The return of 'Love and Rockets'

February 15 - 22, 2001

[Art Reviews]

House of raging women

The return of Love and Rockets

by Douglas Wolk
When the first issue of Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez's Love and Rockets appeared in 1981, it was instantly clear that it was a new kind of comic book: not quite one of the "underground" comics that thrived on spitting at taboos, not exactly one of the black-and-white fantasy series like Elfquest and The First Kingdom that were starting to pop up from self-publishers. L&R became a hit in the comics world, running for 50 issues over the next 15 years (they're collected in a series of paperback reprints from Fantagraphics), and inspiring a British band's name. A host of black-and-white and self-published comics followed in its wake, from Eightball to Yummy Fur to Peepshow to Acme Novelty Library. Now, five years after the Hernandez brothers went off to do their own separate things, they've reunited for a new L&R series, and there's still nothing else like it.
It didn't take the Hernandez brothers long to realize that they could dispense with the action-adventure and science-fiction trappings of their first few stories and concentrate on their characters, and that's when L&R really took off. They were among the first American cartoonists to think of comics as a medium for literary fiction rather than genre fiction; they were certainly the first with the skill and imagination to pull it off. And part of their secret was that they concentrated on things that can be done only in comics: images that communicate more than words, snapshots that imply a whole scene, and that distinctive iconographic language (as when squiggly lines rise up from their characters' heads when they're mad). For sheer command of comics as a form, few cartoonists are even in their league.
It also doesn't hurt that their major characters -- almost all of them women -- are some of the most richly realized in the medium. Their two best-known characters are at the center of most of Jaime Hernandez's stories: Margarita "Maggie" Chascarillo and her on-and-off friend and even more intermittent lover, Esperanza "Hopey" Glass. Over the past 20 years, we've watched them age in more or less real time. The series has followed them through punk tours, domestic drama, parties good and bad, shitty jobs, and occasional flashes of romance. The first time Maggie and Hopey appeared, in #1 of the first Love and Rockets, they were adorable, skinny teenagers; in the first issue of the new series, they're in their mid 30s. The lines on their faces have changed slowly, and Maggie's gradually gained a lot of weight. As she ages, she looks progressively more like her aunt, the wrestler Vicki Glori. The cover of the new Volume 2, #1 is a police line-up of the Maggies we've seen in the past: the businesswoman in a little suit, the early-20s hipster Maggie, the boozy, tank-topped Maggie from her lowest years, the blasé young mechanic with a Black Flag badge. Behind them is our first look at the new Maggie, a little older still, her hair bleached blond, covering her nakedness with her hands, looking a little worried, hiding behind the party girl she was a few years ago.
The image is poignant and funny, and it's also a nod to the first L&R cover: a line-up of four buxom aliens and superheroines, plus a woman in a bathrobe and curlers with a what-am-I-doing-here expression on her face. (The brothers have drawn variations on the "line-up" image more than a few times.) The big change between the two covers, though, is in Jaime's drawing style. The earliest issues were meticulously modeled and shaded, in the fantasy-art tradition of comics like Heavy Metal. Within a few years, he stripped down to a pure, bold stroke -- he never uses 30 lines where just one will do. Jaime wears his cartooning influences on his sleeve, but they're not from the usual superhero axis; you can see the way Dan DeCarlo's Archie comics have rubbed off on him, and sometimes even Charles Schulz's Peanuts, as in his award-winning story "Home School."
For a cartoonist whose work is so stylized, Jaime's an incredible draftsman -- you can look at any drawing of one of his major characters and usually tell how old she's supposed to be. (He uses that to his advantage, too. The chronology of his best book, Wigwam Bam, leaps backward and forward with no notice: the way the characters look is often the only cue.) His characters say as much with their body language as with his snappy, natural-sounding dialogue. The real force of his stories, though, is in how they add up -- Hopey has barely mellowed with age, but Maggie's life has changed dramatically through the decades, as she's evolved from a hotshot "prosolar mechanic" who can fix anything to a middle-aged divorcée who's not doing much of anything. Even so, Jaime sometimes reminds us that she hasn't totally lost her skill. He doesn't draw attention to it, but Maggie casually fixes a broken phone in the new L&R #1, and in a way, it's the climax of the story.
