My favorite page from The Education Of Hopey Glass. (That doesn’t feature nudity.)
7 Comments | Posted: June 29th, 2008 | Filed under: Art Appreciation, Thinking About Comics | Tags: jaime hernandez
This page jumped out at me during a reread of The Education Of Hopey Glass. Jaime Hernandez gets by with things that would drive me absolutely bugfuck if another creator did them, but he’s got a photographer’s eye for capturing something that makes every single panel worth having.
Forgive me, but I admit I don’t get it. Here’s what I see.
This cute girl seems to be interested in going to a place called Virgil. Then, four parties drive toward the right of each panel (which I presume to be the direction in which Virgil lies). Each group has different problems: acne, obesity, old age, and, apparently, bitchiness. After getting this six-person snapshot of the people of Virgil (don’t forget the kid in the corner of the fourth panel), she decides not to go there after all.
Would you explain to me the significance of this, if it would not diminish the elegance and subtlety for other viewers?
As I said, Jaime Hernandez can do pages like this and I enjoy them much more than I would enjoy a similar page appearing in a comic by another creator.
Maybe right now their faces turn us off, but if you imagine each one of those people breaking out in even a momentary smile, the entire picture would be changed! Our skin-deep understanding of the people of Virgil doesn’t tell us anything important. I think I am too caught up in the shallowness of Hopey’s dismissal of these people to see what you are seeing.
The art is pretty great, though.
I took it as just some random people driving by, possibly to denote the time that she spends waiting for the bus. They’re not necessarily driving to Virgil. They’re just random people, depicted fairly realistically.
I loved this page, too–it’s a quiet respite from Hopey’s normal hollering and jumpin’. It shows demonstrably that time is moving, here–even if in starts and fits. Sitting on a bench can make time move like snails, anyway.
But look at the difference in the cars, the faces–Xaime puts love even onto the lowliest of folks, in the most mundane settings.
i love hopey @ this age…my girl maggie cried about her lot in life all the while- but hope is swinging wildly and trying to see what works and the whole time keeping it pretty goddamn gangster as the kids would say.
and dammit..she knows the last face. ok? that’s all.