Keep Your Distance #1.75 – Over There
September 8th, 2021
Back in my first post on Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories, I made a passing reference to the way these earliest tales frame their science fiction and fantasy tropes by making them part of something that happens “over there”, and noted that Gilbert abandoned this specific bank of imagery when he stopped making use of “careless tribal tropes”. Let’s unpack that a little.
While they never go full Tintin, the early Mechanics stories still make use of some of the tropes of those old adventure comics. There is a pastiched exoticism to these stories, a sense of that we are looking at something familiar through outsider’s eyes. This is as apparent in the tribal masks, wooden huts that smell of “kaka” and bewildered locals as it is in the deployment of romance comics tropes – the main love interest is a square-jawed, ultra capable hunk called Rand Race, c’mon!
This ironic distance will develop into something more nuanced in later stories, as I’ve already argued in Keep Your Distance #1, but there’s reason to be wary of its deployment here. At this stage in the narrative Hernandez is largely just replicating these tropes and setting them in contract to his characters’ home lives, and… well, when I mentioned the science fiction elements of the story happening “over there”, this sort of casual distance from the reality of other lives was implied in the framing, right?
We’re talking about a postcard composed almost entirely of second-hand, othering cliches here, a world that exists purely as backdrop to Maggie’s story:
It’s not always great.
One of the most quietly compelling aspects of these early experiments in genre is the way they foreground the distorting effects of money, how much chaos extractionist living creates in places we (which “we”?) don’t truly believe in. It’s just a shame that these early stories don’t make any efforts to convince us of the reality of “over there” along the way.
A curious addendum to all of the above comes in the form of the strip Jaime Hernandez drew for the New York Times, ‘La Maggie La Loca’, which revisits these old adventures with tired eyes and asks what might be implied by them. Rena Titanion, a wrestling legend and adventurer when we first met her, is now retired and living in isolation on “some remote island”. The story frames her status as a figurehead for “upheaval and revolt” in Latin America as being liberatory, but by this stage in the game enough of a sense of reality has crept in to acknowledge that you could never trust that everyone else would agree with this assessment.
More importantly, the story reunites Maggie with Tse Tse, who appeared in these early stories as an unreconstructed innocent – another sampled cliche, basically. It’s not just that ‘La Maggie La Loca’ shows Tse Tse as a successful woman with a career that lets her travel the world on her own terms, it’s that in doing so it suggests a novel tension.
Is Tse Tse an old friend who’s come to visit Maggie, or is Maggie a fondly remembered guest in the new Tse Tse comic? The narration points one way but the other story seems plausible despite the burden of learned perspective.
The islanders Maggie interacts with have a jaggedness to them that is equally convincing, and the idea that the island itself might serve as a background to an outsider’s story is explored with double-edged irony:
You see during this particular reunion Rena thinks everyone’s living in her story, while Maggie is convinced they’re all stuck in their own. Neither of these perspectives matches what we see in the comic itself – that narration again! – but the easy acknowledgement of these difficulties is yet another distance travelled in these pages.