Blubber

by Gilbert Hernandez

Overview

The great Gilbert Hernandez's unfettered Id unleashed! Absurd, explicit, and profanely funny, Blubber makes all other comics blush.

Drawn from the first five issues of Gilbert Hernandez's comic book series Blubber, an absurdly X-rated showcase for the most surreally transgressive of Hernandez's short stories, weirdos (Blubberoo, Mr. Elvis, John Dick, the Mentor), creatures (the Mau Guag, Doogs, and Orlats…), and anthropomorphs (the Cloarks, the Kekeppy) visit places where most comics fear to go. Blubber veers between an absurdist satire of porn (and occasionally nature documentaries) and a celebration of unbridled hedonism, serving as a defiant provocation to those unable to appreciate the difference between cartooning and obscenity. As R. Crumb said, "It's only lines on paper, folks!" It is also a howlingly funny book, filled with a rogues gallery of colorful comic book monsters (the Pollum, the Junipero Molestat, the mythical Forest Nimmy) and characters (T.A.C. Man, Mr. Hippy, Padre Puto, the Snowman, Baron Mungo, Red Tempest) that echoes the sheer visual imagination of Jack Kirby.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781683964865
Publisher:	Fantagraphics Books
Publication date:	01/04/2022
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	1,119,000
Product dimensions:	6.70(w) x 10.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Gilbert Hernandez was born in 1957 in Oxnard, California, and is considered one of the greatest living comics writer-artists in the world. In 1982, Hernandez co-created, along with his brothers Mario and Jaime, the ongoing, iconic, internationally acclaimed comic book series Love and Rockets, one of the greatest bodies of work the medium has ever seen. In addition to his work on Love and Rockets, its spinoffs, and side series, Hernandez has released a prodigious amount of original graphic novels and miniseries, such as Sloth, Bumperhead, and Marble Season. He also collaborated with Darwyn Cooke on The Twilight Children for DC. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2017 and is the recipient of a Fellow Award from United States Artists and a PEN Center USA’s Graphic Literature Award for Outstanding Body of Work. Hernandez lives in Ventura, CA, with his wife and daughter.

Editorial Reviews

"Hernandez has become the medium's David Lynch or Guy Maddin, rolling his personal obsessions and freewheeling abstractions into stories that present as pulp, then take some very weird turns."

The A.V. Club

"Every writer should be so lucky to have the imaginative chops that Hernandez shows."

Southwest Review

"Hernandez is one of the great craftsmen of modern comics. ... Here, [he] offers a menagerie of weird invented monsters — like the Pollum, the Junipero Molestat, the mythical Forest Nimmy — engaged in unspeakable and strange acts."

New York Times Book Review

"Plot, as can be the case in Gilbert Hernandez's more perverse work, is optional here: your eyes are immediately drawn to whatever extreme depiction of sexual deviancy is filling up the page."

The Comics Journal

08/01/2021

Hernandez (Hypnotwist; Scarlet by Starlight) leaves virtually no taboo undepicted in this volume collecting the first five issues of his "Blubber" comic book series. It opens by describing the nightmarishly surreal, scatological mating habits of cryptids called "doogs" and becomes even more shockingly transgressive in the stories that follow. An incontinent professional wrestler disrupts an orgiastic secret ritual, much to the chagrin of the fan who invited him. A priest suffers a sexually charged nightmare featuring zombies and a faun. A cavalcade of characters drawn from superhero and pulp conventions engage in vicious battles and sexually explicit misadventures, often simultaneously. In one of the final stories, a fuzzy snowman-like creature, gazing upon an exaggeratedly buxom woman, quotes Akira Kurosawa: "To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes." In the next panel, the creature, overcome with lust as the woman unbuttons her shirt, exclaims, "The artist has lost all credibility!" This might not sound hysterically funny in the abstract, but readers who encounter the moment after absorbing the unbelievably provocative content preceding it may well find themselves doubled over with laughter. VERDICT Open-minded adult audiences might thrill to watch Hernandez (one of the comic book medium's most revered storytellers) allow his imagination to run wild, without restrictions.

Library Journal