashion, there are bizarre, horrifying diseases and deaths, and many random, mostly unhappy events -- a long life in a Gilbert Hernandez story is a sequence of sad and shocking moments, ended only by death.
The title is ironic at best, as well: not only is this the story of a hundred years, not a single day, but Julio never really had a day, either literally or metaphorically. His grand-nephew poses that question to him near the end, and that's the source for the title -- but Julio was never in the right time or place to seize that day, and maybe was never the person who could have seized that day.
Does that make Julio's Day a cautionary tale? It's not focused enough for that, and I think Hernandez would deny that impulse -- he's never been one to make a single lesson with a story. Gilbert Hernandez stories aim for the complexity and confusion of real life: too many things happening to too many people to turn it into a single narrative, and all of the lessons possible in there somewhere.
And I suspect Julio's Day is the kind of book that rewards multiple readings, to trace the connections, personal and visual, over this long century, from the moment Julio opens his mouth to be born until the moment his mouth hangs open in death.
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