Speak of the Devil
by Joshua Malbin on Sep.30, 2010, under Comics
Toward the end of the premiere of Boardwalk Empire, a Mafia boss is murdered while listening to opera on his Victrola, blood pooling around his body as Caruso sings an aria. TV critic Alan Sepinwall wrote about this scene that Martin Scorcese is one of only two living directors still allowed to do something like that (the other being of course Francis Ford Coppola).
That sums up well my feelings about Speak of the Devil, the new Gilbert Hernandez hardcover that collects a six-part series you probably missed in 2006 and 2007. If anyone else tried to pull it off I’d hate it. Because it’s Gilbert Hernandez I’m trying hard to give it the benefit of the doubt.
The story centers on teenaged gymnast Val and her stepmother Linda. Val has started dressing up in a devil mask and sneaking around the rooftops of her suburb, peeking in at the neighbors. Nearly every time she does it she spies on Linda, often while Linda has sex with her dad. Linda often catches her and is clearly as excited to be watched by this masked peeping Tom as Val is to watch her.
Then Val’s boyfriend Paul catches her in her mask and things start to change. Voyeurism turns him on too, and they have hot sex in a graveyard. Val injures her ankle and can only go watch her best friend triumph at the state championship. She comes home to find that Paul donned her mask in her absence and slept with Linda. She attacks the two of them with a knife.
He survives. The three of them, now with a taste for blood, murder Paul’s parents and gouge out their eyes. They steal a car and flee, wantonly murdering as they go, in a multistate three-way orgy of sex and blood.
Now as I say, I wouldn’t remotely buy this from anyone else. The characters are paper-thin, essentially motivationless. They murder for basically no reason other than excitement—sometimes they murder on a whim, or out of exhaustion. So the question is, should I take it from Gilbert Hernandez merely because I think he’s a genius.
For an answer I had to turn to some of his early work, when he employed cheerful violence and mayhem in a magical realist vein. I am excluding here most of his Palomar stories, because those were deeply character-based, and thinking instead of some of his short-shorts. The difference, I ultimately decided, is that that violence felt cartoonish and this edges closer to feeling real, which lends me to want realer motivation for it, if not from the characters then at least from Hernandez himself. I want all these murders to mean something, to be saying something about the world, or making me feel something other than confused. I want to understand what he’s saying about voyeurism and exhibitionism.
Preview here.