With Julio’s Day, Gilbert Hernandez has created a glorious, sweeping journey through one man’s 100-year life. From the day he’s born to the day he dies, we follow Julio and his family through a century of life and death. Relationships are forged and destroyed, people come and go, but family bonds are strong and binding. Hernandez guides us through the key events of Julio’s life, and those of the world, as it revolves around him.
The book is a tapestry of events, some seemingly crucial to Julio’s character, others more humdrum. However, Hernandez’s skill at sowing innocent-looking seeds early on in the book, and nurturing them into life-changing events further down the line, is second to none.
Hernandez’s art is just beautiful here, with family resemblance working through the generations; glorious set-piece scene-setting panels; and a pace of design that’s just phenomenally executed.
To discuss the plot would be to unbalance the magic of the book – the page-by-page discovery of story is everything here, and I don’t want to spoil a single panel of the enjoyment I know you’re going to get from this book. Just buy it now. This is Gilbert Hernandez at his finest, distilling a lifetime into a single volume of pleasure and pain.
Julio’s Day is a literary classic, and another incredible piece of work from a true master of comics.
