Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > Garden of the Flesh

At a glance I was puzzled by the low rating of this book and what I see as people not getting the joke at the heart of it. The Hernandez brothers--Jaime and Gilbert--love fifties and sixties pulpy, trashy sci-fi-fantasy, noir, B-movies, and not sleek and sophisticated stuff, so they have a series of comics versions of the B movies Fritz starred in, the very "trash" they love and laugh at. And most people respond: Ugh, such bad writing! What is going on with those guys?! But have we lost all sense of what B movies (Reefer Madness, The Night of the Living Dead, and so on) and "midnight movies" were all about? So bad that's it good?

Garden of Flesh is a retelling of the Book of Genesis as a Tijuana Bible, which these guys would have been familiar with growing up, cheap/nasty/funny/quickly done, eight pages.

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Fantagraphics does a funny production: Small and short as Tijuana Bibles would be, with an embossed (fake) leather cover as if it were a cherished family Bible. And it is clearly marked: For Adults Only, because the version of Genesis Hernandez jokingly relates here is one as if by and for smirking juveniles, one that is almost exclusively focused on explicit sexual acts, missing any spiritual or religious meanings intended by the original text. Hilarious, if you see it that way, but very possibly offensive if you only pick it up to skim through it. So this is a parody, not porn. Still, maybe it's not the kind of joke you would enjoy, involving graphic depictions of Adam and Eve and their descendants having sex, maybe it sounds like Beavis and Butthead depicting the Bible as only the "begattings," and in a way maybe it's not far from that, so you are hereby forewarned, but it made me smile. Los Bros remember comics and youth as rebellion.