Hypnotwist/Scarlet by Starlight

Gilbert Hernandez

Fantagraphics 2021

Hb, 100pp, £22.99, ISBN 9781683962045

In its early days, the Love and Rockets comic often had SF or fantasy elements to its stories. Over the decades, it’s tended to become more realistic, but the two graphic novellas in the latest book – back-to-back like the old Ace doubles – are anything but mundane. Both continue Gilbert Hernandez’s series of comic-book renderings of B-movies starring former therapist Fritz, halfsister of Luba, the focus of his earlier work. In the silent movie Hypnotwist, a young woman’s ordinary life becomes utterly surreal after she puts on a pair of glittery high-heeled shoes. In a bewildering kaleidoscope of nightmare images of sex and violence she passes through floors and ceilings and encounters, amongst others, disturbingly alive smiley-faces, a dwarf and two haggard versions of herself, one a street drunk, the other an elderly woman being tormented in a pit… In the other story, Scarlet by Starlight, three scientists are performing experiments in some unknown land. The local life includes two “primitive” groups, the sub-human “pinkies” and a family of peaceful and beautiful cat-like humanoids the scientists name Crimson and Scarlet, whose children help out carrying things in the lab. When one of the scientists starts a sexual relationship with Scarlet, the comfortable coexistence between species is shattered. This is a deeply disturbing parable of the perennial clash between so-called civilised, advanced cultures and exploited indigenous peoples.