Tag Archives: Jaime Hernandez

Love and Rockets and Lesbians

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News Flash: straight men love lesbians. We love them in movies, television, magazines, games … pretty much any medium you can name. But comics fandom is in a league of its own. The Japanese have an entire genre dedicated to girls who love girls.  In the U.S., Jaime Hernandez built an enviable career by writing about lesbians, and he’s hardly the only male creator to find success through Sapphic appreciation. Lesbian (and female bi-sexual) characters may not be necessary to win accolades and commercial success, but they’ve never hurt a writer’s chances.

Before someone accuses me of being glib, I’ll acknowledge that Locas is indeed more thoughtful than lesbian porn. I won’t elaborate on the merits of Locas, as I’m sure the other roundtable contributors will discuss it in detail. Suffice to say, it’s about much more than sex. And Hernandez  obviously cares about Maggie and Hopey for reasons besides prurience. But the prurience is always there, lurking in the background.

There are plenty of theories explaining why straight men love lesbians, but I suspect much of the appeal has to do with voyeurism. Lesbianism is a rejection of the male presence. Stories about lesbians allow men to gaze upon a “hidden” world of women, and by gazing upon it they shape it to their desires. The pleasure comes not simply from observing women, but from observing women in an environment that excludes men. This phenomenon is obvious in mainstream lesbian porn (that is, porn created for men), because the physical attributes of the women and the manner of the sex are intended for a straight male audience. However, voyeuristic pleasure does not require explicit sex. The appeal is not simply in the women being attractive, but that they are attracted to each other, and that attraction both reflects and enhances straight male desire.

For a writer, there are additional pleasures in creation and control. In Locas, Hernandez created an universe centered on women. The women fuck and fight and do crazy things, often in the absence of any man, yet Hernandez controls everything: their personalities, histories, clothing, bodies. Maggie and Hopey are shaped by Hernandez, and they embody his desires and fantasies. Their mutual attraction is his attraction, whether to each of them or to the two of them together.

On a related note, the limited number of male characters in Locas has occasionally been treated as a failing in Hernandez’s writing. But that complaint misses the point. The lack of male characters is not a bug, but a feature. A more frequent presence of men would alter the nature of the story, because it could no longer be a world primarily of women. Stories about men with women have their own appeal, of course, but that appeal is fundamentally different from the voyeuristic appeal of lesbianism.

Is it impossible for a straight man to write about lesbians in a completely non-exploitative manner? Maybe, but that doesn’t mean the outcome would be superior art. As I suggested above, even an exploitative work can have artistic merit (and there are treatments of lesbianism far more exploitative than Locas). And LGBT readers are often the most enthusiastic fans of lesbian stories by male creators (see Jaime Hernandez, Terry Moore, Joss Whedon, etc., etc.), at least when those creators treat their characters with a modicum of respect.

But I’m left wondering how Locas  would be different if it had been written by a lesbian. And how would the identity of the creator affect the critical reaction in the tiny world of comics? Would a lesbian creator be given the same acclaim for Locas as Hernandez, or would she be pigeon-holed as an LGBT creator writing for a queer market? Do male comic readers give a damn about lesbians when they’re created by lesbians?

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The index to the Locas Roundtable is here.

Exes and Ohs

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Click images to enlarge

Jaime Hernandez uses the temporal flexibility of the comics medium to work like memory: moments that are far separated in time recontextualize when put in proximity to each other. He shows that the ways people treat each other resonate unpredictably through their lives. In the world he has built on paper and in ours, passion can be fleeting, violence can happen in the blink of an eye and both can have long-lasting repercussions.

Hernandez’s recent comics show psychological insight and a command of expression and gesture that transcends his earlier efforts. As he refines the economic grace of his storytelling, he delves into the formative years of his characters to motivate them.

Secrets hinted at over the years are overtly revealed in Browntown, which is cut with flashbacks to a time when the teenaged Maggie’s family moves from Hoppers to Cadeeza to be closer to where her father Nacho works, so he can spend more than just alternate weekends with them. But, Nacho’s infidelity is revealed by his behavior at a party attended by both his wife and his young employee/mistress Miss Varga, who makes a point to cruelly inform Maggie of the disparaging nickname of her new neighborhood. Nacho thinks he has uncovered a betrayal when a drunken former workmate of his wife says he visited her house while they lived apart; here perhaps he displaces his own guilt to her and so to their daughter.

Maggie in her innocence percieves his half-serious disowning of her as only a joke and then does not understand her father’s violent reaction to her affectionate embrace. Now, on the one hand, he is freaking out because his wife and his girlfriend are both in that panel, a significance that Maggie and her mother are both unaware of. But also, possibly a baser sexual instinct provokes his panic; certainly Maggie could not imagine that he might be subject to arousal as a young girl climbs on his lap, even if she is his daughter. Perhaps, here is some of the rationale of misogynistic fundamentalism, men who repress women because of their own lack of self-control.

When Maggie later sees Nacho parked having an emotional scene with his lover, she places her as Miss Varga from the party and as the girl seen earlier leaving what she and his siblings had decided couldn’t be his car. The depth of her father’s betrayal destroys her trust, her idea of how the world is structured and when she then tells her mother what she saw, the family fully dissolves. Nacho won’t control himself and he isn’t protecting his family, which enables the ordeal that Maggie’s brother Calvin goes through and forces that little boy to take on the role of protector.

Left to his own devices and vulnerable, Calvin is initiated into a club of boys of varying ages that sit around in the grass with their pants down. Hernandez shows the boys mime heterosexual sex, though not engaging in actual sex. But, the older boy who leads this supposedly harmless homosocial group draws Calvin away from the rest to rape him repeatedly.

Hernandez shows the progression of abuse with understated taste in his increasingly appealing style, which makes it all the more horrific. The period shown is protracted, enough that both characters’ hair grows significantly longer. What is done to Calvin is long-term bullying and rape: he says “no” repeatedly, he expresses that it hurts again and again. The older kid threatens Calvin’s family several times when he tries to refuse to submit; his arm is twisted behind his back, he is forced. Ice pops are shoplifted and shared with Calvin as a show of exchange, which also makes him complicit in crime and solidifies the kid’s hold on him.

When the sociopath begins to spend time with Maggie, Calvin knows the boy’s practices and does not want him near his sister. He erupts and attacks the bigger kid for violating their pact: that if Calvin endures the abuse, his family will be safe. Calvin is badly beaten. When he gets home, there is a problem occurring involving Maggie that he doesn’t understand. Everything happens quickly; the family is breaking up, they are leaving town because of something unspoken, something bad that no one will tell such a young child. He mistakes the upset caused by Maggie’s exposure of her father’s cheating for something involving Maggie and his rapist. This is why Calvin does what he does, here and later in The Love Bunglers. His older, traumatized and disassociated self is still trying to protect Maggie.

A terrible irony of the revelations in these stories is that the reader knows much more than the characters do. As Calvin acts because he does not comprehend the true reason his family is falling apart, Maggie remains ignorant of what Calvin does out of love for her, she doesn’t realize who the older Calvin even is and eventually she denies her brother entirely.

