Mindless Ones

Birdland (Gilbert Hernandez, 1991)

(Originally published in a slightly different form on the now-decommissioned Vibrational Match blog back in January 2009.)

Ladies, gentlemen, those beyond the binary – I’d like to start out by informing you that this post is most definitely NOT SAFE FOR WORK, not even if you work from home!

I’ve edited some of the following images down so that they’re a little more abstract, but it’s still not the sort of material you want anyone else to catch you looking at, you know?  Your cat would be unimpressed, and your father would only fall back into the arms of his priest to spite you.

Sensible souls that you are, I know you’ve probably closed this browser down already, or at least flicked back to a less grubby web page. So, having scared off those who still have their wits about them, let’s get on with it shall we?

Back in my pre-Mindless days, I built up an audience for my writing about comics through a series of posts on The Filth by Grant Morrison/Christ Weston. Those posts aren’t available now, but there’s a fair amount of writing about the comic on this site too, so obviously something about it has stuck to me. One of the prominent subplots in The Filth concerns the production and consumption of of brutal hardcore pornography, but no matter how crude that comic gets it’s always very much about pornography, rather than an example of the form. To put it another way, its relationship to the actual muck of the world is broadly analogous to The Singing Detective‘s relationship to fully-fledged musicals.  

Birdland, meanwhile… well, that comic’s just plain filthy!

An imaginary story about psychotherapist Fritz from the main Love and Rockets comic and her spunk-daft husband Mark Herrera, Birdland was published by Fantagraphics’s porn subsidiary Eros Comix. The cover to the collected edition promises “Libidinous psychiatrists! Neurotic strippers! Horny little creatures from outer space!”, and the pages within deliver on all of these pledges with gusto. As always in Gilbert Hernandez’s comics, women with huge breasts are freely and openly fetishised; in Birdland, the only difference is that men with huge cocks are given a similar treatment.¹

Personally, I find Birdland far too gooey and overblown for any, um, practical applications (too much information? too defensive?), so why am I bothering to talk about it here?²

Good question! Well, spending too much of my time writing about The Filth has clogged my brain up with all sorts of stringy connections. For example: 2008’s deluge of Jack Kirby reprints – particularly The Eternals! – sparked thoughts about how Grant Morrison’s discordant scripting style is an attempt to match the constant rupturing of sense and perspective that occurs in Kirby’s artwork. Thinking about Kirby’s artwork while pondering the ‘Pornomancer’ arc in The Filth led to a small explosion of thinking about Birdland. And so on.

You see, beyond the relatively demure covers that have so far graced this blog post, Birdland is full of some of Gilbert’s most bugfuck crazy cartooning. If those covers linger a little more readily on the sort of zesty hornyness that is a constant feature of Hernandez’s mainstream work, then the comics themselves take another feature of his work to its natural conclusion. Namely, the Jack Kirby influence.

I fully understand that this might sound a little bit off. You’re looking at the above image and wondering what it has to do with Captain America, or The Thing, or all those big lads with their carefully etched headplates. Just trust me on this one – it’s all about the spunk, you see. If I was being facetious I might claim that spunk is to Birdland as cosmic energy is to Kirby’s oeuvre, but if you caught me in a less playful mood… well, I’ll probably tell you the same thing. Birdland is all about bodies crashing into each other, sending off arcing jets of thick white semen as they twist into ever-more-unlikely shapes and combinations. Tongues grow, cocks twist, genders flip, and the man-milk keeps on flowing. Hernandez’s busty heroines have always been imbued with Kirby-esque raw power (both in terms of physical shape and personality), and seeing them covered in such a ridiculous amount of gunk made me think of nothing so much as the way Kirby swathed his powerhouses in raw, crackling energy.

Just take a few seconds to dwell on those last two images in sequence. The former is from Birdland, the latter from The Eternals, and while they’re miles apart in terms of content, there’s a shared sense of overkill which makes me think we’re dealing with kindred spirits.³

Of course, there’s more to this post than that, and more to the Kirby connection that surface level aesthetics. While there’s a certain juvenile frisson involved in writing a about a hardcore skudfest like Birdland, I wouldn’t have let it run on for this long if the book didn’t have other traits that demand our attention.

