Pick of the Week: “The Twilight Children”

Gilbert Hernandez and Darwyn Cooke channel the more romantic side of science fiction for “The Twilight Children”. The two of them working together is something akin to a cartoonist supergroup, and their distinct voices and unique storytelling sensibilities come together to create something eerie, fascinating, and beautiful. And it almost all works, too.

Written by Gilbert Hernandez
Illustrated by Darwyn Cooke and Dave Stewart

When a white orb washes up on the shore of a remote Latin American village, a group of children poke at the strange object to see what it is. The orb explodes, leaving the children completely blind. And when a beautiful young woman who may be an alien is found wandering the seafront, she’s taken in by the townspeople, but soon becomes a person of interest to a pair of CIA agents, and the target of affection for a young scientist.

In all honesty, Gilbert Hernandez and Darwyn Cooke were never a team I pictured working together. Don’t get me wrong, both of them are talented cartoonists, some of the strongest working today. Their styles, too, seem to come from the same retro source and they both are fantastic at delivering memorable characters. But their sensibilities and approach to storytelling are vastly different. Hernandez tends to run more toward the surreal while Cooke has this preference for violent crime capers.

It’s that dichotomy coming together, I think, that really gives “The Twilight Children” its voice. The book works because these two creators were able to combine their respective styles. They’ve blended their love of B-movies and magical realist novels and quieter science fiction stories like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Man Who Fell to Earth to conjure up this fable of a small community dealing with an invasion they couldn’t begin to understand.

Hernandez and Cooke juggle a large cast of characters. Despite the constant presence of these floating orbs, the book has a lot of markings of a small town drama:

• there’s Tito, who was cheating on her husband, Nikolas, with a burly fisherman named Anton, but has now turned her attention toward the scientist investigating the mysterious floating orbs
• the sheriff who only wants to maintain order and the pristine nature of the community
• the mysterious girl, Ela, who doesn’t speak for the longest time, but casts a strange spell over all those she comes in contact with.
• the three children who end up blind and prophetic after they touch one of the orbs
• the beach bum, Bundo, whose family perished in a fire a couple years back, though all signs seem to point toward them being abducted
• the scientist, Felix, called in to investigate what’s going on, but finding his very appearance unwelcome and every sentence he utters scrutinized
• the bumbling government agents who everyone immediately identifies as government agents but are nevertheless pretending to be tourists.

There’s a lot going on. Honestly, potentially too much going on. The opening chapters of the story are the most memorable as Hernandez and Cooke establish this small town and the people existing in it. Maybe because Vertigo only gave Hernandez and Cooke so many pages to work with and they threw so much into the narrative, a lot of these characters come off more like archetypes. They feel like the kind of people you’d expect to run into in some small Latin American town rather than your, like, actual neighbors.

As the story unravels, it feels like Hernandez and Cooke are constantly jettisoning all these subplots and ancillary incidents in order to make sure the main plot line gets finished. The second and third acts are hit with a bunch of hiccups as some of the invasion stuff pushes up against some of the relationship stuff, and neither of them resolve as well as earlier scenes in the story. Sometimes, an event occurs organically — like when Felix, the doctor, and the government agents suddenly freeze — and other times, a similar event feels abrupt and random — like when the whole town freezes . And on its own, the final confrontation is beautiful, bursting with color, but it takes a few panels more than it should to jumpstart our attention. There’s also a newly formed relationship closing out the book that feels like the conclusion of a deleted scene.

But the thing is, so much of this book is great. Cooke’s artwork is in top-form over here. He has this preternatural instinct for staging and page design. “The Twilight Children” is an incredibly easy book to get immersed in, a truly fascinating world to sink into. He rarely deviates from his rectilinear grid structure but his eye for movement and dynamics are trained toward that, so its captivating to look at throughout. Hernandez’s penchant for the bizarre shows itself frequently throughout, which Cooke embraces with humor. The interstitials where the abducted parties suddenly flash naked on the beach before being whisked back to wherever are like a solid punchline.

And even if the individual characters seem broadly drawn and generalized, the community itself is alive and thrumming. Hernandez and Cooke manage to make the village feel like an authentic and living place. It’s not so much an individual’s reaction to an event, but the whole neighborhood’s. They’re all up in each other’s business, but they all make up each other’s business. So much of the eeriness and unsettling tone of the book stems from the town’s paranoia about being invaded: not just from the extraterrestrials or floating orbs or whatever, but all these outside forces coming in to upset their way of life. It’s not till the end, when they collectively can accept an event, that they truly make progress.

Gilbert Hernandez and Darwyn Cooke are superstars, true and through. They’ve created some of the best work in the medium, and as their disparate perspectives come together, it produced something unique and fascinating. Not all of “The Twilight Children” works and it may have rushed through a lot to reach its ending, but it nevertheless offers up plenty of memorable images and an unforgettable setting.

Final Verdict: 8.5 – an interesting collaboration that I would have never considered, but am glad we received.