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The first time I read The Love Bunglers, it unnerved me. A few days ago, I read it again and thought it was perfect. Still, I should restrain my interpretation until I see where Hernandez goes next, as I had to do with L&R NS #3, which is clarified by what transpires in the next issue. The scale of the lateral expanse he has developed makes it so he can continue to explore the spaces between and around what he has already established.

The most obviously outstanding aspect of Hernandez’s work is that his female characters are afforded, in their mesh of word and image, a depth of agency and complexity rivaled by no male cartoonist but Milton Caniff. It is hard not to single out Maggie for her particular charisma and I’m very impressed with Jaime’s most recent issue’s visual deglamorizing of such a beloved construct. His male characters are no less considered. Below, for example, Hernandez counterpoints Maggie’s subtle interaction with Ray by his frenzied coupling with “The Frogmouth,” a conflicted and sometimes tragic figure in her own right:

But it is Maggie who is imbedded in Ray’s consciousness; she’s unforgettable. Here’s one of my favorites of all of Jaime’s panels:

It reminds me a lot of one of my favorite Kirby panels since I was a kid, that I suspect Hernandez noticed as well:

Obviously such montages are well-worn romance comics devices, but Kirby was one of the initiators of the genre and Hernandez is one of his best students. In both stories these are significant moments in much larger, painstakingly set-up spreads of narrative; they are timed and emotionally keyed in the interaction of word and image so that the reader is driven to empathize with the characters’ yearning and to associate it with a similarly displaced attachment in their lives.

With Hernandez’s work, this identification goes well beyond sentimentality or nostalgia. I once sent him a letter that said, “Your work is great art because it is not only a pleasure to behold but also makes one consider one’s own experience with added perspective.” I can’t think of a better way to say that and it’s true, his work has given me many such moments of reflection. The director Jean Renoir wrote to François Truffaut, “It is very important for us men to know where we stand with women, and equally important for women to know where they stand with men. You help dissipate the fog that envelopes the essence of this question.” When I first read that quote, I thought of Jaime Hernandez.

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The index to the Locas Roundtable is here.

La Maggie La Superhero

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(Convention sketch by Jaime Hernandez from Batgirl, Heck Yeah!)

Despite being one of my favorite comics artists, I’ve always found it hard to write about Jaime Hernandez’s work. I have managed to take both a micro (one page)[1] and a macro (the whole Locas series) approach, so this time I thought I’d try to address a single story. But as I read and thought about it, I again found it difficult to address a single story without moving out to the series as a whole. Thus, I offer these thoughts that came from reading “La Maggie La Loca” and “Gold Diggers of 1969” as found in Love & Rockets v.2 n.20 (Summer 2007)[2].

“La Maggie” originally appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine as a weekly serial (the second of their “Funny Pages” comics). It is hard to imagine how a new reader would approach this story. Hernandez drops in information for the new reader, but also leaves much unexplained (who is this “Hopey” on the phone who is mentioned so casually then never heard from again). He seems to be attempting to reach both the new and the long time reader (appropriate for the context), but I wonder how effective, in the end, this can be. Does, as the story progresses, Maggie’s inability to communicate with Rena or the fact of her 40th birthday and the corresponding feelings of aging and failure mean anything to someone who hasn’t been following the character’s life story as found in the rest of the series? As a standalone story, the emotions seem a little unearned without the stories that precede it (which can be both a strength and weakness throughout the series).

As I thought about the new reader and how one would fill in the details for him/her, it brought me back to oft-repeated comments about trying to explain a single superhero comic to someone, and how there is so often such a built up accretion of material that the story (a single issue of a comic book) cannot be appreciated as a individual narrative (for example, I think here of the Chris Claremont written Uncanny X-men stories that were one of the first comics series I read as a kid). This made me realize that despite its longstanding place as a key “alternative” comic to the “mainstream,”[3] Hernandez’s work shares so many components with those mainstream superhero books, perhaps more than it shares with the modern “graphic novel,” placing the Locas stories in middle ground between the two. In one of my previous posts on Locas I wrote: “For someone who is so clearly influenced by and still interested in superheroes, his work is a kind of diametric opposite to the ageless superheroes.” But now I find myself rethinking that statement from my 2008 self. There are many ways Locas is the opposite of the superhero genre, but the two also share a number of elements.

Perhaps this is an obvious revelation, as Hernandez has never totally left behind superheroes. Since its science fiction origins, the series has made use of superheroes in varying diegetic levels (sometimes as part of world of the characters, sometimes as part of those character’s reading material (we know Maggie and Ray both read comics)). As recently as Love & Rockets: New Stories issues 1 and 2 (coincidentally, the comics that immediately followed the revised version of “La Maggie”), Hernandez featured a superhero story (a recent low point of the series). Even disregarding said superhero appearances, the connections are numerous once I started in that direction.

On thinking it, I realized how much the Locas stories probably do fill a similar place for me as superhero comics do for a lot of comics readers. In his post last week, Noah noted “the years and years of investment in the characters, by both the author and his readers.” The reader of Locas, especially the longtime reader, is invested in the characters, much in the same way a longtime reader of a superhero comic is invested in the character(s). And not just the character, but the diegetic world itself, the world that is just this side of the real world (a little further away for the superhero comics, though not by much when taking Locas as a whole). As so many of the recent reviews and comments on “Love Bunglers” have shown, readers have an emotional investment with the characters (especially Maggie, the protagonist).

This connection (and others below) are, admittedly, as much about serialized narrative, as they are about superheroes as a genre, but in comics this type of narrative is more associated with superheroes than any other genre (at least in the present day). In these narratives there is no overarching theme/plot (unlike a traditional novel) beyond the lives of the protagonists. The (seemingly) endless serialized narrative can be found in comics since fairly early on in the history of comic strips (Gasoline Alley to name one), but has since become the province of the “mainstream.” While the comic strips were a daily serialization, made of small pieces strung together, work like superhero comics and Locas are series of longer, slightly more independent stories. Similar to many superhero comics, Locas’ serialization tends to be short narratives with the occasional, multi-part, “to be continued” limited series mixed in. Locas has even had one spin-off series, Whoa Nellie, not unlike a mini-series spin-off from a superhero series.

We can also posit “guest stars” in Locas. The appearance of Rena and Tse Tse in “La Maggie” acts much like a guest appearance in a superhero comic: a character from some previous story returns, offering the “in the know” reader an extra level of engagement with the story. This sense of the reader’s experience with the world of the narrative is an important part of superhero comics and is a primary factor in Locas (again, Noah, did some of the work for me in addressing this issue, though I am more positive on it than he).

Locas even has a few of its own “origin stories.” A case in point (and one I just noticed this time around) is the “Gold Diggers of 1969” strip that runs below “La Maggie” in Love & Rockets v.2 n.20. While the story, drawn in Hernandez’s Dennis the Menace/Little Archie style, shows a very young Maggie as she meets elements of the adult world she doesn’t yet understand (like hiding from bill collectors), the experienced re-reader discovers that the story also contains the birth of Maggie’s brother Calvin, who features so prominently in Love & Rockets: New Stories no.3 and no.4 (2010-2011). The work tends to encourage rereading as a way to better extract the clues from the latter stories as the world and characters are built up.

