Tag Archives: Locas

La Maggie La Superhero

Posted on by


(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.)

_____________

The index to the Locas Stories roundtable is here.

_____________

[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).

#7: The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez

Posted on by

For better or worse, American comics has been an art dominated by its characters. Even the most uninterested of Americans if asked about comics would, no doubt, think of characters rather than artists or titles: Garfield, Superman, Spider-Man, etc. The tradition holds an equal stable of character pairs: Batman and Robin, Archie and Veronica, Charlie Brown and Snoopy. If the pair of Maggie Chascarrillo and Hopey Glass, the protagonists of Jaime Hernandez’s Locas, have not entered this popular pantheon, it is perhaps because of their shorter history or, due to their cursing and having actual sex (sometimes with each other), their lack of an “all ages” audience. Or maybe it’s because, unlike my other examples, Maggie and Hopey are dynamic individuals, rather than static icons.

Almost all of the Maggie and Hopey stories have originally appeared in Love and Rockets, the anthology series Hernandez produces with his brother Gilbert. Over a 30-year period, he has done something quite rare with his famous pair: he has built up their lives as a massive, unfolding narrative. Since their introduction in 1981, Maggie and Hopey have aged and their world has grown. Unlike most other comics, these stories exist in time—not just in the passing time of their reality-based world, but in the passing time of the characters themselves. Like Frank King’s Gasoline Alley (and few others), the characters age over the course of the series (although not quite in real time). Rather than maintaining the status quo in endless repetition, Hernandez makes change a defining element of the series’ trajectory.

First seen as a teenage punk, by the time of the most recent stories (last year’s Love and Rockets: New Stories v.3) Maggie, the character given the most attention, has passed her 40th birthday and her life has changed as much, if not more, as it’s stayed the same. In tracing the lives of his characters, Hernandez does not offer a simple chronology of events; his narrative style in many ways echoes the reality of making friends. We learn about Maggie like we learn about our friends: stories come out over time. We are there for some of the big moments but miss some of them, too. Years later we hear a childhood story or some small anecdote that fills in a missing piece, a missing clue to their actions and personality. Part of Locas’ power is this sense of Maggie, in particular, as a friend or acquaintance. We are not privy to all her thoughts and actions. We see her this week, but then lose touch for a few months, or even a few years of blank times and secrets. It is often as telling what Hernandez leaves out as what he puts in.

The stories Hernandez tells are grounded in a contemporary reality (one that, unlike most comics, acknowledges race, sexuality, and class) but are also willing to touch on a host of modes and genres. The early stories are a little too rooted in science fiction-esque adventure, and a recent story delved too long into nostalgic superhero tripe, but for the most part the shifts into the fantastic feel fully integrated with the real emotional drama (and comedy) of his characters, all of whom live and die, love and lose, work and play, and go about their lives in a way that has clearly provided decades of reading pleasure for more than just this fan.

Throughout the series, Maggie struggles with her sense of self-worth, her ever-changing relationships with family and friends, and more recently her aging and the passage of time (I think it no coincidence that recent stories delve back into her childhood and revisit a number of relationships from her past). With the accumulation of time (and pages), Hernandez is increasingly able to wring emotional weight from small moments and allusive reference in a way less expansive works cannot accomplish. The intertwining threads become more prominent with re-readings as brief mentions early in the series become full-grown stories years or decades later. Hernandez has created a sense of history (albeit fictional) in Locas that is unparalleled in any other comic.

A project like Hernandez’s gains effect from the way its physical manifestation exists in a time similar to the narrative. Rather than experiencing the characters’ lives in a single unified chunk that compresses and smooths over the changes of time (like a novel or film), Locas as a series of publications and Hernandez as an artist have both grown along with the narrative content. The youthful adventures of Maggie and Hopey are the youthful drawings and writings of Hernandez and the youthful expressions of the “alternative” comics scene. As Maggie ages, as Hernandez refines his work, so too have the publications grown along with the changing realities of the comics market to be one of the last serialized “alternative” comics from the era Hernandez (and his Love & Rockets co-creator/brother Gilbert) helped found.

All these narrative pleasures would be lost without Hernandez’s clean visuals, a stripped-down amalgamation of influences from the comics of his youth. Examples include the stark contrast and framing of Alex Toth and the stylized cartooning of Harry Lucey, Bob Bolling, and other Archie artists. His style is never ostentatious, and over the years his line has simplified, tones are rarely used, and only two stories have appeared in color. He is not afraid to make use of many of the tropes of comics for both comedic and serious purposes. Of particular note are the breadth of his character designs and the skill he shows in depicting his characters’ aging faces and bodies. His images not only clearly convey the story, they add to its impact.

For readers unfamiliar with the material, the earliest stories are not the best entry point (as is the case with many long-running series), so I’d recommend The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S., the second volume of Fantagraphics’ most recent series of reprints. This volume includes the early masterpiece “The Death of Speedy,” which gives a better feel for Hernandez’s more mature stories.

Derik Badman is a artist, critic, and web developer. His blog and comics can be found at MadInkBeard, and he regularly writes about comics at The Panelists. He did the tech work and theme customization on the current Hooded Utilitarian site design, and he occasionally contributes to the site as well.