You see, while there are relationship problems, insecurities, infidelities and some deeply unethical therapy sessions in Hernandez’s comic, none of it matters. In Birdland, as in the feverish monologue that ends issue #6 of The Filth, we’re presented with a world in which there’s no black hole that can’t be filled, no problem that can’t be gang-banged away. A world in which ‘All you need is fuck.‘⁴

Time for yet another tangent! Does anyone else remember the Silver Surfer: Year Zero mini-series that was rumored to be happening way back in 2002/3? I think Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely were the proposed creative team, and Morrison’s old, eye-scorching red website used to have some sort of blurb up about it. But… okay, let’s be honest, the only reason I remember it is because of this old Barbelith post:

Hope this hasn’t been mentioned already. Please be gentle if I’m embarrassing myself…

Anyway, the guy who owns/runs AMAZING FANTASY in Hull was telling me he had Mark Millar down for a signing and mention this project in the pub afterwards.

Apparently it includes a scene where Galactus has one off the wrist and “out come lots of tiny little Silver Surfers”, to quote the bloke in the shop.

“Marvel will never publish it”, according to Millar.

As a fresh faced Botswana Beast points out at the bottom of that short thread, Millar was probably just having a laugh with the shop owner, but it’s still a memorable image. What’s more, its somewhat conducive to my point. Imagine that this hypothetical Silver Sufer: Year Zero started with this unthinkably silly image. Then say that this gushing horde of Silver Surfers flew off into the cosmos, not to herald the destruction of countless planets, but to spray their own cosmic energy into the atmospheres of these worlds, turning the matter of these planets horny. Let’s also say that this plot was executed in a style that was slightly tongue-in-cheek, but still full of enough conviction to want to slide that tongue elsewhere at times. And while we’re at it, let’s just suppose that the creator of that comic was as talented as Gilbert Hernandez. If all of these things were true, and if the artist in question let the ink jet across the page with enough verve, then my point is that this imagined comic might just make a fitting sequel to Birdland.

Still with me? Good. Thanks. I appreciate it. For anyone out there who’s not read Birdland and thinks that I’m being hyperbolic here, please be aware that the aliens and “metaphysical sex” promised on the cover are every bit as present as the strippers and psychiatrists. This is why I can’t seem to wipe off the Jack Kirby comparison: at points in this comic, it truly feels as though Gilbert is trying to match Kirby’s representation of the cosmiconscious on the page!

Also, did anyone mention that at one point we’re jerked back into the age of rampant, inter-species dinosaur lovin’?

⁵

If Birdland’s cast of characters don’t quite manage to fuck each other all the way into the supercontext, it’s not through lack of trying. Still, for all that this pornographic fantasy has madcap energy to spare, it’s still just that in the end: a deranged fantasy. In a book that fucks its way across space and time, perhaps the most interesting shift in perspective comes in the last page, where a post-coital Fritz and Mark Herrera stagger into the outside world, and Fritz says:

Perhapth… pehapth I wath too hathty about filing for divorce. It’th not too late to thotp the proceedingth… and try to work thingth out…

It’s pure soap-opera, of course, but that’s the point — for all the bangs and drama and big passions that this story contains, it’s this moment of small, ordinary emotion that closes the book. It might not seem like a big deal at first, but it’s changes in focus like this that allow Hernandez to use these two characters here and as part of his ongoing Love and Rockets saga. What’s more, it’s moments like this that show he’s aware of the limits of such berserk fantasies, and that’s an essential part of any adult’s mental hygiene.

Thanks for sticking with me on this one. I hope no one out there feels too dirty for the effort!

1. Anyone looking to read a rhapsodic account of Gilbert Hernandez’s more… socially acceptable work in Love and Rockets should probably head over to The Tearoom of Despair right now.
   
   I always loved that blog, and it was a treat to check in a while back and see that Bob’s still posting away. There’s something to that sort of continuity that’s quite appropriate for the topic of this detour, a great comic book that has been in publication for pretty much my whole life.
   
