Turf, Tags, and Territory: Spatiality in Jaime Hernandez’s “Vida Loca: The Death of Speedy Ortiz”

Visually rendered space is a crucial ingredient on the comics page. As Charles Hatfield puts it, “Besides its narrative qualities, comic art is, again, visual: a straightforward enough fact, indeed a banality when bluntly stated, but one that places special obligations on critics and scholars in terms of methodology and range of reference” (133). Unlike a writer who uses text alone to create narrative, comics artists have the tools of visual iconography at their disposal that allow them to designate specific spaces on a page which represent and correspond to actual spaces within the inscribed storyworld. Whereas the text-only writer represents space by using words and phrases that orient readers to locations and positions of objects within the storyworld, the comics artist may achieve the same task by employing an image as simple as a line to something as complex as a photorealistic image of a human face. In most comics, specific visual iconography establishes and enriches the texture of the storyworld; it suggests three-dimensional space via two-dimensional cuing. In other words, space in comics is a vital aspect of the medium itself, a point so abundantly clear as to be taken for granted. However, just as in the early stage of narrative studies where explorations of the temporal aspects dominated, comics studies has only recently taken up the issue of space—not simply as a secondary characteristic but as a substantial constituent of comics. Many factors may explain this—from the observable use of two-dimensional space in comics, to the immeasurability of spaces within storyworlds, to the uncertainty surrounding the term “space” itself when discussing comics. Indeed, multifarious manifestations of space in comics are much more complex than most scholarship acknowledges.

In this essay I wish to consider three aspects of spatiality—what I call configuration, localization, and spatialization—as they play out in Jaime Hernandez’s three-part series “Vida Loca: The Death of Speedy Ortiz” from 1987. I argue that an exploration of Hernandez’s use of space can help us understand how space in comics may enrich a given comics storyworld and also influence reader engagement with comics itself. By using a storyline that is rare in his oeuvre—gangland violence—Hernandez establishes how spaces are claimed and owned within his storyworld—spaces that manifest as neighborhoods, cities, homes, automobiles, and bodies of people. Through careful consideration of these aspects of spatiality, Hernandez produces a unique take on gang life in the barrio while also producing one of his most powerful comics. Thus, I explore Hernandez’s manipulation of time-space as well as his protagonist’s engagement in a similar endeavor within the Hoppers storyworld. While Hernandez uses images to realize a storyworld onto the two-dimensional canvas of the page, Eulalio “Speedy” Ortiz strategizes the creation of his own persona through careful choreographic scripts common to “thug life” as well as his own navigation of space. At its core, “The Death of Speedy Ortiz” underscores how both Hernandez and Ortiz must overcome specific spatial challenges in pursuit of their respective goals. “Vida Loca: The Death of Speedy Ortiz” provides an exceptional opportunity for such a study.

Considerations of Space in Comics

As it relates to comics, one can think of space as having three aspects. The first of these concerns the actual space occupied by the visual art on the page, as in, for example, the panel. This aspect of space has been explored in great detail, particularly by Thierry Groensteen in The System of Comics (2007). Groensteen theorizes a spatio-topic system of comics that encompasses, for instance, the arrangement or dimensions of panels on a given page, among other considerations. Yet Groensteen’s examination of space in a holistic system of comics lacks depth, evident when we consider two other aspects of space in comics.

The second of these aspects is often what we think of when we identify a narrative’s setting—the location in which narrative events occur, but also the three-dimensional texture of a storyworld. Indeed, early explorations of space in narrative often analogized space as a stage, one that functioned as a sort of container where temporal events occurred as the narrative progressed: “In early narrative texts, space is often reduced to a mere backdrop or stage design whose relevant features are largely assumed to be known even if the setting itself is as crucial as the locus amoenus in medieval and romantic literature or indicative of the social status of characters as in the novels of Jane Austen” (Buchholz and Jahn 553-54). Later, Bakhtin’s exploration of the chronotope gave equal weight to both time and space, just as his source inspiration, Albert Einstein, theorized.

