Chance In Hell
Fantagraphics
Palomar writer/artist Gilbert Hernandez’s new graphic novel is rooted in a bit of self-referential high conceptism. It’s apparently the first in a series of stand-alone stories bringing to life the fictional filmography of Hernandez’s Love and Rockets character Fritz, the buxom B-movie actress.
One need not have ever heard of Fritz, Love and Rockets or Hernandez to enjoy the story. The suggestion that this is one of her films is notable only as a wink to fans, and perhaps for the fact that she’s a B-queen, whereas this is an A-list art film of a graphic novel.
It’s the life story of Empress, whom we first meet as a freckle-faced toddler living in what looks to be a savage, postapocalyptic junkyard. Like all kids who live there, she’s in constant danger of being raped, but she’s eventually adopted by a kind poetry editor in the city. As a teenager, she befriends a teenaged pimp; brutal coincidence sends her to a convent, and then we meet her as an adult in a troubled marriage.
Like in a lot of Hernandez’s work, a streak of magical realism runs through the book, contributing to the art-film feel of it. Featuring strong cartooning and a compelling narrative, it’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect from Hernandez at this point.
The Architect
Big Head Press
The most well-known architect in America, Frank Lloyd Wright had a somewhat scandalous personal life and is widely believed to be the inspiration for Ayn Rand’s egomaniacal architect, Howard Roark, in The Fountainhead. But he never killed his young wife, her lover and himself, nor did he, to my knowledge, perform druidic rites and worship mushrooms.
Writer Mike Baron’s Wright-inspired title character, named Roark Dexter Smith, does that and more. Baron’s ambitions with this tale are not quite as lofty as Rand’s with The Fountainhead, of course—he’s merely telling the sort of horror story that would be well-suited for a low-budget October release. On that score, Baron’s story, like collaborator Andie Tong’s artwork, is perfectly serviceable.
Smith’s version of Fallingwater is built into a hillside, and, after some mysterious events, becomes a sort of haunted house, inherited by the bastard son of his wife and her lover. The boy, coincidentally, is an architect and fan of Smith’s work.
It’s slickly produced, but the most interesting aspect is the decision to cast a Wright analog as the demonic bogeyman/slasher figure in a comic book that reads like a formulaic horror flick.
Essential Dazzler
Marvel
There are no two words in the English language that are more antonymous than “essential,” as in something that is absolutely necessary, and “Dazzler,” as in the title of a short-lived early-’80s Marvel series about a roller-skating disco diva with the mutant ability to change sound into light and energy. So, Essential Dazzler? It’s not merely an oxymoron of a title, it’s a paradox.
Marvel’s black-and-white, phonebook-sized Essential reprints generally offer a lot of comics for a low price (here, more than 500 pages for less than the price of six single issues). But given Dazzler’s nonexistent fan base, it seems like an awful lot of trouble for the company to go to just to put out a graphic novel whose chief value is ironic—a “can you believe we published this crap?” in-joke to readers.
Created to exploit a musical trend that was already waning, Dazzler failed to become timeless—no real surprise. Still, whatever the original intention, these stories are, when read today, absolutely hilarious.