Hernandez has a Chance in Hell in Hollywood

by Sasha Watson, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 5/22/2007

Gilbert Hernandez may always be best known for Palomar, the fictional Central American town that has provided a setting for much of his serialized work in Love and Rockets. For another artist, this might prove limiting but for "Beto," as he signs his work, Palomar has proven an endless source of stories and forms. In his new graphic novel, Chance in Hell, Hernandez gives readers a completely new fictional world, but one that still has its roots in Palomar.

Fritz is the younger half-sister of Luba, a central figure in the Palomar stories. Hernandez has said that Fritz is one of the first characters he created, but it's only in recent years that he's delved deeply into her career as a sci-fi and B-movie actress. Having "basically planned out Fritz's career on paper," Hernandez describes her trajectory as similar to that of real-life movie stars "who start out with bit parts in exploitation movies, then get better parts, become famous, and then start to fall because they're getting paid so well that they have to do projects just to keep the money going.... [T]he movies become throwaways."

Chance in Hell is also the name of Fritz's first movie and her only "art film," says Hernandez, though Fritz appears only briefly as a prostitute. The idea of doing a graphic novel based on each of Fritz's films came to him after he tried adapting the film stories to short stories in Love and Rockets. As he did so, though, "that plot line developing her film career took off and I started seeing so many different directions I could go with it." The result is a planned series of three graphic novels depicting the stories of Fritz's early films, though there could be more if readers' response is positive.

Following the three-act structure of the film world, Chance in Hell is divided into three separate sections, each of which illustrates a different moment in the life of Empress, the protagonist. The first is set in "the pit," an anarchistic urban trash heap, where Empress, at this point a happy-go-lucky little girl, is alternately cared for and abused by the older male denizens of the place. The pit is the opposite of Palomar. "If such a place existed," said Hernandez, anyone who came from there would have "little chance for a decent life." Indeed, in the two stories that follow, "even though Empress gets out of it, she can't relate to normal life." Hernandez wonders if this will prove troubling to his readers. "When people read my work, they're looking for Palomar," he acknowledged, "for community, for characters who wear their emotions on their sleeves."

Empress, on the other hand, shows almost no emotion. As drawn by Hernandez, her face is a blank, showing age but little emotion and no real connection to other characters. "She's cold and removed," said Hernandez. He admitted that this can be "a tough sell with editors, but that's the story. It's about someone that's not able to love." It was precisely this dysfunctional coldness that interested Hernandez in the project. "For me, the exciting part was taking chances with characters not being sympathetic, looking at the weird contradictions that screwed-up people have, and going against my own type."

Where the Palomar stories always return to the understanding between people who live side by side in both good and bad circumstances, each of these stories ends with isolation, violence and unresolved conflict. Chance in Hell tells the story of an absence of community and thus becomes the negative of Palomar, where any moment of connection is inevitably eclipsed by violence and inescapable isolation. Other projects that Hernandez has in the works treat a similarly desolate world. "There are violent things that happen and they're not resolved," he said. "These are dark, creepy stories that have their roots in reality. All this horrible violence happens and people just have to walk away and live with it." Chance in Hell represents a shift toward more adult comics and also toward exploration of the darker, "trashier" side of things. "I love to write trash," Hernandez said. Another self-contained graphic novel by Hernandez to be released by Dark Horse at the end of the summerexplores a self-contained dark world, one that's also about disaffected youth and violence that he describes as "a creepy psychological thriller."

Hernandez said all this darkness may have something to do with the movies he's sought out over the past eight or so years. Thanks to DVD releases and, more recently, YouTube, he's been watching "strange B-movies from the '50s and '60s, exploitation drive-in movies, the nuttiest stuff that originally was supposed to just disappear" after its release. These movies represent "a weird little world" that existed in Hollywood before the financial stakes were too high for experimentation.

Fritz is the stepping stone that leads us into this new world for Hernandez's readers, but the story does more than provide another look at the characters of Palomar and their branching families; it's a showcase for Hernandez's versatility as a writer. Fritz's next movie is previewed on the last page of Chance in Hell. It's called "The Troublemakers," and panels of Fritz and others holding guns and wearing masks promise B-movie grunge that both Hernandez and his readers can look forward to.