Yet as Susan Stanford Friedman has demonstrated, Bakhtin’s notion of topos, or space, is often set aside in favor of other characteristics of narrative. One has only to consider how dominant the exploration of time is in Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse (1980) relative to space, despite the tacit understanding that time and space are equally significant. Friedman suggests

that we need a compensatory emphasis on space in order to bring back into view Bakhtin’s continual attention to the function of space as an active agent in the production of narrative. We need a topochronic narrative poetics, one that foregrounds topos in an effort to restore an interactive analysis of time with space in narrative discourse. (194)

Friedman goes on to show how space, that is to say, substantial geographic space within the narrative (such as a building), can have a larger thematic influence on the narrative that may go unnoticed. For Friedman, the space within narrative is not simply a container for the narrative events; it is a driving force of the narrative itself. Her own conception of space in narrative is concentrated on the notion of the border. “Isn’t it borders that make movement through space/time interesting, suspenseful, agonistic, reconciliatory?” she asks.

Borders insist on purity, distinction, difference, but facilitate contamination, mixing, and creolization. Borders of all kinds are forever being crossed; but the experience of crossing depends upon the existence of borders in the first place […]. Bodies too are border sites, marking the distinction between inside and outside, self and other. Bodies are a flesh and blood upon which the social order marks its hierarchies based on boundaried systems of gender, race, ethnicity, class, caste, religion, sexuality, and so forth. In all these modes and functions, borders are sites and social locations that generate and shape narrative in conjunction with time. (196-97)

Thus, not only is space geographic and cartographic, it is intimate and interwoven with identity.

Friedman’s call to attend to spatial elements of narrative only implicitly acknowledges the third aspect of space, which concerns how readers reconstruct the spaces of a storyworld in their own minds as they read. This theory of spatialization has been theorized by David Herman and Marie-Laure Ryan, among others. As part of the cognitive effort of reading, readers constantly work to recreate the inscribed storyworld in a narrative as well as to constantly update and revise this mental model of the storyworld as the narrative progresses. In Story Logic (2002), Herman describes narratives as “systems of verbal or visual cues prompting their readers to spatialize storyworlds into evolving configurations of participants, objects, and places” (263). Herman’s work on spatialization has helped elucidate how mental models are suggested by certain characteristics of narrative such as deictic shifts, but his model has not yet considered spatialization in graphic narrative specifically. Herman’s precise typology, I suggest, is poised to help scholars of graphic narrative begin to move away from predominant terms that privilege the temporal aspects of narrative. For example, “configurations” or “constellations” with regard to adjacent panels in comics might serve scholarship better than “series” and “sequence” when spatial characteristics of comics are under consideration.

Ryan, for her part, has explored how readers are able to create cognitive maps of the events conveyed in narrative. Her use of the term “cognitive map” is “a mental model of spatial relations” (215). Ryan’s investigation of how storyworlds are mapped by readers (and the difficulties such a task presents) highlights the relation between “the temporal dimension of language and the spatial nature of maps” (218). But as with Herman, Ryan does not consider such cognitive mapping vis-à-vis graphic narrative. Indeed, one might ask how the two processes of cognitive mapping (i.e., reading text-only narrative vs. graphic narrative) are different. The process of creating a mental model of space cued by static images inscribed in comics has not yet been explored in sufficient detail. Indeed, part of what I explore in this essay is how, in comics, the reader reconstructs a storyworld in a way that goes beyond what has been inscribed in the sequential and configured layout of the panels. The reader not only reconstructs the images within a constellation of panels but, as a function of filling in gaps, creates a greater textured storyworld than what is inscribed within the page. Viewed in these specific ways, space within a storyworld may take on a life of its own and can, for example, become a crucial member of the cast of characters as it rises above the designation of mere backdrop or setting. Rather than characterize graphic narrative as “essentially boxes of time,” as do Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven (769), I assert that the triangulation of space along the artist-comic-reader relationship is what enables an expression of time to begin with. So, the comic panel is not “essentially” time. Rather, spatial and temporal aspects of panels in comics are equally important for investigation.

