Julio's Day

by Gilbert Hernandez, Brian Evenson (Introduction)

Overview

Gilbert Hernandez traces the life of a 100-year-old man from cradle to grave in this fictional graphic novel.

It begins in the year 1900, with the scream of a newborn. It ends, 100 pages later, in the year 2000, with the death rattle of a 100-year-old man. The infant and the old man are both Julio, and Gilbert Hernandez’s Julio’s Day is his latest graphic novel, a masterpiece of elliptical, emotional storytelling that traces one life—indeed, one century in a human life—through a series of carefully crafted, consistently surprising and enthralling vignettes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781606996065
Publisher:	Fantagraphics
Publication date:	04/20/2013
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 10.60(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	16 Years

About the Author

Gilbert Hernandez was born in 1957 in Oxnard, California, and is considered one of the greatest living comics writer-artists in the world. In 1982, Hernandez co-created, along with his brothers Mario and Jaime, the ongoing, iconic, internationally acclaimed comic book series Love and Rockets, one of the greatest bodies of work the medium has ever seen. In addition to his work on Love and Rockets, its spinoffs, and side series, Hernandez has released a prodigious amount of original graphic novels and miniseries, such as Sloth, Bumperhead, and Marble Season. He also collaborated with Darwyn Cooke on The Twilight Children for DC. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2017 and is the recipient of a Fellow Award from United States Artists and a PEN Center USA’s Graphic Literature Award for Outstanding Body of Work. Hernandez lives in Ventura, CA, with his wife and daughter.

What People are Saying About This

Junot Diaz

"A haunting performance and about as perfect a literary work as I’ve read in years. Hernandez accomplishes in 100 pages what most novelists only dream of—rendering the closeted phlegmatic Julio in all his confounding complexity and in the process creating an unflinching biography of a community, a country and a century. A masterpiece."

Editorial Reviews

Gilbert Hernandez’s work has been kicking around in the pages of Love and Rockets with that of his brother Jaime for three decades now. With more collections of his work becoming available, the walloping punch of Gilbert’s vision is becoming increasingly evident. Julio’s Day is the 100-year story in 100 pages of a 100-year-old man living in a small, mostly Mexican town in the American Southwest, from his first to last breaths, 1900 to 2000. Where some artists would take that expanse as an excuse to go epic, Hernandez keeps a gimlet eye on his story, making every richly textured frame count. The outside world registers only in distant murmurs, wars that take young men and mutilate them, hints of industrialization. The town itself is a tight nest of family and neighbors familiar from Gilbert’s work in the Palomar comics (much of Julio’s story was previously published but never before collected). Lovesick heartbreak and tragedy alternate with magical realist elements like a months-long rainstorm, while dark skies and the horror of death’s oblivion throw a shadow over everything. Through it all slips Julio, a quiet man whom others look past, few guessing his secret. A marvelous and tightly scripted epic whose last page is a heart-stopper. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

""A haunting performance and about as perfect a literary work as I’ve read in years. Hernandez accomplishes in 100 pages what most novelists only dream of—rendering the closeted phlegmatic Julio in all his confounding complexity and in the process creating an unflinching biography of a community, a country and a century. A masterpiece.""

Junot Díaz