"Adults who burn out from living in the city pick up their families and move to towns like this for the slower pace, the quiet. They feel they can raise their younger kids in relative peace and safety. What they fail to recognize is that it's their teenagers who suffer boredom and existential low self-esteem in extreme ways."
I’m a very big fan of Gilbert Hernandez, co-creator of
one of the greatest comic series of all time, Love and Rockets. There is an ethereal quality to his work that is
combined with strong characterization and bold, unapologetic art. His Palomar
stories are a young man’s masterpiece but Beto (as he’s known) has continuously
improved throughout his career. Though I’m most familiar with this Love and Rockets stories, I’ve been
slowly working my way through the rest of his oeuvre. Note that the only reason
I’m doing it slowly is that he’s rather prolific. Thirty years after the first
issue of Love and Rockets Beto
continues to regularly publish comics on an annual basis. Some years, he’s even
got three or more publications if you count his collection of serialized works
and original graphic novels.
Released in 2006, Sloth
is an original graphic novel. Hernandez wanted to create something that was
different than his Love and Rockets
stories. For those who might not know, Beto’s half of Love and Rockets is a huge, sprawl family epic with dozens of
regular characters who have age in slightly quicker than real-time since their
original appearance. Part of his inspiration for Sloth was to create something with fewer characters and really
focus on them. That’s really what Sloth is.
It’s a study in character and it’s also a study of what it is to be a teenager.
The story is about Miguel, a depressed teen who wanted to
escape reality and willed himself into a coma. The comic starts out with his
reawakening after his year-long coma. We follow him as he re-enters the world
he left behind. Hernandez presents us with a bit of Miguel’s family history and
he also gives us the events that may have led to his coma. Miguel lives with
his grandparents since his father is in prison for selling drugs and his mother
abandoned him when he was a toddler but is now rumoured to be dead and buried
in the lemon orchard, a local haunted spot.
Structurally, Sloth
is fascinating comic. Beto splits the story in two parts, the first dealing
with Miguel’s post-coma return to normal life and he second is Lita’s post-coma
story. The story is linear for the first two thirds (give or take) but the
story is partially rebooted when Lita wakes up. There are interesting parallels
and differentiating storie happening to Miguel and Lita but what really
captivated me was how some parts of the story, those related to Romeo (and
maybe the Goatman?) appear to continue from the first to the second part and
ultimately lead us to a third comatose teen.
Beto has mentioned in an interview (which you can read
here) that the coma is a metaphor for adolescence. In order to understand the
characters you have to understand why they chose to self-induce themselves in a
coma. For Miguel it was a way to escape life. It was too much for him to deal
with but when he woke up, everything was still the same. He still has the same
girlfriend, his band is still together, the legend of the Goatman (who lives in
the lemon orchard and can swap bodies with you using his willpower alone) is
still being circulated. Absolutely nothing has changed and when he slips into
what can only be his final coma, his only regret is that he’s leaving Lita
behind. For Lita, her coma is nothing but an extended dream, a fantasy. Nothing
in her life remained the same. She has different friends, Romeo has become an
incredibly successful rock and roll star. What really makes it a fantasy though
is that everything she wants (a relationship with Miguel, to meet Romeo X, etc)
happen without requiring any real effort. Her post-coma (dream) life is a
fantasy because it depicts an unrealistic portrayal of life where change
happens easily and is always rewarding.
A big fuss is made over the Goatman but what is his
portion of the story really about? I think the Goatman symbolises change or the
desire to change. Teenagers have their entire life ahead of them and they often
dram of what they will one day be. Few teens actually work towards achieving
any of their goals. Teens are dreamers and because of that they’re static, they
don’t do much. They’re so unmotivated to enact change and better themselves
that they’re rather avoid real life and regress into a cocoon of sleep and hope
everything will fix itself in their absence or that their dreams will come true
all on their own. The problem with this approach is that by the time they wake
up they’ll realize nothing has really changed and their coma approach to life
was counter-intuitive. You can’t just dream of what you want, you have to go
out and obtain it. While Lite and Miguel were busy trying to film the Goatman,
Romeo stayed home and worked on his music. Later, in Lita’s coma fantasy, Romeo
is a successful rock star because he worked hard to achieve his dream. In the
dream Romeo X hangs out with Miguel and Lita and he tells them he’s from the
same hometown as them essentially telling them and the reader that it doesn’t
matter where you’re from, you can achieve greatness if you work hard. I see the
Romeo as being the Goatman and they both represent will power, which Romeo used
to get what he wanted out of life rather than run away from life like Miguel
and Lita did.
Sloth looks and
reads like the typical Beto comic, that is to say all the components are there,
the elliptical storytelling, the heavy-inked bold art and a focus on developing
interesting and deeply flawed characters. It really works though because he
rearranges those components to tell a very effective story about teenagers and
their hopes and dreams. Beto’s later work is often categorized by a false sense
of simplicity. Sloth, despite its
name, is a pretty quick read but unless you slow down and think about what is
happening, you won’t be able to appreciate. My interpretation of the story
isn’t necessarily right and I’m certain there are far more interpretations that
could be made, each of which could be equality validated, but that’s the
pleasure of this kind of comic. Beto doesn’t spoon feed us the answers but he
avoids giving the reader a pile of unrelated visual symbolism. If you focus on
the characters and the recurring elements of coma, dreams, movement and the
Goatman’s famed will power, you can puzzle together a story that sheds light on
the lives of teens and how best to escape it all.
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