Hollow Heart #1
Written and lettered by Paul Allor, drawn and colored by Paul Tucker. Published by Vault.
Here’s a lovely and promising start to a super-gay near-future science fiction story that’s nonetheless tropey as all get out. El (as in Spanish “the,” as in the Chicago El, but also as in the Hebrew divinity) is a salvaged part-human, a cyborg, a recovered creature, in the venerable style of Victor Stone and the Six Million Dollar Man, though he looks more like Robot from Lost in Space. Restored to full function within his high-tech suit, with a skull-like semi-face behind his pink dome, he remains captive in a familiar kind of national security facility, unable to escape (and not shown trying to do much of anything else): If he got out, which he won’t, his life support would stop, thanks to a device or subroutine known as the Tether.
Can El break out? Should he? Will anybody help him? A mechanical engineer named Mateo, who may be falling in love with El — or pitying him, or wanting to get to know him better — can give him a chance.
Paul Allor’s writing and Paul Tucker’s art suggest, for the first few pages, that we’ll be reading yet another comic about how tough it is to be a (gay, trans, disabled, reconstructed, take your pick of real-world analogies) person looking for intimacy in a world that confines you. Such stories, with their opportunities for conflict between soul (words) and body (pictures), between professional and technical situations (mecha fights) and personal social ones (human bodies preferred). A childhood story about parents and goldfish, told entirely through text boxes, sounds like it’s going to illuminate the consciousness of the figure within the suit.
Nope. Allor and Tucker have created — and it looks good so far — a story about what it means to be attached to the guy in the suit, to commit yourself to helping and caring for the cyber-figure you may or may not learn how to love, or how to liberate. Our principal point of view shifts from El the cyborg to the pencil-mustached, green-jumpsuit-clad Mateo, who tries to distract himself from El in the usual way, via a conventionally hot, extremely muscled dude on Grindr. Predictably, it doesn’t work: Mateo will have to return to El and set in motion plot elements that point to our next issue.
Hollow Heart begins with a small cast of characters, a familiar problem and a visual palette that includes few surprises: Put everybody in a beekeeper hat, and we could be reading a Marvel story about AIM. What Tucker lacks in visual oddity, though, he makes up in wise pacing and deft panel construction: No two pages look alike, and each one’s asymmetries and overlaps (especially where text blocks come in) advance the plot. Scenes of Mateo’s disappointing rough sex (with the wrong kind of play, the wrong kind of dominance, for him) slide easily into scenes of Mateo and El, where Mateo knows what he wants to do: “Don’t worry. This won’t hurt at all.” (It will.)
Allor and Tucker’s plot, in turn, stands out for the emotional intricacies it could make possible (One issue can only start to build them), and for just how interested in gay masculinity it remains. The firm holding El captive looks all male. El is one kind of gay man (if that’s what you look for in allegory), one who can’t get out of his tough situation nor do what he wants to do with his body. Mateo is another: He looks a bit like a 1970s clone, he’s fit as heck and he fixes up robots (He dresses like he’s fixing up cars). What would gay liberation even mean, if these are the constraints? Tucker’s scary full-page finale shows us an El confined and unable, for the nonce, to do anything at all, pink skull inside blue helmet on flat black background: What will happen to him, to all of us, if he gets free?
Check out a preview of Hollow Heart #1, out Wednesday, below.
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her podcast about superhero role playing games is Team-Up Moves, with Fiona Hopkins; her latest book of poems is We Are Mermaids. Her nose still hurts from that thing with the gate.
