Really excited that my new piece for the #awesome online mag HILOBROW.COM has gone live! See it here: https://www.hilobrow.com/2019/05/15/seriocomic-20/ . . . OR . . . keep reading for the longer (unsnipped by Hilobrow editor/magician Joshua Glenn's devilish pruners) director's cut:
Ghost in the Mirror
Gilbert Hernandez's Errata
Stigmata Revisited
William A. Nericcio
16 May 2019
Can it ever be written that a
comic book panel, or a series of them, changed the career of an English
Professor?
Mind you, please delete the
image of a be-tweeded, bearded, white man with leather patched elbows, pipe,
and avuncular grin. I am a down and dirty creature of the U.S./Mexican border,
and while not quite “street” I am a little scruffier than your average Ivory
Tower dandy gringo.
And I am mad about comics—all
comics! Richie Rich, Little Audrey, Sad Sack, the Silver Surfer, Betty and Veronica ….
Don’t get me started on Betty and Veronica.
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| As with all images on this posting, click to enlarge! |
But it is the comic I pick up
in 1985—the one with Gilbert Hernandez’s “Tears from Heaven: The Life and Times
of Errata Stigmata” that breaks my mind, or scars my synapses, or wounds my
ocular ontological core.
Errata, a young girl growing up in a fictional Central
American town called Palomar (think Mayberry with sex, drugs, and aliens),
witnesses the stabbing murder of her parents by a serial killer named Tomaso
(we don’t know this in 1985—I would argue that Beto, aka Gilbert, doesn’t know
this in 1985, or has not dreamed it up yet).
In that instant, in that
witnessing, everything goes to pot, and her destiny is sealed. She grows up as a precocious young adolescent
being raised by a Jewish-American uncle and utterly abusive aunt, Zephie, in
the United States.
The result of her murder-filled
witnessing?
She suffers from the
stigmata, hence her name, that is, she bleeds from the sites associated with
the crucifixion of Jesus.
Jesus Christ!
In the panels here, lifted
from the original comic, Hernandez focuses (pardon the pun) on the connection
between seeing and being: the ocular and
the existential.
In the last panel, the one I
have dreams about, a dislocated, disembodied eye explodes with viscera across a
mutantly giant television screen with Errata mutely witnessing. I have gone on to to write
numerous articles and soon, three books on Latinas/os and Visual Culture and I
think all of them come back to that
panel—the young orphaned witness with her face, unseen, to the screen.
The smartest undergraduate I
ever “taught” (I am not sure I taught her anything) the independent film maker
Diana Contreras, interrupted me when I was lecturing in class about this panel
at SDSU in 1991. I was speaking endlessly about the dialectical relationship
between witnessing and being, between seeing and existing—you know the drill:
“blah blah blah.”
She interrupts my lecture to
tell me and my 120 students, "Nericcio, that’s not a TV screen, it’s Errata’s
mirror."
I shut up.
I had nothing left to say.
