Gilbert Hernandez talks to The Telegraph about his latest book, Marble Season, and making a comic his daughter could read:
“I thought: what kind of book can I do that’s authentic to what I do, but that my daughter can read?” Hernandez’s daughter is 12, a little young for the zombie splatter of his Fatima: The Blood Spinners or the sexually omnivorous pornography of Birdland. “I thought I’d put myself into Marble Season,” Hernandez says, “but it wasn’t going to have all those things that my daughter can’t look at, or I don’t want her to look at. I wanted to live up to a lot of the good response I’ve had in the past, but put that effort into something that’s, let’s say, clean. For want of a better word…”
Although Marble Season seems a radical departure, Hernandez sees balance and change as essential to his creative process. “My personality is all in my comics, and my personality is all over the place,” he explains. “I’m not a trained technical artist. It’s all visceral and it just comes up – it’s where my brain is that morning when I get up.” It is this desire to experiment – he has complained in the past about being expected to be “a do-gooder cartoonist” – that led to his other ongoing project, the noirish, over-the-top Fritz books.
“In those, I’m thinking about how far the underground cartoonists had gone,” he says, “in particular S Clay Wilson and Robert Crumb. Wilson was criticised as a crazy person in his day, but now he’s one of the grand old artists of the underground. I haven’t even gone as far as Crumb, and yet he’s an American icon. I want to push myself, in a way, so my imagination goes crazy with inventive horror.”
The Telegraph.
Like this:
Like Loading...
