Proof That the Devil Loves You by Gilbert Hernandez

So Gilbert Hernandez makes his regular comics stories - I almost said "normal," but that's not the right word here - with continuing characters set in a real world. They get pretty rococo; Hernandez is fond of overcomplication and of turning his theme-amplifier knob up to eleven and then trying to twist it up even further. But scenes have the same people in them, and those people have regular relationships that the stories explain and depict.

He also makes stories that are meant to be fictions within his already-fictional world - I think they've all been "movies" so far, but I don't want to be dogmatic. (Hernandez is deeply inventive, both stylistically and formally.) These focus on his character Fritz, who was a basically normal-proportioned woman who worked as a psychologist in her earliest appearances, but at some point turned into a worldwide icon as a bad actress with breasts larger than her head. [1]

I'll take Fritz's unlikely career as read, and the vastly more unlikely worldwide army of Fritz imitators likewise: in Hernandez's worlds, manias just seem to spread, and people don't act rationally except on rare occasions.

But, anyway: there are the core Gilbert Love & Rockets stories, set in a secondary world. Then there are the "movie books," which are comics versions of movies that exist in that secondary world. Hernandez has done a number of these: Chance in Hell, The Troublemakers, Love from the Shadows, Maria M. They tend to be pulpy - they're bad movies; this is on purpose - but they do lean into some of Hernandez's strengths.

That finally brings us to Proof That the Devil Loves You, which is the most recent "Fritz Movie Book," published in 2023. It collects five stories, or story-pieces, that appeared in his serial comics over the pervious decade, somewhat reorganized and expanded...but not into a single narrative.

The descriptive copy hints at this, but doesn't quite say it: Proof is a collection of scenes that don't seem to be from the same movie. In fact, two of the six somewhat separate stories  here might not be from a movie at all. I suspect that Hernandez didn't so much turn these five previous-published pieces into a single graphic novel as he cleaned them up slightly and set them alongside each other, and then walked away.

The six stories - the first has the book's title; the others are untitled - are, roughly:

• In a Palomar-esque small town, a female sheriff is one of a large number of monomaniacs, which leads to tragedy. Meanwhile, the Fritz character is a wacky oddball who may be mentally ill and who seems to die off-panel for possibly thematically important reasons. This actually has a beginning and an end, and is arch and affected but all of that seems to be on purpose; think of it as a misfire from a Wes Anderson type, maybe.
• Three weird creatures drive into Vegas, with a lot of money because of something possibly-criminal that they vaguely celebrate. Strange things happen to them, and two seem to die or disappear, while the third is left to keep gambling, we assume eternally. The other two drive away, in what may be a parallel universe.
• Fritz is an "astronette" who needs to uncap some thing on an alien world. It is difficult, and she has a radio argument with her controllers during it, but she does it. A beam of light streaks off, and missiles try to destroy her escaping ship, but she survives.
• A passel of Fritzes, each in costume for a specific story and called by the name of that story, are in a tall building. The central Fritz is from a movie called Chest Fever; we also see non-Fritz actresses from that movie. The Fritzes talk about their careers in metaphoric ways, change their clothing, travel to different floors, come and go randomly. It is all very philosophical, and ends with our central Fritz transforming, or something. It is also super-obviously Symbolic and Important.
• A Prince Valiant-looking dude with glowing flying boots meets a furry demon-woman (played by Fritz) who, along with her imp sidekicks, tries to kill him in a typically icky Hernandez way. It doesn't take, and two other Prince Valiant types appear to scold her. Everyone swears every other word in a very "modern" way, which is probably important.
• Fritz and some guy - he seems to be connected to her career, an agent or manager or studio guy, and might have a name but it's not mentioned here - wander around, talking about various things, mostly in philosophical mode but using mostly-grounded and specific language (unlike the Fritzes-in-metaphoric-Hollywood-as-a-building before). This is probably "real" within the world of Love & Rockets. It's less artificial than a lot of the similar conversations in Lovers and Haters, and looks like it could actually lead somewhere - so, of course, it closes out the book.

As often with Hernandez, his pages are interesting and his artistic choices bold - sometimes bold in the "that is great" sense; sometimes in the "why on earth would he expect that to work?" sense - and I do believe that he thinks these pieces come together to form an overall narrative. But I think that narrative exists about 65% in Hernandez's own head, with only the remnant actually making it onto these pages.

And, in common with a lot of late Hernandez, this is not the place to start. You don't need to go all the way back to Palomar, but you should start earlier in the Fritz stories, maybe Three Sisters. He's in what we might call a remix period currently, taking many of his core concerns and themes and bouncing them around in different permutations - it can be arresting, but you need to have a grounding in the more conventional stories to get much of anything out of it.

[1] Hernandez's work now features many characters with breasts larger than their heads, and some men with biceps larger than their heads, for reasons I hope that are essentially artistic but that I suspect are not.