Children of Palomar & Other Tales by Gilbert & Mario Hernandez

Today is not Monday: my tag is a lie. But I'm doing something else on Mondays these days, so everything else has to shift over, like the crowd in the backseat of an big '70s car as they pick up one more person on the way to some big event.

Children of Palomar & Other Tales is also not one thing, if that matters: it's the fifteenth in the omnibus series collecting "all" of Love & Rockets, under the general title The Love & Rockets Library. It's a mostly-Gilbert Hernandez book - there are a couple of pieces Gilbert drew, but were written by his brother Mario, the Halley's Comet of the Hernandez comics family. And it gathers three long stories and one short one: two of the long stories were previous collected as books on their own, while the other is a quirky thing that I suspect wasn't seen as commercial enough for that.

So what we have here is Julio's Day - the story of one man's life, somewhere in America (southwestern US, maybe, or perhaps nearby Mexico, since they seem to go off to WW I at the same time as American forces), over the course of a century, and what changes around him - and then the flashback stories of The Children of Palomar (originally a comics series called New Tales of Old Palomar), set in the timeframe, or slightly earlier, of Gilbert's first burst of Palomar stories in the 1980s.

Since I already covered those stories in detail, and don't have anything new to say about them, I'll leave it at that: dive back into the links for more if you want.

Then we have the Mario-written pieces. He's a much more clotted writer than his brothers, maybe more of a traditional old-fashioned comics writer, with lots of captions and random action and density of activity and words on his pages - deconstruction has no home in a Mario story. They read very differently than the all-Gilbert pieces, which have more space and grace to them, doing a lot more of the storytelling through art and visuals.

The short story is "Chiro El Indio," from the first issue of the book-format Love and Rockets series, in which a couple (literally, a couple) of rural goofballs are tricked by smarter, nastier people into religious mania (different for the two of them) in order to steal their land, but then the ending has an actual god zapping people, so...I think the plot didn't work?

The long Mario story, "Me for the Unknown" - reprinted from a stretch of the second Love & Rockets series, around twenty years ago - leads off the volume, and it's a pretty typical Mario thing: corporate skullduggery and violent criminal shenanigans in fictional Latin America, involving the complex family of an exploitative company. It's a nine-part story, and each part sees new complications which are mostly forgotten or changed by the next section - again, this is all heavily narrated and deeply wordy, explaining all of these things that then shift entirely a few pages later.

I will admit I'm not a fan of Mario's comics, and leave it at that.

If you are a fan of Mario, this is the first new collection of his stuff in a while, so that's good news. Otherwise, it's a great book if you like having the uniform series, and less good if you already have Julio's Day and Children of Palomar.