When we take this road, it’s not hard to see Maggie as the superhero (she is the real protagonist of the series) with a few sidekicks over the years (Hopey early on, Ray, and even, shortly, like the Robin that just didn’t stick, Viviane). Like many superhero protagonists, we have seen her past revisited and rewritten. Hernandez doesn’t explicitly change Maggie’s past, but he does return to the past quite frequently (which Marc just addressed yesterday), adding in narrative information. “Gold Diggers of 1969” does that with another element of Maggie’s childhood, including the birth of Calvin. Further in the past, the story about Maggie’s marriage rewrote/added to elements of the characters’ past as a way to build on the present.

From an industrial standpoint there are also certain similarities of production. Love & Rockets has had a few relaunches (volume 2 and now “New Stories”), with format changes and new number ones. There were even the years of retitling (Penny Century in Locas’ case). Collections of softcovers and hardcovers and deluxe hardcovers and new softcovers are also not dissimilar to the way superhero comics are published. These are pretty much just part of the industry, an increasing (over the course of Locas) shift between the “direct market” and the (non-comic) bookstore market.

Of course, there are also many ways that Locas differs from the superhero genre, foremost being the lack of emphasis on violence and crime as well as the way time works. In Locas time exists both for the world and the characters. Superheroes never really age, time never really moves forward for them, despite the world they exist in changing with the times. Maggie and her world do move forward, characters change and age, as evidenced again in “La Maggie” where the narrative revolves (in retrospect) around Maggie’s 40th birthday (do superheroes ever have birthdays?). This changes the way the reader interacts with the characters. Superheroes are essentially static, and reading them is revisiting endless static variations of the character. The reader of Locas is always faced with the changes of time, the past in the present and the present in the past. Hernandez explicitly pushes this point throughout the series, taking, to stick with our story of focus, as an example the way he reprinted “La Maggie” with a strip beneath it featuring Maggie as a child. The recent “Browntown”/”Love Bunglers”/”Return for Me” stories also push this point with heavy use of analepses in the narrative (again see Marc’s post from yesterday)[4] .

And while superhero comics (for the most part) tend to have changing creators working on a corporate property, Locas is just one artist who owns his characters and stories. Though, Hernandez never seems to remain completely static, if the reader is not seeing an actual change of writer or artist, the long time reader does become attuned to Hernandez’s stylistic evolution and narrative experiments. Which also brings us back to “La Maggie.”

“La Maggie” differs from other Locas stories in a few immediately obvious and other not so obvious ways. It is, as far as I am aware, the first page-by-page serialization in the series. Reading this in a collection, this is most noticeable in elements of the page layout–the colored caption that starts each page as well as the signature that ends each page–but also in the narrative structure. The page as a narrative unit and the repetition of broader narrative moments in the text.

Less obviously different, is the use of narration. In many decades of stories, Hernandez uses narration only in specific contexts. The primary one is through the character Ray Dominguez. Ray’s stories tend to be narration heavy. The reader learns a lot about Ray through his first person narration. This creates a rather different relationship with the character for the readers. Ray tends to be more transparent as a character (we know what’s he thinking and feeling), which is a change from both Maggie and Hopey who remain more opaque. We have to infer their feelings and thoughts based on their actions, spoken words, and the way Hernandez visualizes the stories. The narration in “La Maggie” doesn’t totally break from this tradition, as it reads like a letter to a friend rather than an internal monologue (as Ray’s narration does), and, in that way, it recalls the first time Maggie met Rena in the first story from Love & Rockets v. 1. Like many other aspects of this story, it seems to be another callback for the long time reader, because as far as I can find (skimming all the collections) there’s only one other, very short, story where Maggie narrates (“Angelitas” from v.1 n.45) (In the comments below, Marc Sobel corrected me, noting that “Angelitas” is actually narrated by Maggie’s sister, Esther. Some poor skimming on my part.). So in a way it is another mark of the continuity of the series, and the calls back to the past.

So, having made this comparison, what can I draw from it? As I noted above, by looking at Locas as a superhero, a.k.a. “mainstream”, we see how this bastion of the “alternative” comic is not all that different from the mainstream in many ways. The stories in volume 1 of Love & Rockets especially go through a process of evolution, starting from the “mainstream” and moving into the “alternative,” as Hernandez (mostly) leaves behind the sci-fi/superhero elements that are so prominent in the beginning. What is interesting to consider is how much the “alternative” has moved past this model into a place where Locas can’t go: the stand-alone lengthy narrative (a true “graphic novel” if that term weren’t such a misnomer in most its usage). The literary graphic novel that has risen in the decades since Love & Rockets started has become a whole other type of comic, leaving Locas as an anomaly in many ways, standing beside the superhero comics as one of the last (along with Archie[5]) of the endless comic book serializations[6].

(Addendum: This essay came as a surprise to me when I sat down to rightwrite about Locas, so I’m sure it is rife with propositions that should have been thought through much more thoroughly and carefully, but thus is the way of writing with a deadline.)

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The index to the Locas Stories roundtable is here.

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[1] Also some here and here.
[2] The former, but not the latter, is also found in The Art of Jaime Hernandez by Todd Hignite (Abrams, 2010). I’ll refer to the former as “La Maggie” from here on in to save space.
[3] I have to put these in quotes, because I find the terms so annoying, despite being hard to avoid.
[4] It’s nice how some of the previous roundtable participants are helping me save time by addressing some of the parts I didn’t fill out as I drafted this post.
[5] Archie might on the surface be a better comparison than superheroes. I’m having trouble coming up with any other examples. All the big serialized narratives from the 80’s-90’s that I recall are now completed or gone, and most/all of the completed ones were more directly novelistic than Locas is.
[6] I say “comic book” because I’m not knowledgable enough on the mainstream/popular side of manga/bande dessinee/etc. to comment on the existent of these types of narratives. I think some parallels might be made with bd album series that are, in a way, the bd version of superheroes (ie long running popular genre serializations).

Thoughts on Love & Rockets New Stories 3 and 4

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Recently, in order to prepare a comprehensive timeline and character guide for the upcoming Love & Rockets Companion, I re-read Jaime Hernandez’s entire body of work – thirty years worth of stories. This was, of course, not the first or even fifth time I had read these stories, having meditated on each and every chapter in detail, but in flying through the entire series in just a few weeks, it struck me yet again what a stunning achievement Locas is. Despite all that I have written, I had the sensation that I was staring at the Grand Canyon; so vast and indescribably beautiful as a whole that praising it was like empty babbling.

Yet, it has been my mission over the last five years to immerse myself in the Hernandez Brothers’ work in order to really understand and describe how Jaime and Gilbert have accomplished what they have.

When I spoke to him recently, Jaime mentioned that looking back on his career, he was most proud of the fact that he gave his characters a past and a future. This is something that fans of Locas understand intimately. No series ever in the history of comics has engendered such passionate and sustained emotional investment from its fans, and there are many reasons for this, but the fact that these characters are fully realized from birth to, eventually, death, is at the core of what makes them so fascinating.

