Tonta by Jaime Hernandez

Jaime Hernandez spent thirty-five years mostly making comics stories about pretty girls (to be extremely reductive about it). Some were chubby, some were skinny -- and they got older over time, though he tended to introduce new younger characters as well. But even latter-day Hopey, as sour and grumpy as she can be, is still pretty darn cute...maybe because we remember who she was back in the day.

Those characters were often confused or wrong or lost or heading at high speed in entirely the wrong direction. Frankly, I could even argue that they were almost always at least one of those things.

Tonta, though, was Jaime's first non-cute protagonist. He draws her round-faced and gap-toothed, cross-eyed and eternally gawping, with a face that he previously reserved for old ladies. She's just as confused and wrong-headed as any of the other women in his stories, maybe even more so. But people take her less seriously, though there's still at least one boy lurking around, trying to get with her. (There always is, for everyone. In some rare cases, it's even mutual.)

Adding to the goofiness, Tonta is not consistently the main character of the stories in Tonta. Her older half-sister Vivian (aka "The Frogmouth," who is too pretty and too pushy for her own good) drives a lot of the stories here, and the rest of Tonta's complicated family is the engine of the underlying central plot. Tonta is the second youngest of a gaggle of half-siblings, who seem to be spread over something like twenty years, with the youngest in the mid-teens. They all have the same mother; most of their fathers are different. Most of their fathers are dead, frankly, and more than one has died in suspicious circumstances that seem to lead back to that mother.

That all comes out as the stories go on: when we first meet Tonta we know she's related to Vivian, but several other siblings show up in subtly different roles first and then seem to be retconned into the family story, as if Jaime thought of it after a few of the stories were already published. (Or maybe he was just being more subtle than I paid attention to; that's always possible.)

Tonta, the character, is somewhere in her high school years: she knows how to drive, but probably isn't supposed to be doing it. She's loud and goofily exuberant and crazy about punk and a boy or two. She wants to have fun and isn't all that clear about what's actually going on within her family -- again, she's a pretty typical Jaime protagonist, except his previous versions of that character tended to be drawn as femme fatales. Tonta is very much not that, though she's like to be, intermittently (at least for the right punky guy).

I'm not sure if the tone shifts entirely work in the Tonta stories: there's serious drama, with lots of family secrets, and then there's Tonta being super-goofy, making faces and being deeply confused. They're mostly not in the same stories, but Jaime works with lots of short stories building up to something bigger, so the goofy is right next to the serious, over and over again.

I don't think this is the end of Tonta's story; I think we'll see more of her and her family, and that she will continue to be the way into that story for readers. So, for now, I'll say that she's an interesting departure for Jaime, and that it's good to see him stretch in that direction...but that I'm not sure if the mixture is fully baked yet.