   Now, since writing this post back in 2009, I’ve published a few posts on Love and Rockets myself, though those were all focused on Jaime’s work instead of Gilbert’s. Those posts were supposed to be part of a longer series that covered all of Jaime’s Locas stories, but I lost faith in the project along the way, partly because of a muted response on what remains of the comics internet, and partly because I was rethinking the style of those posts while I was trying to finish them and I got myself in a guddle.
   
   I might go back to that series because the notes and drafts for the rest of it are actually pretty good! Either way, my Jaime Hernandez series makes for a neat counterpoint to my writing on Gilbert Hernandez’s work here. This post on Birdland finishes up by coming down from its cosmic high, back into time and interpersonal drama; my series on Locas, meanwhile, is all about the way Jaime’s focus on relationships makes time vivid in all of its dimension. ↩︎
2. Online culture has moved to the point where the idea that I’ve properly crossed the line into “too much information” here feels quaint. In 2009, this was exactly the sort of territory I didn’t want to get into on my blog. Instead, I wanted to be a little bit critical, a little bit poetic, my “real” self – inasmuch as one exists – visible only as a pattern of interests, jokes, obsessions. Hence all the blether about spunking on a triceratops’s tits, obviously.
   
   After fifteen years of venting whole brain districts in order to feed twitter/instagram or keep some random guest spot on a podcast movement, I no longer feel certain that I have anything of value left to protect. This feels less like a sign that I’ve opened up my mental armour as part of some sustained therapeutic orgy, and more like I’ve allowed my sense of worth to be chipped off piece-by-piece by contemporary branding apparatus. Then again, if we’re talking about brands, maybe I should have spent less time worrying about my own, and more worrying about what I’m doing by associating the images in this post with the hallowed institution that is Mindless Ones dot com! ↩︎
3. Old school comics minions, please take note: I am not implying that Jack Kirby calmed his drawing arm by breaking out hardcore porn comics after hours. We’re just having fun with juxtapositions here, after all. If you intimated anything untoward from that, well, perhaps it’s time to work out your own damage! Ask Fritz, I’m sure she can recommend a fellow professional to help you out… ↩︎
4. This isn’t entirely true in Birdland, of course – the comic tests the limits of this idea, before eventually waking up, telling the reader that it’s time to go to sleep, and setting the stage for a new day full of interpersonal drama. Don’t worry, dear reader. The body of the post will get to all of that in a minute!
   
   In the meantime, a quick aside on sexual therapy. A year or so after this post was originally published, another comics critic threw a subliminal at it in their own post about Birdland. If I remember correctly, the point of their gripe was that no one – not even some idiot blogger who’d used all sorts of hyped up language! – had written about the importance of Wilhelm Reich’s theories to Birdland. Reading back over the post, with its youthful enthusiasm, I can’t say I’m any more troubled by the omission now than I was then. In fact, I’d made room for this gaping hole in my post because I was sick of hearing people wang on about orgone accumulators – a danger of developing certain patterns of interest on your way into adulthood, no doubt.
   
   I’ve introduced a few winks in that direction in these footnotes to commemorate that ancient diss. Whether I’ve excluded the name of my one-time interlocutor out of forgetfulness or spite, I’ll leave it for you to decide. ↩︎
5. The original footnote for this image said: “The only disappointing thing about this section of the comics is that Acid Archie fails to make a guest appearance.” A cute idea, if not a particularly meaningful one.
   
   Putting Zenith aside for a minute, time to acknowledge another bit of prehistoric trauma. About eight years ago, I bumped into an artist pal of mine from a former life who pulled me up for this post. As an enthusiast for her work, I’d stuck a link to her website on the blogroll at Vibrational Match. So far, so good, right? Well, the trouble was that when you searched for her name on the internet, one of the first images to come up was a picture of two dinosaurs fucking, drawn in a style that was not particularly sympathetic to her own. My pal was nice enough about all of this, but I could see her point. I took my old blog down a few years ago. Now, when you search for my friend’s name, you find pictures of her and her work. I’m not going to undo all of that by naming her here, but on the off-chance she ever reads this – sorry if I fucked up your web presence! I’m glad you didn’t feel the need to pivot into dinosaur porn, because the work you do is a perfect record of life and consciousness as it flows! ↩︎