“It’s Gilbert Hernandez’s peculiar genius, his greatest strength. It’s his art.”
— Rob Rodi, The Comics Journal, on sleeve of 1987 Edition
"Heartbreak Soup shares the dreamlike sensuality of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s stories, their soft contrasts, their intoxicating images. Hernandez introduces the Central American town of Palomar in “Sopa de Gran Pena.” There are four main storylines running through “Sopa,” marking their own courses and occasionally bumping into each other like billiard balls. The first concerns the plight of Chelo, the town’s bath-giver, whose clientele is usurped by a newcomer to the town, Luba (Gilbert’s earth-mother character and the central figure in his Palomar stories), here having only but begun her prodigious career in child-bearing. Then there’s the story of Manuel, the town gigolo, and his amorous conquest of the 14-year-old Pipo; and there’s the arduous climb to manhood of the Palomar adolescents, a rite of passage that is marked by both the loss of virginity and the death of a comrade (although in Gilbert’s hands these mythic prerequisites have never seemed more commonplace and natural; after all, aren’t they the stuff of every boy’s life); and finally, there’s the redemption of the village clown Tipin’ Tipin’ by the unnaturally precocious Carmen (who is almost paranormal here she seems like and unusually sophisticated child, but in her subsequent appearances — as Heraclio’s wife — she’s like a quixotic dwarf; yet her physical appearance hasn’t changed at all, only the context in which she appears). The thrill of his work is in the sharpness of his observations. Each Palomarian is gifted with a set of unmistakably personal mannerisms, gestures, and styles of dress. Few comic books have given their character such distinctive facial features: it is impossible to confuse Heraclio with Satch, or either of them with Israel or Jesus. He also has an amazing demographic eye. He expertly evokes the drowsy sense of suffocation under which Palomar labors, the magical potency of names like “Disneyland” and “Sophia Loren” have when they filter through the temporal cloud that hangs over the town. He conveys a sense of place better than any other cartoonist in the medium. Palomar has an urgency that simply isn’t matched by any other comics landscape. It’s Gilbert Hernandez’s peculiar genius, his greatest strength. It’s his art.
