Poison River
Poison River is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Gilbert Hernandez, published in 1994 after serialization from 1989 to 1993 in the comic book Love and Rockets.
It traces the first eighteen years of Luba and her growing extended family during the 1950s–70s as they trek through a fictional Latin American country, while social and political events intrude upon their lives.
When Poison River appeared in book form in 1994, Hernandez expanded the page count and altered and added panels to improve the reading experience.
She eventually makes her way to the center of political and social happenings in the fictional Latin American village of Palomar, but little was related of her pre-Palomar life.
[16] Cold War-era political tensions form a prominent backdrop to the story, in which right-wing gangsters and others brutally target leftists such as Ofelia and her communist-sympathizer friends, who burn US President Eisenhower in effigy.
[19] The story traces the first eighteen years of Luba's life, known to long-time Love and Rockets fans as the bañadora ("bath-giver") of the fictional Latin American village of Palomar.
[21] Over the course of Love and Rockets, the Hernandez brothers made increasing using of what Joseph Witek calls "uncued closure":[d] frequent use of abrupt ellipsis to pack large amounts of narrative into a small number of panels, relying on readers to fill in the gaps.
While women take prominent roles in the social and political life of Palomar, a patriarchal mood dominates Poison River's crime-ridden cities.
[20] His expressionistic style ranges from naturalism to exaggerated cartoon distortion, a highly stylized approach that nonetheless captures nuances of expression and the individuality of his characters' features.
[10] During the serialization Hernandez turned to other outlets to take the pressure off completing Poison River, such as in the pornographic Birdland series in which two-dimensional, carefree characters have promiscuous sex without fear of AIDS or pregnancy.
The poor reader reception of Poison River contributed to the Hernandez brothers' decision to bring Love and Rockets to an end in 1996, by which point Gilbert had already returned to more self-contained Palomar stories that were easier for a serial readership to consume.
[15] During Poison River's serialization, Love and Rockets #36 was among a number of publications marked "Adults Only" and wrapped in plastic that were seized by the South African vice squad.
Since its completion, he has chosen to serialize certain works, such as Julio's Day (2012) and Me for the Unknown in the second volume of Love and Rockets; and to publish others as stand-alone graphic novels, such as Sloth (2006) and Chance in Hell (2007).
[29] Critic Anne Rubenstein found the jumps in time and physical similarity of many characters—many related to each other—to be particularly hard to keep track of, especially compared to Love and Rockets X, whose chronology was straightforward and whose characters were much easier to tell apart visually.
[31] Latin American cultural references largely unfamiliar to English-speaking audiences, such as to lucha libre, Frida Kahlo, Cantinflas, and Memín Pinguín, may also have played in a role in the book's cold reception.
[30] In 1997 Publishers Weekly described the work as "an epic Latin American melodrama of lost identity, political violence and polymorphous sexuality", whose "complex plotting is occasionally confusing", but with "characterizations, dialogue and relationships [that] are vividly, emotionally engaging".
[32] Charles Hatfield considered Poison River "the apogee of Hernandez's art to date" for "wed[ding] formal complexity to thematic ambition".