The characters’ past has always been an area where fans have had a particularly strong response. Whether it’s “Spring, 1982,” which explored Doyle Blackburn’s trouble background, “Tear It Up, Terry Downe,” a compelling shotgun blast through Terry and Hopey’s brief yet tumultuous relationship, or “Flies on the Ceiling” about Izzy Ortiz’s emotional breakdown, which still stands among Jaime’s most beloved tales, the stories that look backward seem to stand out among Jaime’s vast oeuvre. This is perhaps why the recent stories in Love and Rockets New Stories 3 and 4 have garnered such effusive praise from all corners of the industry.

Most of the underlying events in “Browntown” and “Return For Me” are not new to those who have paid close attention over the years. Letty Chavez, Maggie’s best friend who died tragically in a car crash, was first mentioned all the way back in “Young Locas” in issue #13 in 1985, and referenced again in juxtaposition to Maggie’s friendship with Hopey, in “Wigwam Bam.” Even the circumstances surrounding Maggie’s father’s affair which led to Maggie living with her irascible Aunt Vicki, have been chronicled from a variety of perspectives since the second issue of the series. Yet, there is something special about these latest stories. For a while it eluded me because I felt the same sense of awe and admiration I have for Jaime’s work generally, yet was incapable of articulating exactly why these particular stories stood out, but then, on this final re-read, it hit me. “Browntown” is not about Maggie.

The tragic story of Maggie’s troubled younger brother, Calvin, is the real revelation. This is the new part of the story within the larger narrative, and as usual, it’s conveyed with astonishing naturalism and compassion. In “Browntown,” Calvin was just a normal boy who became the victim of a sexual predator, and as his family unraveled at the same time, he found himself exposed and alone. This terrifying feeling was unleashed in a violent rage when Calvin ultimately attacked his unnamed abuser, and the resulting devastation – both to himself and his family – profoundly altered both his and Maggie’s life.

Alone, “Browntown” could be considered a masterpiece of character psychology, a hallmark of Jaime’s storytelling, but when combined and read alongside “The Love Bunglers” and “Return For Me,” as Jaime obviously intended, its impact is greatly magnified. By swinging from past to future, Jaime illuminated the long-term psychological effects of Calvin’s ordeal in a way that is both believable and heart-wrenching. Although he grew up, Calvin never recovered from this childhood trauma. As an adult, he remains lost and alone, terrified and mistrustful, incapable of forming normal human relationships. Throughout his adulthood, which is shown to us only in telling glimpses, Calvin mostly lurks in the shadows, avoiding rather than embracing the love and support from family and friends.

But Jaime’s masterstroke, which is something that his fans have become accustomed to over the years and perhaps take too much for granted now, is how he managed to seamlessly and organically integrate this past tragedy into the vast tapestry of Maggie’s life. “Browntown” may not have been about Maggie specifically, but on the whole, she is still the Sun around which all of the other characters orbit. Although she was already one of the most fully-developed and realistic characters ever created in comics, this story shook her up and redefined her yet again. In “Browntown” and “Return For Me,” Jaime did not just delve back into Maggie’s past again, as he has done with such skill and sensitivity throughout his career, he illuminated and deepened perhaps the two defining events of her childhood, her parents’ divorce and her best friend’s death. Although we were aware of these events previously, the emotional experience of reading these stories was akin to a close friend finally opening up and confiding to you after years of holding back about some carefully guarded secret.

Although exceedingly subtle, this arc of stories (particularly “The Love Bunglers”) also addressed, confidently and directly, the long-running saga of Maggie’s relationship with Hopey. Where Jaime had arguably become complacent in keeping Maggie in her shell of perpetual relationship ambiguity (will she end up with Hopey or not?), Calvin’s devastating attack on Ray finally woke her up and made her realize how important he is to her. The prospect of loss compelled her to finally look inward in a way she was not mature enough to do when Speedy died. The impact of this tragedy within the sweep of Maggie’s life story cannot be understated – this was a defining moment of transformation for her.

Rather than serve as an ending to the series, as some have observed, I suspect that time will prove that “Love Bunglers” was the beginning of a new era in Jaime’s characters’ lives as they start to grapple with aging, parenthood, marriage, etc. I view these stories as a landmark in terms of the characters’ development, just as “Wigwam Bam” and the stories that followed showed the characters growing out of the punk phase into young adulthood.
The realism and emotional sincerity of this tandem of stories cannot be understated. The full impact of “Browntown,” “The Love Bunglers” and “Return For Me” will linger forever in the minds of Jaime’s fans because, taken together, these stories illuminate Maggie’s past, while at the same time, push her forward, forcing upon her a maturity that only life experience and age can ascribe.

At a signing Jaime did in Brooklyn last Fall, I had a fan (a prominent artist, no less) confide to me that he had known Maggie and Hopey longer than any of his real friends, and cared for them just as deeply. This kind of emotional investment is the bond that Jaime has forged with his readers, and it is this bond, not some wistful sense of nostalgia for Maggie’s punk rock youth, that makes the recent Locas stories so powerfully resonant. Like relationships with real people, Jaime’s fans, both new and old, continue to feel something akin to love for Maggie, Hopey and their friends. Ultimately, it is this love (not rockets) that underscores everything in Locas, and the more the characters reveal about themselves and their past, the more this love deepens and matures. By unfolding chapter by chapter over three decades, Locas takes this realism inherent in all human relationships to a whole new level. Its ambitious scope, specificity of character, and sustained artistic quality elevate it above most other contemporary comics.
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The index to the Locas Stories roundtable is here.

50 Million Jaime Fans Can’t Be Wrong

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BOSWELL: Why, Sir, it is bruited through all London that Garrick holds the pictorial efforts of our Mr Hernandez in the utmost esteem.

JOHNSON: Garrick, Sir, can go fuck himself.

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Sometimes people disagree — NEWS FLASH, right? People disagree about politics, science, religion, sports, the weather, what it’s got in its pocketses…and sometimes they disagree about art. Indeed, as you may have noticed, people around here sometimes politely disagree with other people about art.

So what should you do when you disagree with someone about a work of art? I don’t mean “should you call them fanboys?” or “should you call them vaginas?” or “how can you best persuade them that, on reflection, everything you say is correct and everything they say is STUPID?“; forget about what you should do to the person you disagree with. I’m asking how you should treat your own opinion when you find someone who holds a different opinion.

My question isn’t how you should treat the reasons, evidence, arguments, etc. that they might put forward to bolster their opinion. Leave all that aside, too, and just consider the basic fact that they disagree with you. Is that fact, by itself, important enough that it should make you change your mind, if only a little?

Since the mid-2000s, this question has become a hot topic in epistemology — the philosophy of knowledge. Broadly speaking, there are two answers to the question:

(1) Resolution

and (2) Conciliation.

