Booklist Reviews Bumperhead

In last year’s Marble Season, Hernandez offered a sympathetic view of a 1960s suburban childhood. This companion work takes an equally incisive look at a troubled young adult in the subsequent decade. We first see Bobby as a preadolescent hanging out with his friends, discovering girls, and dealing with his unassimilated Mexican-immigrant father, and readers follow him through the decade’s fashions, drugs, and music. After high school, the unambitious Bobby takes a janitorial job and continues to drift through a leaden existence, buoyed only by his discovery of punk rock and his turbulent relationship with the mercurial Chili Madrid. As Bobby—barely—makes it into middle age, he achieves an acceptance of his life that seems to come less from wisdom than from weariness. Hernandez’s artwork, though typically masterful, is less flamboyant than usual; the suburban setting and Bobby’s mundane life provide little occasion for graphic flair. The indispensable visual gambit here is his keen character design, which tellingly shows how Bobby and his friends fared over the course of the decade.