Aesthetic Mimicry. On Speak of the Devil by Beto Hernandez
In a few years, I hope, a sociologist-critic will realise that the current transculturalisation between the Hispanic and Anglo-Saxon worlds, which will serve as a paradigm to understand the time we are living, has been most clearly and firmly expressed in the work by Beto Hernández, rather than in the places where critics have been insistently looking. Despite this, a few critics have had a look at Love & Rockets, the exceptional magazine with which the Hernández brothers made their name. However, very few have ventured beyond the comfortable territory of easy classifications, particularly with regard to the clear differences displayed by the work of each of the brothers in their early days. Those who felt closer to the visual arts preferred Jaime’s work, which was much more suited to its time, as well as being more experimental, despite its narrative absurdity. Those who approached comic books from the perspective of narrative were likely to prefer the work by Beto (Gilbert), which was clearly inspired by Latin American literary narrators, and was much more conservative in terms of its graphics.
In the comfortable world of comparisons, which are ultimately mere simplifications, it has always been said that Beto’s stories were comparable, in the comic book world, to the universe of García Márquez. To a certain degree, there is an obvious similarity between the two, in terms of the superposition of different stories, of love and loss, but the way they are presented to the reader, with flashbacks and other resources, hint at other sources of inspiration apart from the Colombian Nobel prize winner. In any case, this label has become rooted in readers’ subconscious, and seems impossible to escape when looking at the work of Beto Hernández.
However, how can we reconcile that model with a work such as the recently translated Speak of the Devil? All we need to do is look at the details of the story’s ambience to realise a number of changes have taken place, and that it is time to review those hermetic labels. In Palomar the stories took place in village houses, cabins, shacks almost, and along dirt roads, with the characters carrying out the jobs of a society devoted to production –whether agricultural or based on handicraft-, and generally bearing Hispanic names. However, in this latest work, the narrative takes place in one of those neighbourhoods in the metropolitan area of any large American city –the legendary suburbs -, and the characters are either high school students, displaying varying degrees of adolescent awkwardness, or workers in a society founded on the services sector; and accordingly, they all have Anglo-Saxon names. However, what is truly relevant is not the setting but the narrative itself, the message distilled from the reading of this chilling story. In the face of realistic stories, where it was essential that the reader understood all of the events described, regardless of how believable they were, as was the case of the stories in Palomar, in Speak of the Devil, Beto Hernández’s narrative has undergone a huge development. The panels are larger, the dialogue more cutting and the characters do not tell us where they come from; they simply act. Keeping in mind the story of madness and murder we are reading, it seems doubly chilling to find a complete unwillingness to explain the reasons behind the events. There is a greater sense of silence and mystery, as well as a true awareness of narrative’s inability to explain or describe anything. Here, in the presence of something horrible and impossible to grasp, this latest comic by Beto Hernández resembles the work of some of the artists who have grown up reading Love & Rockets: Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, etc.
It is now time to update the old categories, and to speak about a narrator, without the need to qualify the term, who knows how to articulate and build a story, regardless of his past production and training. This work is a gem to be enjoyed.
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