According to the resolute view, disagreement ain’t shit — you don’t have to do anything when you find someone who disagrees with you. You’re perfectly entitled to maintain your own belief exactly as strongly as you did before you learned that somebody disagreed with you; in other words, you can stand resolute. According to the conciliatory view, by contrast, disagreement is shit — it should make a difference to your belief. Exactly what difference, and how much, is up for grabs among philosophers who hold the conciliatory view; but they are united in believing that disagreement should make you at least a little less confident than you were before. (Stick with me; we’ll get to talking about comics eventually)

Here’s one way to think about what conciliation means. Picture all your thoughts as a big list of sentences written in your mental notepad. They might include:

2+2=4

The Earth revolves around the Sun

Caesar crossed the Rubicon

Barack Obama will win the 2012 US election

The moon is made of green cheese

2+2=5

and so on.

Some of these things you believe, and some you disbelieve. You believe some really, really strongly — like 2+2=4 — some less strongly — like, perhaps, the belief about Barack Obama; and similarly for the sentences you disbelieve. So now imagine that next to each sentence is a number between 0 and 1. 0 means “I think it’s definitely false”, 1 means “I think it’s definitely true”, and values in-between correspond to varying degrees of confidence. Now the list might look like this:

[1] 2+2=4

[0.999999] The Earth revolves around the Sun

[0.9995] Caesar crossed the Rubicon

[0.6] Barack Obama will win the 2012 US election

[0.0001] The moon is made of green cheese

[0] 2+2=5

On this picture, people disagree when they assign different numbers, or credences, to the same sentence. So maybe in my mental notepad, the sentence about Barack Obama has the number 0.6 next to it, whereas in Noah’s notepad it has the number 0.8 next to it. This would mean that I am less confident than Noah that Obama will be re-elected.

What conciliatory views say, in essence, is that when Noah and I discover our disagreement, we should revise our credences towards one another. Noah should be less confident about Obama’s chances, and I should be more — OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL. (We’ll get back to this caveat shortly).

Another name some people sometimes give to the conciliatory view is the Correct View. And by “some people”, I mean “me”, and by “sometimes”, I mean “right now”. I call it the Correct View for the simple reason that it is the correct view.

The basic motivation for holding the Correct View is this: when you find someone disagreeing with you, and you have no reason to think you’re in an epistemically better situation than they are — i.e. you’re not any smarter, or more informed, or less drunk, etc. — then you really don’t have any reason to think you’re more likely to be correct than they are. So the mere fact that someone like you has gone through the same process of reasoning and come to a different conclusion, that fact just by itself is some evidence that you might be wrong. It may be very weak evidence, and you may not have to “adjust your credence” — i.e. become more or less confident — very much, but it is some evidence, and you should adjust your credence to some extent. (As I said, just how much is up for grabs)

Here’s a hypothetical example: suppose Gilbert and Jaime are sitting at the table, trying to add up their joint profits from the most recent issue of Love and Rockets. (I told you we’d come back to comics)

Now, further suppose they go through their calculations separately, but using the same information and each using his own electronic calculator. And, finally, suppose that, at the end of all this, each brother arrives at a different total. Before they share their results with one another, each brother is fairly confident in his own calculation. But what happens when they share their results and realise that they disagree? According to the Correct View, each brother should become somewhat less confident in his own calculation.

And since, by definition, the Correct View is correct, this is just what they should do.

It’s important to remember that OTHER THINGS should be EQUAL when deciding how to react to disagreement. If Jaime knows that he is better at maths than Gilbert, then Jaime should not take Gilbert’s result as seriously, and hence should not reduce his own confidence as much (if at all); and vice versa. Similarly if Gilbert knows that Jaime’s calculator is broken; or Jaime knows that Gilbert forgot to count all the money; or Gilbert knows that Jaime wasn’t really paying attention; or…

The point being that you shouldn’t react to all disagreements in the same way. You should revise your confidence, down or up, only when you find that you disagree with someone who is in at least as good (roughly) an epistemic position as you — someone who is your epistemic peer. That’s why you don’t have to start believing that the end is nigh whenever you pass a religious fanatic on the street, or that global warming is a hoax when you watch Fox News, and so on — because these views arise from people in worse epistemic positions than you (or the proxies from whom you ultimately derive your opinions).

If you’ve followed me so far, you can probably see where this is going. As with opinions in general, I submit, so with opinions about art. In short: if you think a particular work of art is a piece of shit, but lots and lots of your epistemic peers think it’s the bees’ knees, you should seriously consider the possibility that you’re wrong. And maybe you should do this even if they can’t point to any convincing evidence in their favour.

Actually, this aesthetic conciliatory view follows from the Correct View only if we make a few extra assumptions. First, we have to assume that aesthetic sentences express propositions — or, to put it in English, that a sentence like “The Love Bunglers is one of the greatest comics of all time” is actually trying to describe how things are, rather than merely giving voice to your tastes. The former is like saying “I hurt my foot” or “I like ice cream”; the latter is like saying “Ow — my foot!” or “Ice cream — yum!” The former can be true or false, and even debated, but the latter cannot.

The second assumption is that the propositions expressed by aesthetic sentences are not entirely individualistic — that their truth does not depend solely on your reactions during the act of experiencing the art. If “The Love Bunglers is one of the greatest comics of all time” was merely a statement of how you felt about it, then, again, there’d be no room for disagreement. One person — let’s call him “Jeet” — could assert it, another — let’s call him “Noah” — deny it, and both could be speaking truly; just as one could truly say “I like ice cream” and the other “I don’t like ice cream”.

In other words, whatever makes some aesthetic opinions true and others false, it had better not be something that is entirely peculiar to whoever holds them.

Here’s one way aesthetic truth could depend on facts outside the individual: maybe the sentence “The Love Bunglers is one of the greatest comics of all time” is true only if The Love Bunglers properly reflects the Metaphysical Form of Beauty, which exists outside time and space, and doesn’t depend at all on what we humans think about beauty, trapped as we are in Plato’s cave.

Or, since that’s patently preposterous, maybe not.

Here’s a picture of aesthetic truth that is slightly more plausible. You have a set of preferences, values, likes and dislikes when it comes to art — let’s call them your tastes. Tastes are not permanently fixed, but they are usually stable over the short- to medium- term: if you like horror films today, then you’ll probably like them tomorrow. They can be very narrow or very broad: you might like films that are satires; and you might also like films that feature a combination of bicycles, conga lines, and references to Dante — in which case, have I got a film for you… And, crucially, although tastes vary from person to person, they are not entirely unique to each individual; you can share, to a greater or lesser extent, your preferences with other people. When you share your tastes with other people, we can say that you belong to an aesthetic community with those people; since you probably won’t share your tastes exactly with anyone else, you’re probably part of many different, partially overlapping communities.

This, for instance, is considered a thing of great beauty in some communities:

Aesthetic claims, in this picture, are made true by (1) the properties of the artwork in question and (2) the appropriate aesthetic community. The community sets the standards for judging the artwork, and the artwork itself either meets or fails to meet those standards. Which community is appropriate depends, basically, on who is considering the claim. So, in some communities, the sentence “Alex Ross is a great cartoonist” is true; in others, it’s false.