Visual Storytelling in Gang Culture

Before applying my model for spatiality to Jaime Hernandez’s comics, I want to take a moment to establish the primacy and value of visual storytelling that permeates gang culture, by and large, as the predominance of visual markers such as tattoos, scarring, and tags are a salient factor in my analysis. It will be useful to briefly consider the gangland narrative as it typically appears in fiction and autobiography. Though not readily apparent to a casual observer, there is an intriguing parallel between creators of narrative and individuals who take up what Tupac Shakur famously labeled the “thug life” and what Chicano gang culture has called “la vida loca” (crazy life). That is to say, gang members are often preoccupied with the task of creating their own narrative—one that allows them, and their reputations, to become larger-than-life. For gang members, certain acts of violence are typically used to weave a self-designed narrative or origin story to intimidate and to invoke respect and fear from rivals. Such acts are carefully planned and are not the result of mere happenstance; they are the result of strategic storytelling—one that is rooted in fact rather than fiction. More specifically, both the creator of narrative and the gangland initiate are involved in similar world- and persona-creating processes that engage in the same sorts of narrative worldmaking strategies, albeit for vastly different reasons. While the narrative-maker’s purpose is frustratingly difficult to locate (i.e., does he create fictional worlds to suit his own tastes or those of an ideal reader, or both?), the gangbanger’s purpose is readily apparent: to reach the upper echelons of power without suffering disability or death at the hands of a rival. The comparison of narrative worldmaker to gangbanger is a bold one. Yet viewing the gangbanger, or vato loco, along the vector of narrative may help us understand how so-called thug life or “la vida loca” uses narrative strategies in negotiating the space in which this deadly “game” is played. Several of the characters in “The Death of Speedy Ortiz” work to create their own narrative within Hernandez’s storyworld while being aware of the value of space in la vida loca.

Moreover, despite the potential of graphic narrative to undertake a seemingly unlimited range of stories, few comics have explored the world of la vida loca or thug life in general. For reasons that are not altogether clear, gang narratives tend to be rendered in text-only autobiographical words. For example, Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets (1967), and Luis J. Rodríguez’s Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. (1993) are all masterful examples of autobiographical forays into the allure and ultimate destructiveness of gang life. These writers, as they detail in their books, survived their violent youths in order to tell the gang narrative. We have yet to see similar types of stories through the lens of comics. Consequently, the paucity of thug life narratives in comics form makes the works of Jaime Hernandez all the more important for study for several reasons. First, while Jaime and his brothers all grew up in Oxnard, California and were ostensibly not far from the effects of gang life on the atmosphere of a community, Jaime’s narrative engagements with la vida loca, unlike the narratives of Brown, Thomas, and Rodríguez, are not explicitly autobiographical. (While Hernandez admits his first-hand engagement with lowrider culture in his youth, “The Death of Speedy Ortiz” is not personal in the same way as, say, Down These Mean Streets.) Since there is nothing in Hernandez’s comic that blurs the ontological line of fiction, we can read it purely as fiction. Second, the visual-verbal mode of storytelling in comics allows Jaime to foreground the spatial elements in his storyworld that act as signifiers which transcend immediate localizations of time, such as the graffiti tags that literally decorate the Hoppers storyworld. Though often backgrounded relative to what the visual-verbal narrator foregrounds within the panels, these tags serve an overarching, if minor, storytelling function within the Hoppers storyworld, just as similar tags do in real-world practices. Consequently, these tags serve as a sort of connective tissue that unites the serialized issues of the Hoppers storyworld. These tags are also created by faceless entities that strive for a sort of omnipresence, much like Hernandez himself. In fact, the splash page of Part Two of “The Death of Speedy Ortiz” displays the title written as graffiti on a background wall in the panel. Hernandez adopts the name “Loco,” in this panel, a name appearing throughout many of the comics set in the Hoppers storyworld. Finally, as a rare instance of the meeting of graphic narrative and thug life, Jaime’s comics highlight the value of space as currency in the two endeavors, affording a new way of looking at them both.

Gangland Appropriations of Space

Undoubtedly, the most obvious and iconic method of claiming territory among gangs is the graffiti tag. These tags function as an identity place marker, wherein the person who creates the tag has declared a specific place as off-limits to certain people—often those who are seen as outsiders. More importantly, the act of producing graffiti “permits inner city teenagers, who are denied access to legitimate mastery over spaces, to claim control of a more ephemeral and chimeric nature” (Ley and Cybriwsky 494-95). The graphic tag itself is a metonymy of the tag’s owner, much like a signature is associated with an actual person. In certain situations the tag may be attacked or vandalized, perhaps overwritten with another tag. While one might argue that an attack on a tag is not the same thing as an attack on a person, the insult and disrespect felt by those involved is palpable. The tagged space, the side of a building for example, often represents the surrounding spaces as well and not simply the actual tagged space. In fact, the defacement of the tag, because of its degree of permanence and claims to ownership of larger spaces, may be a potent insult with staying power. The graffiti tag itself is a visual icon of identity, one that is simultaneously declarative and vulnerable.

