Chicanos Vol. 1

Written by Carlos Trillo
Art by Eduardo Risso

Over the last couple of months, I've amassed a number of graphic novels by the team of the recently deceased Carlos Trillo and collaborator Eduardo Risso.  I've been buying these books on the strength of Risso's unconventional art, but haven't read anything by this team beyond the first chapter of their Vampire Boy (the nice new Dark Horse edition of which is on my 'to-read' pile).

Anyway, Chicanos is an interesting project.  It was clearly serialized in short installments when it was first published in Europe, as each story is pretty short.  For whatever reason, when designing this trade paperback, the people at IDW decided to place the various short stories that make up the book in a continuous stream of pages, with the effect that it's sometimes confusing to read the book in prolonged sittings.

Chicanos stars AY Jalisco, a short, pencil-legged, over-endowed Latina private detective operating in what I assume is New York.  Poor Jalisco is pretty bumbling and clueless a lot of the time, as she stumbles from case to case or problem to problem.  She doesn't have many friends or clients, and spends too much time stuck in her own head.  None of this stops her from going up against mobsters time and again.

It's interesting to see how this European comic portrays Jalisco and the people that make up her mostly-Latino neighbourhood.  To begin with, I don't think many poor New Yorkers have bidets in their bathroom, but Jalisco does (minor point, but it really stood out as being strange).  Also, it's hard to believe that there has been a period in the last twenty years where anti-Chicano sentiment and prejudice has been as virulent as it is shown here.  This book implies that Latinos live under Jim Crow-like conditions, where they can't even enter the front door of hotels, let alone hail a cab (that one being more believable).

Still, Chicanos is a frequently funny and engaging comic.  Risso's art is always brilliant, if never beautiful.  It's interesting to look at his pre-100 Bullets work and see how his style has developed and been refined.  I will be looking for Volume 2 of this title, and am glad that the two books are connected, but are not exactly continuations of each other.