When a critic makes an aesthetic claim, then, it doesn’t make sense to ask whether it is true-full-stop (“true-period” for our benighted Yankee cousins). What must be asked, rather, is whether it is true given the standards of the appropriate aesthetic community. The advantage of this picture is that aesthetic claims turn out to be relative, but not solipsistic; their truth can meaningfully be debated between members of any particular community.

So, let’s go back to the issue of disagreement, with these two assumptions granted, namely: (1) aesthetic sentences can be true or false; and (2) their truth or falsity depends on more than just individual taste. As we saw, how you respond to disagreement depends on whether your disagreer (so to speak) is your epistemic peer. How you respond to aesthetic disagreement further depends on whether your disagreer is your aesthetic peer.

That means that, when you’re confronted with aesthetic disagreement, you need to ask yourself two questions. First, is my disagreer in a better position than me to appreciate the artwork, a worse position, or a roughly similar one? If the answer is “worse”, then you can safely ignore them; alternatively, you can publicly call them out in a blog post.

What sort of thing would determine your relative position to judge the artwork? Any number of things, including (but not limited to): who’s more familiar with the artist’s other work; who’s more familiar with other examples of the same genre; who knows more about the particular techniques involved; who’s wasted more years on a fine arts major; who can cite more passages of Lacan; etc. etc.

Anyway, if you decide that your disagreer is at least no worse off than you from an epistemic perspective — in terms of knowledge, expertise, intelligence, etc. — you can then move to the second question, viz. Is my disagreer addressing what I think is the appropriate community? Naturally, the answer to this depends on what you think the appropriate community is — and, equally naturally, this is a vexed and contentious decision.

Many online folks who talk about comics restrict themselves (knowingly or not) to addressing a very small aesthetic community. And if you don’t care about that community, then you can just ignore their proclamations about, say, the greatest cartoonists of all time.

Breathe a sigh of relief — I just validated your life choices.

More interesting are cases where you and your disagreer see yourself as sharing membership in at least one community. That’s where disagreement bites – – you’re now disagreeing about how the artwork in question (say, “The Love Bunglers”) lives up to, or falls short, of your shared tastes. And you can point to this or that feature in support of your opinion.

But — and here’s where we draw it all back together — if the Correct View is correct —

and it is, by definition

— then you should consider changing your mind even without being shown the opposing “evidence”. Because the fact that a member of the relevant aesthetic community has had one reaction to an artwork, and formed a particular view about it, that fact itself is evidence that your own view is mistaken. It’s evidence that, in fact, the artwork has a different relation to the community’s standards than the one you think: that it’s the bee’s knees, rather than a piece of shit. Or the other way around.

So, in conclusion:

Jaime rules, just because we said so.

Also:

DON’T JUDGE MY LIFESTYLE

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The Locas Roundtable index is here.

When You And I Were Young, Maggie

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Jaime Hernandez’s “Browntown” has been lauded by everyone from Tom Spurgeon to Jeet Heer, the later of whom states that it is “arguably one of the best comics stories ever”.

It’s a bit of a let-down, then, to actually read the thing and discover a decent but by no means revelatory, piece of program fiction. All the hallmarks are there: the precocious child narrator as guarantor of authenticity; the ethnic milieu as guarantor of authenticity; the sordidness as guarantor of authenticity and the trauma as guarantor of authenticity. Poignant ironies fall upon the narrative with a sodden regularity, till the only landscape that can be seen is the wet, heavy drifts of meaning.

For what it is, “Browntown” isn’t terrible. Jaime’s precocious child narrator is endearing

his ethnic milieu is surprisingly uninsistent and unforced; his traumas are doled out with a disarming lightness — as when Calvin’s years of abuse are limned in the space between panels:

But still; there’s nothing particularly brilliant here, either in the use of language, or in the drawing, or in the use of the comics medium. In this sequence, for example, Jaime uses a series of verbal and visual clichés to present the end of an affair.

“Nothing, I guess I’m just selfish,” she says, as the stylized tears pour down. The camera moves closer, and then we’ve got a shot/reverse/shot. Entirely competent story-telling, sure. Masterpiece by one of the genre’s greatest creators? For goodness’ sake, why?
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I read a fair bit of the Locas stories for this post — Death of Speedy, The Education of Hopey Glass, The Love Bunglers, bits and pieces of other stories, including Wig Wam Bam. I haven’t exactly grown more fond of Jaime’s work, but I think I have a better sense of what I’m supposed to like about it.

Which would be nostalgia. The difference between “Browntown” and an anonymous short story in a lit magazine isn’t Jaime’s skill, or his handling of plot or theme or character — none of which, as far as I can tell, rise above the pedestrian. Rather, “Browntown” is different not because of what’s in it, but because of what’s outside it: the years and years of investment in the characters, by both the author and his readers. Here, for example:

You see Maggie from a distance, and then in close up. It’s not an especially interesting or involving visual sequence…except that this is the first time in the story that Maggie appears as an adolescent, thirteen years old and post-puberty. For those who have followed Jaime’s work (or even just read the first installment of the Love Bunglers that precedes this piece in Love and Rockets 3), that face is finally, recognizably, the Maggie we know (or one of the Maggies we know). As a result, there’s a charge there of recognition and delight. It’s analogous, perhaps, to Lacan’s description of the mirror stage:

This event can take place… from the age of six months, and its repetition has often made me reflect upon the startling spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror. Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support, human or artificial…he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image….

We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification , in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image – whose predestination to this phase-effect is sufficiently indicated by the use, in analytic theory, of the ancient term imago.

This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.

As always, Lacan is a fair piece from being comprehensible here…but in general outline, the point is that the child sees its image in the mirror — an image which is whole and coherent. The child identifies itself with this image, and so jubilantly experiences, or sees itself, as coherent and whole.

In her book Reading Lacan, Jane Gallop points out that the jubilation and excitement of the mirror stage is based upon temporal dislocation:

…in the mirror stage, the infant who has not yet mastered the upright posture and who is supported by either another person or some prosthetic device will, upon seeing herself in the mirror, “jubilantly assume” the upright position. She thus finds in the mirror image “already there,” a mastery that she will actually learn only later. The jubilation, the enthusiasm, is tied to the temporal dialectic by which she appears already to be what she will only later become.

Thus, there is a rush of pleasure in seeing the woman Maggie in the adolescent Maggie; the future image charges the past.

But the mirror stage is not just about recognizing the future in the present. It’s also about creating the past. Gallop explains that before the mirror stage, the self is incoherent; an unintegrated blob of body parts and non-specific polymorphous pleasures. But, Gallop continues, this is an illusion; the self cannot be an unintegrated blob before the mirror stage, because it is the mirror stage that creates the self. Thus:

The mirror stage would seem to come after “the body in bits and pieces” and organize them into unified image. But actually, that violently unorganized image only comes after the mirror stage so as to represent what came before.

The mirror stage, then, provides an image not just of the future, but of the past. The subject “assumes an image” not just of what she will be, but of what she was; the coherent image of the self is not just an aspiration, but a history. When Lacan says:

This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form…

the specular image that is assumed is precisely the infans stage, and the I that is precipitated is precisely the primordial form. The jubilation is not just in seeing a future coherent self, but in seeing a past self that is coherent with both the present and future.

