Review: Hector Umbra by Uli Oesterle

Hector Umbra — Uli Oesterle (w/a)

Blank Slate Books, £18.99, ISBN 978-1-906653-16-3

Blank Slate have been doing yeoman’s work of late, bringing both new British talent into publication and translating some foreign-language gems into English for the first time.  Hector Umbra falls into the latter category.  The work of German artist Oli Oesterle, it made a lot of noise when it began serialization in his native country back in 2003, and now finds itself the subject of much hype for its English-language debut.  It’s also the first of Blank Slate’s books to be distributed through Diamond, opening up the US to the British indie publisher.

That Hector should be Oesterle’s entry to America is entirely fitting as the book is practically dripping with the influence of his trans-Atlantic counterparts.  The story is an off-kilter neo-noir that places a hard-boiled, no-nonsense protagonist (the eponymous Umbra) in the centre of a mystery that grows increasingly weird and fantastical.  After his friend — the DJ Osaka Best — vanishes, Hector’s search for him leads him through the afterlife, a world of invisible aliens and more than one encounter with psychotic Jehovah’s Witnesses at an apocalyptic club-night.  All this is set against the backdrop of modern Munich and filtered through Oesterle’s thick, chiseled line-work that isn’t afraid to wear its influences on its sleeve.

With so much resistance to superheroes in Europe, it’s curious to see which aspects of the American comics landscape are reflected back at us and how discerning, yet egalitarian Oesterle’s choice of influences are.   Littered around the backgrounds of the panels, we see copies of Dan Clowes’s Eightball, David Lapham’s Stray Bullets and Paul Pope’s Heavy Liquid.  It’s hard to think of three other comics that could sum-up Hector Umbra’s bizarro crime-world of high-octane dance music quite so succinctly.  Add to that a strong Mike Mignola aspect to the art, and you have a comic that manages to take everything that’s right with American comics and amplify it.

As with any noir piece, a huge ingredient of its success is in the language, and nailing the idiosyncratic rhythms and cadences of real-world speech.  For a translated work this poses a problem, as the nuances of the original German will be lost, and translating to a traditional noir American dialect would jar with the book’s Euro setting.  Translator Iz Rips’s solution is to render the characters with regional British accents which, for the most part, feel authentic and appropriately urban.  The one pitfall is in the voice of Lester Birmingham — a supposed black, house-DJ, who’s revealed to be just a fat Glaswegian with a bad tan — whose overly-stilted Scots is nothing less than cringe-inducing.  It might have been forgivable, were Blank Slate not run by a Scotsman.

Even with these translation misgivings, it’s not enough to spoil the overall quality and energy of Oesterle’s work.  As Hector Umbra’s plot thickens and grows increasingly surreal, there’s always a feeling that the cartoonist is writing himself into a corner and getting carried away with the possibilities of the world he has created.  Thankfully, though, its denouement is a satisfying one and manages to honour the conventions of both its crime and sci-fi roots, tying all the various plot strands together neatly.  Hector Umbra is a bold way for Oesterle to enter the international stage, and it’s a wonder that with material such as this, which is so deeply rooted in American tropes, that he is only just arriving.

-- Gavin Lees

Posted in: Gavin Lees,Review