Graffiti tags, however, are not the only means by which gang members may claim territory. Body art and tattoos often proclaim territorial affiliation and gang membership. Perhaps most famously, members of the El Salvadorian gangs known as the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and the 18th Street gang (M-18) declare gang membership as well as the consummation of certain acts of violence (such as a tattooed teardrop for each life they have taken) in the form of obtrusive tattoos on prominent areas of their body, such as the face or neck. These body markings, as with graffiti tags, are visual icons and markers that announce certain aspects of character or personality at a distance. They are not unlike warning signs. Further, as Karin Elizabeth Beeler argues, tattoos “function as a narrative or tell stories of their genesis; alternatively, the tattoo can in turn generate a story” (2). Beeler identifies “tattoo narratives” as “stories of desire, of trauma and violence, and of cultural preservation—stories that are intimately connected to the symbolic and physical or bodily aspects of the tattoo” (3). While “The Death of Speedy Ortiz” is not a tattoo narrative by Beeler’s standard, it is a graphic narrative in which tattoos are yet another form of the graphic expression of la vida loca in Hernandez’s comic.

The third, and perhaps most impermanent of gang claims to territory is by word-of-mouth—which is another way of saying the instantiation of gang scripts. Certain assertions and claims are made and distributed via gang social networks. It is a high-stakes game of “he said/she said” that may often lead to bodily assault or worse, yet these verbal narratives can spread and embolden or undermine power structures. Understandably, because so much rests on these gangland micronarratives, many acts of violence perpetrated among rival gangs may stem from misunderstandings and/or lies. All of these methods of claiming territory—tags, tattoos, and gang chatter—play out to some degree in Hernandez’s comic. In fact, because the misunderstanding and misreporting of information among characters is a quintessential aspect of any drama, Hernandez uses this as a means by which his narrative unfolds. Because such a high premium is placed on space in this specific comic (i.e., territory in the Hoppers storyworld), anything that disrupts the delicate balance of territory ownership threatens to plunge rival gangs into increasingly more violent acts of retribution, with Speedy caught in the middle of it all.

Spatializing Comics

One of the central components of Groensteen’s The System of Comics is his exploration of how space operates on the page. However, the definition and articulation of Groensteen’s system, while helpful and insightful, uses a highly exclusive understanding of space in the medium of comics. His opening chapter, titled “The Spatio-Topical System,” establishes his theoretical framework for understanding space in comics, whose basic building block, he argues, is the panel. As he puts it, “But the choice of the panel as a reference unit is particularly necessary since one is interested primarily in the mode of occupation of the specifics base of comics. In its habitual configuration, the panel is presented as a portion of space isolated by blank spaces and enclosed by a frame that insures its integrity” (25). The panel, as an elemental building block of comics, is a logical site for understanding how such spaces work as units as well as cohesive areas of visual narrative. Yet Groensteen restricts his examination to what occurs at the level of the two-dimensional space of the page. He is not concerned with how space is represented within the storyworld of a comic, nor is he concerned with how the reader reconstructs the spaces within the storyworld. Rather, Groensteen attempts to establish a typology for how the blank space of the page is appropriated, apportioned, and used by the comics artist. In theorizing his “spatio-topical apparatus,” Groensteen delineates parameters that are functions of geometry and location. In short, Groensteen investigates space in terms of the geometric form of the panel, the area or size of the panel, and the location or position of the panel on the page. The “spatio-topical apparatus” is decidedly mathematical in nature, as when he says, “With regard to the area, a proportional relationship is established, a rapport that the eye of the reader appreciates with some approximation, but which the researcher can establish accurately. Thus, a panel of 8 x 23 cm will occupy, for example, close to one fifth of the area of a hyperframe of 20 x 26.5 cm” (34). Such precision is undoubtedly fruitful in our understanding of comics at the level of form, despite its highly specific characteristic of analysis. Indeed, this system of accounting for these formal characteristics of comics is valuable in comics studies. Ultimately, however, Groensteen’s system is only one aspect of how space is employed in comics.