Hopey and Maggie appeared in the first panel of Jaime's first L&R story; it took Gilbert a little longer to refine his own set of characters. For the first few issues of L&R, his pieces were mostly short and experimental, aside from a long, confusing science-fiction serial called "BEM." Eventually, though, he started telling stories about a little Latin American town called Palomar and its inhabitants. The early Palomar stories are fairly explicitly influenced by Gabriel García Márquez (especially his One Hundred Years of Solitude). In time, they moved away from magical-realist flourishes and concentrated on the complicated relationships and feverish sexuality of the characters, especially a bathhouse owner named Luba (who'd first appeared in "BEM") and her mind-bendingly convoluted family tree in both Mexico and the United States.
Gilbert's drawing isn't as easy on the eye as Jaime's -- it's got a rugged, scratchy look that takes some getting used to -- but like his brother, he's a master storyteller, though one with a very different style. His specialty is capturing a moment in a single drawing or gesture, and letting those moments tell the story, leaving the reader to fill in the intervening narrative -- sometimes a lot of it. By Love and Rockets X, a serial that ran from 1989 to 1992, he'd worked out a rapid-fire, telegraphic approach: each panel's image and snatches of dialogue create an entirely different scene. Collected in a book of the same name, it shifts scenes 64 times in the final 66 panels. Around the same time, L&R also ran his "Poison River," a long story about Luba's early years, whose complexity makes the Godfather movies look like Teletubbies.
In 1996, the first Love and Rockets series ended, and the brothers went on to separate projects. Jaime continued in his accustomed direction. Whoa, Nellie!, collected last year, was a lovingly drawn, if insubstantial, mini-series about women wrestlers; the ongoing Penny Century series, now scheduled to appear annually, follows some of the non-lead characters from the Maggie-and-Hopey stories. (The first few issues have just been collected as Locas in Love.) Gilbert, meanwhile, went far afield. His New Love mini-series (collected in the new Fear of Comics) threw out his established cast of characters and settings, abandoned any form of realism, and ripped the lid off his id for six issues' worth of drawing experiments and messy, gruesome hallucinations. Then he capped it again and launched Luba -- a return to Palomar and its exiles, the characters he can't seem to escape. Gilbert has also done a few children's comics, starring a little girl named Venus; in a beautifully twisted touch, Venus's parents are characters from Birdland, a triple-X-rated miniseries he wrote and drew in the late '80s.
So why the new Love and Rockets series? "The batteries are recharged and it just seems right," Jaime says in Fantagraphics' press material. The new #1 isn't the groundbreaker that the first one was, but it's a blast anyway. Besides the Jaime story mentioned above, it includes the work of a third Hernandez brother, Mario, who contributed only a couple of short stories to the original L&R series. Here he's written "Me for the Unknown," a serial drawn by Gilbert that has something to do with corporate intrigue. (Like Mario's earlier stories, it doesn't make a lot of sense, but Gilbert could draw the phone book and it would look stunning.) The serial Gilbert's doing by himself, "Julio's Day," concerns the century-long life of a man born in 1900, drawn in the scraggly, rural style of the Palomar stories, but not connected to them. So far it doesn't make much sense either, but the first installment has one classic Hernandez moment. As the young Julio and his big sister are out walking, a screaming teenage boy runs naked through the street; a couple pull a bag over the screamer, then uncover him looking dazed. Julio's sister, strolling on, says: "He could have a hundred fits a day and I'd still marry him."
The most exciting thing about the new Love and Rockets, though, is that it's a new Love and Rockets. Gilbert and Jaime are both cartoonists of the first rank, but their work is even better together; they're the Lennon and McCartney of comics. In places, the new series has a feeling about it that the first L&R had at the beginning (and tried to recapture toward the end): the sense that anything could happen, that the brothers are feeding off each other's energy and drawing to impress each other. Can't wait to see what appears in the next line-up.

House of raging women

The return of Love and Rockets

by Douglas Wolk