Marble Season

by Gilbert Hernandez

Overview

AMAZON.COM'S BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL OF 2013!

"Marble Season sometimes feels like one long, seamless shot of budding love, brimming violence and suddenly struck friendships. This is a highly physical, meta-Peanuts suburban universe in which adults are off-camera, but navigating other kids is plenty harrowing." -Washington Post Best Comics of 2013

The untold coming-of-age story from a contemporary comics master

Marble Season is the semiautobiographical novel by the acclaimed cartoonist Gilbert Hernandez, author of the epic masterpiece Palomar and cocreator, with his brothers, Jaime and Mario, of the groundbreaking Love and Rockets comic book series. Marble Season is his first book with Drawn & Quarterly, and one of the most anticipated books of 2013. It tells the untold stories from the early years of these American comics legends, but also portrays the reality of life in a large family in suburban 1960s California. Pop-culture references-TV shows, comic books, and music-saturate this evocative story of a young family navigating cultural and neighborhood norms set against the golden age of the American dream and the silver age of comics.
Middle child Huey stages Captain America plays and treasures his older brother's comic book collection almost as much as his approval. Marble Season subtly and deftly details how the innocent, joyfully creative play that children engage in (shooting marbles, backyard performances, and organizing treasure hunts) changes as they grow older and encounter name-calling naysayers, abusive bullies, and the value judgments of other kids. An all-ages story, Marble Season masterfully explores the redemptive and timeless power of storytelling and role play in childhood, making it a coming-of-age story that is as resonant with the children of today as with the children of the sixties.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770460867
Publisher:	Drawn & Quarterly
Publication date:	04/16/2013
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 10.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Gilbert Hernandez was born in Oxnard, California, and is the cocreator, with his brothers, Jaime and Mario, of the acclaimed comic book series Love and Rockets. Hernandez has won numerous awards for his stories, including the Kirby Award, the Inkpot Award, the Harvey Award, and the United States Artists Literature Fellowship. He resides in Las Vegas, Nevada, with his wife and daughter.

Editorial Reviews

Someday they’re going to run out of superlatives to heap upon the lap of Hernandez (co-creator of Love and Rockets), but not yet. This graphic novel is a sublime and soulful portrait of childhood through the eyes of Huey, a middle child (like Hernandez). The book follows him and his brothers, friends, and the various cliques and clubs of neighborhood kids from toddlerhood to teenage years. This is the pure stuff. Hernandez captures the joy and obsession of childhood days—comic books and trading cards; baseball and “let’s pretend”; the terror of big kids, scary neighbors, and girls; superstition and ritual; television and pop music; and parents (forever offscreen, like in Peanuts) who rein in the fun for no discernible reason. As usual, Hernandez’s artwork adeptly highlights his skill infusing seemingly simple and open panels with intense memory and meaning. Proust had his madeleines, but Hernandez’s inspirations are the smell of newsprint comic books, the sound of a tinny AM transistor radio playing the Beatles, and the taste of a marble on his tongue. This lyrical, memorable book stands alongside the sequential work of Stanley’s Little Lulu, Fitzgerald’s Dennis the Menace comic books, and Schulz’s Peanuts as a masterful, involving, funny, and real portrait of kids and their wide world, unlimited by reality—until, at least, it’s time to go home for dinner. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Hernandez is brilliant on the particular embarrassments of growing up . . . and on the way its disappointments, however trivial, linger into adulthood . . . Marble Season is a treat: beady, nostalgic and sometimes unexpectedly piercing.” —Guardian

“Set in a lower-middle-class multiracial Southwestern suburb in the early 1960s, Marble Season is a wonderfully evocative account of a group of kids for whom popular culture... serve as both a lingua franca and a not wholly reliable guide to the mysteries of social life...in Marble Season, the slow encroachment of adolescence, both a threat and a promise, gives the work emotional heft.” —The Globe & Mail

“In this semi-autobiographical tale, Mr. Hernandez captures the wonder of childhood — the joy of imagination, an appreciation for comic books and all the ultimately petty but seemingly world-shattering trials and tribulations of friendships during that time in one's life.” —New York Times

From the Publisher

In this semiautobiographical chronicle of young Huey and the 1960s California neighborhood he grows up in, the popular and talented Hernandez (best known for the innovative alternative comic Love and Rockets, cocreated with his brothers Jaime and Mario) captures a snapshot of childhood that will resonate with most readers. Neither overly rosy and romantic nor dark and dramatic, the book focuses on the real bulk of a child’s daily life: the long summer months in which nothing eventful happens, the neighborhood kids who come and go, the tomboys and bullies, the temptation of small-time crime, and the confusion and innocence of early sexuality. Parents and classrooms are never depicted; the action takes place in the real kid world—alleys, front yards, and friends’ bedrooms. Peppered with casual pop culture references to the Beatles (called “The Beatos” by the kids), Elvis, Mars Attacks, and, of course, plenty of pulp comics and monster magazines, the book features characters who hang in delicate, sweet balance between the separate worlds of childhood and adolescence.

Verdict This thoughtful homage to growing up (specifically, growing up geek) will appeal to a broad spectrum of readers. An essential addition to all teen and adult comics collections.—Ingrid Bohnenkamp, The Library Ctr., Springfield, MO
(c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Library Journal