Or to put it another way, the attraction of nostalgia is not the idealization of the past, but simply the idea of the past — and of the future. It’s the romance of self-identity. Hence, nostalgia in the Locas stories isn’t a function of actual time (a reader who has in truth read for decades) so much as it is a projection of imagined history. How many times has Jaime drawn Maggie (or Perla, or Margaret, or…)? All of those images are a part of a self, snapshots of a connected chain of bodies linked from infancy to middle-age to (presumably) death. As Frank Santoro says in his piece about the Love Bunglers:

Something extraordinary happened when I read his stories in the new issue of Love and Rockets: New Stories no. 4. What happened was that I recalled the memory of reading “Death of Speedy” – when it was first published in 1988 – when I read the new issue now in 2011. Jaime directly references the story (with only two panels) in a beautiful two page spread in the new issue. So what happened was twenty three years of my own life folded together into one moment. Twenty three years in the life of Maggie and Ray folded together. The memory loop short circuited me. I put the book down and wept.

The power of the Locas stories, what makes them special, is not any one story, or instant, or image, but the knowledge of the whole — not in the sense that each part contributes to a greater thematic unity, but in the sense that simply knowing there’s a whole is itself a delight. You can read the Locas stories and know Maggie, not as you know a friend but as an infant knows that image in the mirror — as aspiration, as self, as miracle.
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And, of course, as illusion. The reflection in the mirror, the coherent past and present I, is a misrecognition — it’s not a true self. Jaime’s use of Maggie as nostalgic trope, then, functions as a deceptive, perpetuated childishness; a naïve acceptance of the image as the real. Consider Tom Spurgeon’s take on “The Death of Speedy”:

Hernandez’s evocation of that fragile period between school and adulthood, that extended moment where every single lustful entanglement, unwise friendship, afternoon spent drinking outside, nighttime spent cruising are acts of life-affirming rebellion, is as lovely and generous and kind as anything ever depicted in the comics form.

That could almost be a description of “American Graffitti”, another much-lauded right-of-passage cultural artifact noted for its compelling, yearning encapsulation of time. I would agree that this is a major characteristic of Jaime’s work…but whereas for Tom that’s the reason Jaime’s a favorite creator, for me it’s the reason that he isn’t. Hopey’s nightmare hippie girl schtick; the shapeless but coincidence-laden narratives; the sex, the violence, the rock and roll — it all seems at times to blur into that single repeated punk rock mantra, “That was so real, man. That was so real, man. That was….”

But while I don’t necessarily need to read any more of Jaime’s work ever, I do think that there are times when the nostalgia in his stories becomes not just a symptom but a theme. For example, looking again at that image of the suddenly post-pubescent Maggie from “Browntown”.

As I said, this is a moment of recognition. But whose recognition? The panel is from the perspective of Calvin, who is both Maggie’s little brother and the sexual victim of the boy Maggie is talking up. While readers see suddenly the grown-up Maggie they know and love, Calvin is seeing, perhaps for the first time, a grown-up Maggie who he does not know, and who he fears and resents as a potential sexual rival. The reader’s image of Maggie — the shock of her newfound adulthood — lets us see her, to some extent, as Calvin sees her (and, indeed, allows Jaime to subtly tell us how Calvin sees her). At the same time, looking through Calvin’s eyes inflects and darkens Maggie’s new adulthood; the overlapping perspectives capture not just the excitement of growing up, but its dangers and sadness as well. The mirror image is also a primal scene, the discovery of self also a loss of innocence. What Gallop says of Lacan might also be said of Jaime:

When Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge, they anticipate mastery. But what they actually gain is a horrified recognition of their nakeness. This resembles the movement by which the infant, having assumed by anticipation a totalized, mastered body, then retroactively perceives his inadequacy (his “nakedness”). Lacan [or Jaime?] has written another version of the tragedy of Adam and Eve.

Another example of the way nostalgia is thematized is in the ghost scenes in “The Death of Speedy.”

On the one hand, this, like the entirety of the derivative “West-Side Story” plot, is fairly standard issue melodrama. But in the context of Jaime’s oeuvre, there’s something (eerily?) fitting about Speedy’s disappearance into a darkened silhouette, a kind of icon of himself. Speedy’s a projection, a specter given meaning only by his past. But that’s not just true for Speedy — it’s true for everyone in the Locas stories, who appear and then disappear and then reappear further up or down the timeline. A ghost is a kind of distillation of nostalgia, a memory that walks. At moments like this in Jaime’s work, the compulsive authenticity claims become almost transparent, as everyone and everything turns into its own after-image. We cannot see the present without seeing the past and the future, which means that we don’t ever see anything but an illusion, an image of coherence.

This is perhaps one way to read the conclusion of The Love Bunglers. Many people have read it as a happy ending for Maggie and Ray; the final triumph of romance after many trials. Thus, Dan Nadel:

In the end we flash forward some unspecified amount of years: Ray survives and he and Maggie are in love and Jaime signs the last panel with a heart.

And maybe Dan’s right. But it’s also certainly the case that that ending is only reflection; it’s what we want to see in the mirror.

Two Maggies side-by-side look in two mirrors at two Maggies. We see doubles doubled, the Maggies we love seeing the Maggies we love. This is the way cartooning works; one image calls forth another and another, the characters become themselves through sequence and repetition. As Dan Nadel says, “It just works. They’re real.”

But at the same time as it solidifies Maggie, the doubling of the mirror stage also disincorporates her. The second Maggie in the mirror…doesn’t she look younger than the first? Is time passing, or is the mirror image just an image — the future Maggie that present Maggie needs to see in order to make the past Maggie cohere? If the happy-ending Maggie looking in the mirror is just a dream to retroactively solidify the grieving Maggie, perhaps the grieving Maggie looking in the mirror is herself a dream, an image to confirm the tragedy. And so it goes; Calvin’s unlikely assault is an image there to give weight and shape to his childhood trauma; Maggie kisses Viv and is rejected by her to give weight and shape to their past — or and simultaneously the past gives weight to the future, and on and on, image on image, through the never-ending jubilant shocks of misrecognition.
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Jaime’s oeuvre, I think, can be seen as a mirrored engine; turn the crank and nostalgia is infinitely reflected. It’s an impressive delivery system. As with the Siegel/Shuster Superman, or the Twilight books, I can see the appeal, even if, for me, there’s something more than a little off-putting about the efficiency of the mechanism.

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The index to the Locas Roundtable is here.

From Hoppers to Honolulu: A Fan Letter to Jaime Hernandez

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As a comics creator and as a life-long comics reader, I’ve frequently been asked, who are your favorite artists, or which artists are your biggest influences? Time and again, Jaime Hernandez is in my top 10 list.

Given that most of my comics life revolves around manga nowadays, my response often surprises people. And it’s true — Jaime’s work isn’t what most people would consider manga at all, although his work is admired by fans and artists around the world for his draftsmanship, dramatic use of black/white, supple line work, and most of all, his storytelling skills. But discovering Love & Rockets when I was in college was a major turning point for me, and one that changed how and why I draw comics.

