Bumperhead
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A fascinating tale of drugs, rock and roll, and adolescence from a legendary cartoonist
Love and Rockets author Gilbert Hernandez returns with Bumperhead, a companion book to Marble Season. Whereas Marble Season explored the exuberant and occasionally troubled existence of the wide-eyed preteen Huey, Bumperhead zeroes in on disaffected teenhood with its protagonist Bobby, a young slacker who narrates his life as it happens but offers very little reflection on the events that transpire. Bobby lives in the moment exclusively and is incapable of seeing the world outside of his experiences. He comes of age in the 1970s, making a rapid progression through that era’s different subcultures and in a short period of time segues from a stoner glam rocker to a drunk rocker to a speed-freak punk. He drifts in and out of relationships with friends, both male and female. Life zooms past him.
Hernandez’s approach captures the numbness and raw undirected anger and passion of a young man who waits for life to happen to him, not noticing all the while that it is happening. Subtle and thought-provoking, Bumperhead is a fascinating read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Following up on his portrait of childhood in Marble Season, Hernandez returns with this heartbreaking, ambitious, and fascinating portrayal of Bobby, a kid growing up in Oxnard, Calif. The book is broken into five parts, each focusing on a key juncture in Bobby's life, that together span the period from childhood to middle age. Bobby falls for and loses girls; he's manipulated and beaten up, then broken down and wounded by his father and his boss at the office building where he's a janitor. He is brought into and pushed out of various music scenes and groups of friends, and we're with him every step of the way; his frailties are as universal as his dreams, as revealed through first-person narration that expresses his confusion, anger, and, sometimes, joy. "When you can talk to a beautiful woman about stupid shit like UFOs then you know life is good," he says at one point. Hernandez's art is characteristically gorgeous clean lines and strong contrasts, with expressive, unique characters, subtly changing as Bobby's situation does. Bobby comes to life as a sympathetic but complicated character, and the book's darker elements the nightmarish sky, Bobby's father's secret down in Mexico, and the tablet owned by one of the characters that can predict the future create a creepy, textured, and mysterious background to his mostly disappointing life adventures. Do not miss this delicate, heartbreaking masterpiece.
