Art and Story by Gilbert Hernandez

Dark Horse Comics $3.50

Val is a popular school athlete, she has great friends and she has supportive parents, even if her over-sexed step-mother is closer to her age than her father’s. Yet, she is unsatisfied and bored with her life. She has taken to wearing a devil mask and black jumpsuit and spying in people’s windows late at night. This kind of activity is much more related to her real interests and she gets a real thrill out of the danger of it.

Everytime I’m in the larger comic shop in Loves Park, I always notice issues of Love and Rockets, the art looks wonderful and it looks like a cute human interest comic, but the cover price is something like seven dollars, so I have yet to pick one up. Gilbert Hernandez and his brother are the minds and hands behind Love and Rockets and, because of this issue, next time I see the comic, I intend to pick up an issue. The art style of this is great, simple, thick lines that form full-bodied women reminiscent of the 1950’s when it was okay for women to eat. While the art certainly stresses sexuality, it would be odd if a comic book about a peeping Tom(or in this case Jane) was overtly pan sexual. It helps that the women are nice to look at, Hernandez knows how to draw an appealing-looking woman in black and white, but the covers for this series are wonderful, the kind of thing I’d love to have a big print of to hang on my wall.

As far as the story goes, I really like it. It’s a fast read and it says a lot to me without being too long-winded. Hernandez seems to making a statement about repressed suburban sexual identities in the sterilized, living in denial style of Christian America. Val’s parents seem to be clones of the Cleaver family from the 1950’s, but the second they’re alone, the fuck like crazy. What’s interesting about Val’s obsession to watch(this includes predominantly watching her father and step-mother have sex) is that she is popular and attractive, obviously capable of actually HAVING sex, yet this seems to disinterest her. I think this says something about our culture, but I haven’t decided what. Hernandez’s Speak of the Devil is a very potent and interesting mixture of repressed sexuality and a refusal to become complacent with the boringness of what is expected of us socially. I’ll be very interested to see where this mini-series goes.