Just as being introduced to shojo manga in my tween years and later Elfquest in my early teens showed me stories that were made for me (and not just my brother) and that women could be comics creators, and just as the X-Men, Teen Titans, and Legion of Superheroes introduced me to the excitement of superhero stories, Jaime Hernandez’ work told me that I could and should draw comics about where I live, the things I did everyday, and the people I know and love.

Local Like Me/Punk Like Me

When I was going to high school and college in Honolulu, I had three separate lives: I was a “nice Japanee girl,” I hung out with ‘those punk rock kids,’ and I liked to read and draw comics. These three worlds rarely, if ever intersected.

I’m a third-generation Japanese-American, which means that my family has been in Hawaii since the early 1900’s. Japanese culture is a big part of my life, but being from Hawaii was just as important in shaping how I see the world.

Growing up and living as a ‘local’ in Hawaii is very different than what the Hawaii Visitors Bureau would have you believe. I can’t surf, I only know a handful of Hawaiian words, and dancing the hula? Please, don’t ask. But growing up in beautiful, easy-going, multi-cultural Hawaii was one of the best gifts my parents could have ever given to me.

Besides knowing where the best places to eat, drink, and surf, being ‘local’ means you know about local language/slang, and you grow up with a set of shared values, experiences, and sense of humor that you rarely see depicted realistically / non-stereotypically in movies, TV, and yes, comics too.

In the late 1980’s, I returned to Hawaii after a stint in art school on the mainland (a.k.a. New York City and San Francisco). My time away from Hawaii brought a lot of things into focus – or at least made me look at my hometown and the people who live in it in a new way. I realized that locals talked and acted differently than ‘mainland’ people. This was kind of cool / funny / interesting to observe; being a former insider who could now see this world through the lenses of an ‘outsider.’

At around the same time, I started hanging out with friends in the local punk / indie band scene. In dingy dive bars in industrial areas, high school auditoriums, garages, and in clubs tucked away in not-so-touristy pockets of Waikiki, you could hear punk, hardcore, speed metal, ska and hybrids of all of the above, played by bands like Devil Dog, S.R.O. (Something Really Offensive), The Wrong, B.Y.K. (Beat Your Kids), Mumbo Jumbo, Elvis 77, and Tantra Monsters.

There were parties at crash pads where the only furniture were milk crates, thrift store finds, and a mattress on the floor. There were nights hanging out in strip clubs with my guy friends, because that’s where their girlfriends worked. And there were lots of midnight beer runs to the 7-11’s and early, early mornings at 24-hour diners, eating breakfast while our ears were still ringing from the gig we just attended.

So when I read Jaime’s Locas stories in Love & Rockets, I immediately felt like I was looking into a world that was both familiar and new.

Reading Mi Vida Locas

While I was growing up, there weren’t a whole lot of Mexican-Americans living in Honolulu. Heck, you hardly hear Spanish being spoken, and frankly, now that I’ve been living in California for the past 10 years, the tacos in Hawaii were pretty lousy. But reading Love & Rockets gave me a glimpse into a world I would never be introduced to, much less become immersed in otherwise.

Before Love & Rockets, I had no idea that there were other types of ‘local’ cultures. I didn’t know what “mija’ or ‘vato’ meant. There are gangs in Hawaii, but I never experienced what it was like to be in the middle of the kind of turf wars that Jaime depicted in “The Death of Speedy.” The beautiful thing about Jaime’s Locas stories is that he did it without romanticizing Latino pride or preaching a heavy-handed ‘anti-violence’ or ‘anti-drugs’ message –- he just drew stories about his characters living their everyday (but nonetheless fascinating) lives.

Maggie was a character I could really relate to. She was Mexican-American, and spent time in both her Mexican and American worlds. She was curvy, and was alternately confidently sexy and insecure about her body. She was just as comfortable in a backyard party with her family and friends as she was at a dingy punk club. She was imperfect and complex.

I could also relate a lot to Ray, the guy from the ‘hood who left to see what the world had to offer. Ray came back and saw his childhood friends and ‘the way things are and the way they’ve always been’ in a different light, much as I did when I returned to Honolulu in the last 80’s after my mainland sojourn.

Unlike many comics I read at the time, Love & Rockets depicted a world that was filled with friends, family and acquaintances who were young and old, white, black, Latino, and Asian too.

I remember being particularly impressed to see Asian characters in Love & Rockets, like Daphne and Kiko. Finally! Asian characters who weren’t ninjas or samurai or dragon ladies or glorified boobs on a stick. Daffy and Kiko weren’t there to be the ‘token’ Asian characters or to add an ‘exotic’ touch to the story – they were just regular people like any other who lived in Maggie’s vibrant, multicultural Southern California world. They looked and acted like people I know, or wanted to know.

Perhaps best of all, the female characters in Love & Rockets are just as interesting (well, maybe more interesting) than the male characters. And sexy? Oh yes, they are that too, even without wearing skin-tight clothing or holding big guns. Chew on that, spandex-fetishists.

Draw What You Know

Before Love & Rockets, I drew the usual things that most young comics fans turned creators do: I drew stuff based on what I liked to read. I drew superhero comics. I drew stuff that looked like it was heavily influenced by shojo manga. I drew cutesy animals. I drew gag comics for my high school newspaper.

Jaime’s Love & Rockets stories showed me that comics can be a medium for telling very personal and engaging stories that aren’t just navel-gazing pity parties. His stories set in the lower-middle class suburbs and punk clubs of Southern California made me realize that I could draw stories about the real worlds I lived in instead of trying to tell stories about places that I would never, ever live in (like Titans Tower, or Xavier’s School for Gifted Children, or in my manga-obsessed mind, Neo-Tokyo or your generic Japanese high school where most shojo manga is set).

His diverse cast of characters showed me that there was a spectrum of human experiences and personalities that could be depicted in comics – and that I could draw stories based on people I knew, rather than people I’d never know, like Wolverine or Wonder Woman. He made comics real and relevant to me at a time when I was losing interest in superhero stories.

It’s been months since I’ve been to a club to see a live band. And it’s been over a year since I’ve been back to Hawaii. I still draw my Bento Box comic strip for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser (albeit only every few weeks, instead of weekly like I used to). I don’t quite have the passion or time to draw comics full time like I used to when I was in college.

But I can still pick up Love & Rockets today, and it’s like catching up with dear friends who are growing old with me. It’s a comics series that continues to speak to me like no other, and one that I know I’ll enjoy until Jaime doesn’t feel like drawing it anymore (which I hope never, ever happens.)

I’m no where near as talented and prolific as Jaime Hernandez is, but I am grateful for the lessons that I learned from his comics many years ago: just draw what you know, and the rest will follow.
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Deb Aoki is the Manga Editor for About.com. She also draws Bento Box, a
semi-occasional comic strip for the Honolulu Star Advertiser.

The index to the Locas Roundtable is here.“>Locas Roundtable is here.