Groensteen’s work has been an essential tool for comics theorists, and my point is not to diminish the value of his theorization. Instead, my point is that Groensteen’s “spatio-topical apparatus” is but one aspect of a larger understanding of how space operates in comics, and it is what I characterize as configuration in my three-part model. His approach to uncovering those measurable, quantifiable aspects of the system of comics necessarily neglects those characteristics of space that are difficult to quantify. For example, it is impossible to accurately measure the distance of specific areas of space within the storyworld suggested by any given panel within a comic. We can only approximate the measurable space between, say, two characters. Here we rely on approximations, descriptions that might suggest intimacy or friendliness. Yet just because we cannot definitively measure the spaces within a storyworld does not mean that they are not worthy of consideration or incorporation into a true “system” of how space operates in comics. So, while Groensteen’s examination of space is localized directly on the page of the comic readers hold in their hands when they read, it is only one small part of a larger spatial system that is comprised also of the spaces within the storyworld and those spaces as reconstructed by the mind of the reader.

Space often appears in verbal narratives in the form of setting and description. In many high school English classes, students are taught that setting is equivalent to time and place, both of which help contextualize the story. Setting thus becomes the stage on which the events of the narrative take place, and only rarely does the setting become a fully-fledged consideration within the story. Spaces must be described in narrative prose; the narrator or character must report to the reader about the spaces within the storyworld. Indeed, the description of spaces until recently has been considered negligible, or at least of secondary concern to the unfolding events within a narrative and the resultant consequences of those events or actions. Long stretches of descriptive prose require cognitive effort on the part of the reader, who must take the verbal cues that suggest certain spaces (whether those spaces are occupied by objects or are empty spaces is inconsequential) and re-create those items found within the storyworld in their minds. To use a famous example from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), consider as Gatsby looks longingly to the green light across the water:

I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness. (21-22)

Readers, using the textual cues from Nick Carraway’s narration, imagine Gatsby as he gazes at the green light. Every space within that scene—the ground upon which Gatsby stands in the “shadow of [his] mansion” (21), the “far away” green light across the water, the intermediary space, dark and unknown, of the water itself, the starry sky above Gatsby, and so on—are prompts in the text to create an image within a reader’s mind. Indeed, before we even consider a reader’s own reconstruction of this scene in visual form within his or her mind, the various spaces in this specific scene from The Great Gatsby resound with meaning. Put another way, the spaces suggested by Carraway’s narration give the scene its galvanic charge and resonating power long after we have finished reading Fitzgerald’s novel. In fact, here it seems that time is not a central concern in this section of narration. It is the various spaces themselves that prompt us, along with Carraway, to make an attempt to enter into Gatsby’s thoughts in this moment. Why does Gatsby seem to tremble as he reaches out to green light? Here he remains inscrutable, and all readers are left with are the various spaces that function as puzzle pieces that provide some clue to Gatsby, and indirectly, Carraway. Cognitive efforts like this on the part of the reader are vital for providing texture and verisimilitude to storyworlds. If Carraway had simply stated that Gatsby stared across the harbor and trembled, we would still have the elements of narrative. The verbal cues that suggest space give this scene its transcendent quality. As this small example shows, rather than being a secondary aspect of narrative, spatial cues are highly significant.

But what of comics? Of graphic storytelling? Are articulations of space through the visual as important an element in comics as they are in text-only narrative? Certainly visual cues are more potent than a verbal description in that the reader has less variability in reconstructing the visual element in his or her mind. For example, a verbal description of Speedy (something readers get in earlier issues of Love and Rockets when Speedy is mentioned but not seen) may never yield an image of Speedy in quite the way that Hernandez inscribes him on the page. Readers of visual narrative have less freedom in re-creating an inscribed storyworld than readers of text-only narrative.

This somewhat obvious point may help explain why a closer examination of how space is used within a comics storyworld has yet to receive sustained attention. Visual iconography in graphic storytelling is so potent that a few simple lines, cleverly arranged, can allow readers to “see” a human face in what may actually look like an electrical outlet, as Scott McCloud demonstrates in Understanding Comics.