Gilberto Hernández
born February 1, 1957, creator of
Heartbreak Soup
Gilbert Hernandez, half of the Mexican/American Los Hernandez brothers, has been delighting us with his stories of Luba and the denizens of Palomar for the last 30 years primarily in the pages of Love and Rockets.
Luba is a grand dame of Palomar and a favorite of Gilbert's. Here she is in all of her ages and phases from toddler to Grand Dame. |
Gilbert has said about Luba, "In BEM she was just a voodoo woman, an island lady who wanted power, wanted to take over the world. You know, it was just bullshit. She was sort of like Richard Corben’s queen bitch in Den. I just did it, I didn’t think about it at all. I decided to do Heartbreak Soup as a sequel to BEM."
After BEM, Luba took up in the small rural village of Palomar as a bañadora, or bath woman with her friend Ofelia and her child Maricela. |
Heartbreak Soup is the stories of Palomar, a primitive fictional town. Gilbert has populated it with the most fascinating and outrageous characters, including Luba, one of it's main characters. "A lot of the stuff about village and small town life in Hearbreak Soup is made up, and of course there’s stuff from movies, too. It’s a mythical town. The characters aren’t necessarily Mexican. A little kid from Colombia can read it, and think that it’s his town, and so maybe it is. I like the fact that it’s a surreal fantasy. Most of it is from what I remember when I was a kid. My momma and my aunts talking about when they were young, telling a story about where they were, “Well, we were next to the train yard and they had this big square, and there was a little market there.” Things like that. I guess I retain images pretty well from films, and where I’ve been."
"I also wanted to deglamorize her, because I didn’t want people to think, because of her big chest, that she was the hot chick all the guys wanted. I emphasized Pipo’s and Tonantizin’s good looks, and I also deglamorized Luba by having her not wear makeup, and giving her a bad attitude and a lot of kids. But you can’t win – people said, “oh she’s the earth mother.” So you can’t win. I gave Luba all those kids so she wouldn’t seem so glamorous, but that made her more glamorous."
Gilbert would write about Palomar stories until issue 26 of Love and Rockets, where he would complete his grand opus, the compltion of his Human Diastrophism.
Gilbert then went on to fill out Luba's origins with his next great work, Poison River that was serialized in Love and Rockets from 1989 to 1993.
Gilbert took a new approach to story telling with Poison River. He did away with strait forward narrative for a much more impressionistic approach to story telling, showing a bunch of vignettes which as a whole create an impression.
Love and Rockets ended with issue #50 in April of 1996. Los Hernandez bros. continued on with their work with each their own traditional size comics (6.75 x 10.25, rather than the black and white magazine size comic that Love and Rockets was). Luba would become the star of her own book and feature stories of her in American and of her kids, all grown up, and her half sisters Fritz and Petra.
It's been 30+ years that Gilbert has been thrilling us with his stories and let's hope he doesn't stop any time soon.
Gilbert quotes were taken from the Comics Journal #126, Jan 1989.
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