Chicanos Vol. 2

Written by Carlos Trillo
Art by Eduardo Risso

Carlos Trillo and Eduardo Risso had a long and prosperous partnership together, creating some very interesting comics like Vampire Boy and Borderline, but their Chicanos is probably one of the stranger and more memorable projects they worked on.

Chicanos tells the story of Alejandrina Jalisco, a short and awkward private investigator who can barely rub two dimes together, who lives and works in a poor Latino area of New York.  She is cursed with terrible luck - she has a tendency to get hit by buses whenever things start to go her way, which isn't often - and is generally mistreated by almost everybody she knows, yet she maintains a level of optimism and goodwill about her.

This second IDW volume collects the second half of Jalisco's stories, I believe for the first time in English.  The collection is interesting - the stories stay pretty bleak but are humorous at the same time - and Risso's art looks very nice, in the way that his work always does.  I wish IDW had done a little more to separate the various chapters, as it's not always clear where one story ends and the next begins (plus, I'm sure there are some beautiful Risso covers that weren't collected).

If you're looking for an oddball graphic novel to entertain you, you could do a lot worse than this.