Julio's Day
Because day in it means a lifetime (like what we mean by saying, in Grandma’s day), the title of this spare graphic novel denotes an entire century. Julio Reyes is born in 1900 and dies in the same bed in 2000. We see him as infant, toddler, first-grader, bigger boy, and young, middle-aged, old, and finally, very old man. He far outlives his feisty sister and handsome-brat brother. He never marries, and his closest relationships are with other males, though when sex apparently impinges on one of them, he abandons it. Moreover, he can’t stomach his great, great nephew’s homosexuality. For lengthy stretches of his story, he’s unspeaking, in the background, nowhere around as we watch the more dramatic lives of friends and family flare in bizarre illness and death, in madness and violence, and in love, at home more than in the wars and wanderings they are called to. All along, he lives with his mother, the still center of a century-long family storm that Hernandez’s mastery of comics somehow makes somberly beautiful. --Ray Olson