Marble Season

Its not as good as those over-sized New Palomar books and its better than those books which are supposed to be movies that Fritz was in.I think the idea is to explore what are the complexities of child-hood and adolescence that make the notions of heroes and such in old-school comics and TV shows so useful and important in this crucial phase of kids development. If that sounds interesting or you want to see some fairly good new Beto art (mixed with a little Dondi and Beavis and Butthead?), this is for you. If not "Speak of the Devil" or "Love and Rockets" X are mighty fine.

I really enjoyed reading this book. I wish there was another 2 or 3 volumes of it. I liked the characters, and their situations--the kind of predicaments children get themselves into and adults don't know anything about the predicaments. I have been reading anything Hernandez for decades. Gilbert please can we have more like "Marble Season"!

The cover is in color but the actual drawings are in stark black and white.

‘Marble Season’ is more crudely drawn and inked than much of Beto's work, but it suits the subject. I was also surprised to see it sticks exclusively to a 6-square grid layout, a formal choice that pays homage to comics of the artist's youth while contributing to the loose, episodic, free-flowing nature of the book, where events come and go in the life of our protagonist, without ever dominating the story for long.Why is it called ‘Marble Season’? Probably because it's a good-sounding name that evokes the subject of childhood. The book starts out with our protagonist Huey trying to teach marbles to a young girl (who's more interested in eating them!) before quickly moving on to other fresh interests—like comics, trading cards, playing with G.I. Joes, or writing plays and movies for the neighborhood kids to act out. Huey's a middle child, even-tempered and creative, with an older brother Junior who shares his interest in comics and a little brother Chavo, too young to talk, who often gets himself lost. The Hernandez‘ world is always social, and these kids exist among the many others in the neighborhood as well as in the family home, and it's in their many and diverse interactions—always with other children, never with adults, à la ‘Peanuts’—that the book unfolds.There's a lot of raw energy in these pages, clean storytelling. You never quite know when a segment has ended and a new one begins, which keeps you reading; it's a book you'll blast through because it's light in its approach and consistently interesting. There's drama, for sure—bullies, fights, kids with annoying personalities, moral quandaries like whether or not it's OK to steal if you can get away with it, frustrations with how we're seen or come across to others—but nothing as intense or rawly exposed as some of Beto's other works. There's plenty of joy and fun, too, to balance things out. And the relationship between Huey and his older brother comes across as refreshingly open and upbeat.“Don't say it! Just do it! Like in a movie!” These are Huey's instructions to his young ‘actors’ as they improvise their way through his second directorial attempt, ‘Trapped Behind the Iron Curtain’, in his backyard. This felt like a glimpse into Beto's own comics philosophy.