Poison River

Poison River is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Gilbert Hernandez, published in 1994 after serialization from 1989 to 1993 in the comic book Love and Rockets. The story follows the life of the character Luba from her birth until her arrival in Palomar, the fictional Central American village in which most of Hernandez's stories in Love and Rockets take place.

The non-linear, magic realist story is complex and experimental. Set in the 1950s–70s, it traces the first eighteen years of the character Luba and her growing extended family as they trek through a fictional Latin American country, while social and political events intrude upon their lives. Each chapter focuses on a different character—Luba herself rarely takes center stage. The story ends with Luba and her family appearing at the outskirts of the village of Palomar at the point when Hernandez's first Palomar story begins.

Long-time readers of Love and Rockets found the serialization of Poison River difficult to follow, and new readers found it disorienting and offputting. Unlike in his previous serial, Human Diastrophism, Hernandez made no attempt to mold the instalments into episodes to fit the serial nature of Love and Rockets. When Poison River appeared in book form in 1994, Hernandez expanded the page count and altered and added panels to improve the reading experience. The book was a turning point for Hernandez and his approach to comics and is an early example of the growing pains the graphic novel form suffered in the 1980s and 1990s.

Synopsis

Luba and her growing extended family trek through a fictional Latin American country from the 1950s to the 1970s, with social and political events intruding in their lives.^[1] The story mostly focuses on the people around Luba, focus a chapter on each — Luba herself rarely takes center stage.^[2]

The story opens as Luba's mother Maria is thrown out of her wealthy husband's house when he discovers he is not Luba's father. Maria, her lover, her maid, and Luba live an impoverished but seemingly happy life until Maria leaves with a wealthy new lover. Luba grows older and her cousin Ofelia joins her. Luba is seduced by an older conga player, whom she marries. Her life becomes entangled with the drugs, gangsters, and sex of the underworld^[3] as her husband, who is obsessed with the image of Luba's mother, becomes involved in organized crime and his sexual fetishes. The right-wing gangsters who surround Luba ruthlessly terminate "leftists" in the name of patriotism and business.^[4]

Events lead Luba, her daughter and Ofelia to the outskirts of the village of Palomar, where they begin a new life. The story finishes at the point where the first "Heartbreak Soup" begins.^[5]

Background and publication

Love and Rockets was an alternative comic book showcasing the work of the Hernandez brothers: Mario (b. 1953), Gilbert (b. 1957), and Jaime (b. 1959).^[6] Gilbert's Luba appeared in the first issue, but the character as she was to be known first appeared in his Heartbreak Soup stories as a strong-willed, hammer-wielding bañadora, or bathhouse girl. She eventually made her way to the center of political and social happenings in the fictional Latin American village of Palomar, but little was related of her pre-Palomar life.^[3]

In the Heartbreak Soup stories, Hernandez gradually took advantage of serialization to broaden his narrative scope;^[7] the stories became longer and more ambitious, and Hernandez delved more deeply into the backgrounds of his characters.^[8] In issues #21–26 appeared Human Diastrophism^[9]—a complex story in which politics and the outside world intrude on the insular Palomar with dramatic consequences.^[10]

Hernandez serialized Poison River in Love and Rockets #29–40^[11] alongside his Love and Rockets X and Jaime's eight-part Wig Wam Bam.^[5] The completed work first appeared in 1994^[11] as volume 12 of Love and Rockets. In 2007 it was included in the Beyond Palomar volume of The Love and Rockets Library, which included Love and Rockets X.^[9] For the completed book edition Hernandez divided the story into seventeen chapters and added another sixteen pages, and prefaced each chapter with an illustration of one of the characters, suggesting that the following chapter was to focus on that character.^[12]

Style and analysis

Posion River is Hernandez's longest and most complex work.^[13] The highly experimental and non-linear book lacks traditional narrative transitions and features magic realist storytelling.^[11] Hernandez has stated that his intention was to create an "epic", a complex graphic novel of the character Luba's life, putting "everything [he] possibly had going on in [his] head" into the work.^[14] The story traces the first eighteen years of Luba's life, known to long-time Love and Rockets fans as the bañadora ("bath-giver") of the fictional Latin American village of Palomar.^[1] Luba rarely takes center stage in the narrative; rather, she provides a focal point around which the stories of the otherwise unrelated large cast of characters come together.^[15]

Over the course of Love and Rockets, the Hernandez brothers made increasing using of what Joseph Witek calls "uncued closure":^{[lower-alpha 1]} frequent use of abrupt ellipsis to pack large amounts of narrative into a small number of panels, relying on readers to fill in the gaps.^[16] In Poison River the gaps between panels, which readers normally processed unconsciously, come to the forefront in a slow, staccato rhythm. Panels are crowded with abundant dialogue, stretching out their perceived duration in time, while transitions from one panel to another are sudden—as are transitions from scene to scene, which can happen several times per page. Hernandez limits the narrative only to important details, showing rapid growth in his characters and situations in limited space, rather than relating the story in a traditional step-by-step manner.^[17] He compresses great a great deal of action into a minimum of panels, as in a two panel sequence which critic Jordan Raphael says "delineates both the entirety (action and consequences) of a shootout between rival gangs even as [Henrandez] reveals each character's guiding motivation".^[15]

Hernandez cartoons in a high-contrast balance of blacks and whites with a line Jordan described as "alternatively loose and tight".^[15] He deploys a highly stylized style that nonetheless captures nuances of expression and the individuality of his characters' features.^[18] He avoids using captions—jumps in time are left to the reader to sort out. The copious, compact dialogue gives the reader an impression of what is going on at a given moment, but filtered through the particular speaker.^[17]

Unlike with Human Diastrophism, Hernandez made no attempt to mold the serialization into discrete episodes in Love and Rockets. The story confused many readers—especially new ones, who had difficulty orienting themselves to the complex, experimental story in the midst of the telling.^[5] Hernandez found serialization an impediment to the type of storytelling he was attempting with Poison River. Since its completion, he has chosen to serialize certain works, such as Julio's Day (2012) and Me for the Unknown in the second volume of Love and Rockets; and to publish others as stand-alone graphic novels, such as Sloth (2006) and Chance in Hell (2007).^[11]

Reception and legacy

Readers of Love and Rockets found the story, with its complexity and non-linearity, confusing and hard to follow. New readers to Love and Rockets had an especially difficult time orienting themselves to the story.^[5] During the serialization Hernandez turned to other outlets to take the pressure of completing Posion River: in the pornographic Birdland series two-dimensional, carefree characters have promiscuous sex without fear of AIDS or pregnancy. The poor reader reception of Posion River contributed to the Hernandez's decision to bring the series to an end in 1996, by which point Gilbert had already returned to more self-contained Palomar stories more easy for a serial readership to consume.^[13]

Critic Anne Rubenstein found the jumps in time and physical similarity of many characters—many related to each other—to be particularly hard to keep track of, especially compared to Love and Rockets X, whose chronology was straightforward and whose characters were much easier to tell apart visually. The tight plot, she says, was particularly demanding for readers, as careless reading early on could easily result in a lack of understanding later.^[19] Teachers such as Derek Parker Royal have commented that their students are often confused by, or resistant to, the complexity of Poison River.^[20] Latin American cultural references largely unfamiliar to English-speaking audiences, such as to lucha libre, Frida Kahlo, Cantinflas, and Memín Pinguín, may also have played in a role in the book's cold reception.^[19]

Québécois cartoonist and comics critic David Turgeon considered Poison River "a major comics work of uncommon inspiration".^[17] Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz stated he likely would not have become a writer if he had not read Poison River.^[21]

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Works cited

Further reading