NOTES

The Locas Stories by Jaime Hernandez received 24.5 votes.

The poll participants who included it, in whole or in part, in their top ten are: Jessica Abel, Deb Aoki, Michael Arthur, Derik Badman, Eric Berlatsky, Matthew J. Brady, Sean T. Collins, Corey Creekmur, Mike Dawson, Andrew Farago, Jenny Gonzalez-Blitz, Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, Nicolas Labarre, John MacLeod, Matt Madden, Chris Mautner, Ray Mescallado, Jason Michelitch, Andrea Queirolo, Martin Rebas, Charles Reece, James Romberger, Joshua Rosen, Marcel Ruitjers, Noah van Sciver, Betsey Swardlick, Kelly Thompson, Matthias Wivel, and Douglas Wolk.

Derik Badman, Eric Berlatsky, Sean T. Collins, Jeet Heer, Nicolas Labarre, Martin Rebas, Charles Reece, and Matthias Wivel voted for The Locas Stories.

Jessica Abel and Matt Madden voted for the entirety of Jaime Hernandez’s work.

Charles Hatfield and Ray Mescallado voted for the story “Flies on the Ceiling.”

Chris Mautner cast his vote for “Browntown” and the two-part story “The Love Bunglers.”

James Romberger voted for “Spring 1982.”

Marcel Ruitjers voted for “The Death of Speedy.”

Noah van Sciver voted for The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S collection.

Douglas Wolk voted for the Love and Rockets stories of Jaime Hernandez.

Deb Aoki, Michael Arthur, Matthew J. Brady, Corey Creekmur, Andrew Farago, John MacLeod, Jason Michelitch, Andrea Queirolo, Joshua Rosen, Betsey Swardlick, and Kelly Thompson voted for Love and Rockets, the anthology series Jaime Hernandez produces with his brother Gilbert Hernandez, and where almost all of The Locas Stories originally appeared. These votes were counted as a 0.5 vote each towards The Locas Stories’ total.

Mike Dawson voted for Love and Rockets, but he singled out the stories “Flies on the Ceiling” and “The Death of Speedy,” so his vote was counted entirely for The Locas Stories.

Jenny Gonzalez-Blitz voted for Love and Rockets, but she singled out the story “Flies on the Ceiling,” so her vote also went entirely to The Locas Stories’ total.

The Locas Stories began with the story “Mechan-X” in Love and Rockets #1, self-published by Jaime Hernandez and his brothers (also fellow contributors) Gilbert Hernandez and Mario Hernandez in 1981. Fantagraphics Books reprinted the issue with a new cover in 1982. (Fantagraphics’ flagship publication is The Comics Journal, for which Jaime and/or Gilbert had produced work as contributing artists since at least 1980.) The first Fantagraphics issue also started a Love and Rockets periodical series that has continued in various incarnations to this day. The current version is Love and Rockets: New Stories, which appears annually. The fourth issue is currently scheduled for release in September.

Fantagraphics has actively reprinted material from Love and Rockets in book collections since 1984. To best understand their current publishing plan, please go to this page, titled “How to Read Love and Rockets,” on the company’s website. As Derik Badman indicates in his essay above, the best book with which to start reading The Locas Stories is probably The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. This contains the stories “The Death of Speedy,” “Spring 1982,” and “Flies on the Ceiling.” It also includes this writer’s favorite, “Tear It Up, Terry Downe.”

–Robert Stanley Martin

Best Comics Poll Index

FCR 4ish: do men with unisex names write better women?

Posted on by

Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise was one of the first “alternative” comics I read when I was a teenager getting tired of Marvel (I bought it after reading the preview in Cerebus). I picked up around the middle of “I Dream of You,” I think, so fairly early in the run. I followed the series faithfully all through high school, painted Katchoo on my graduation mortarboard (and got the photo published in the lettercol!), angsted and argued over the characters, and decided with my best friend that she was Katchoo (but taller) and I was Francine (but gayer).

In short, it was the perfect graphic addiction for the kind of teenage girl I was. Later, I grew up, started hanging out with comic snobs (you know, the kind of horrible people who write for The Comics Journal), and found out my SiP love was stupid and misguided and didn’t I know Moore stole everything he knew from Jaime Hernandez?

I have to confess, I never read any bros Hernandez until last year or so, when another comics snob (allright, so I’ll name-drop) lent me the whole run of those giant Love and Rockets phonebooks, two by two, over the space of a year. The comic snobs may have a point with the ripoff thing. Hopey is Katchoo but moreso, and Francine has Maggie’s daffiness, voluption, and super-heterosexuality-with-one-teeny-exception. Both storylines could be called an exercise in fanny, in that they’re well-realized women in a women’s world, created for straight male gratification (at least the creators themselves are clearly getting off on drawing so many and varied hot women). And no one could dispute that Hernandez has it all over Moore in terms of artwork.

But I don’t really know that Moore is just a poor man’s, or middlebrow girl’s, Hernandez. If I had to pin it down, I would say Locas (if that’s the term for the Jaime parts of L&R) is better fanny, but SiP is better chick-lit.

One of the notable things about SiP is that it always had a very large female following, and those women, going by the lettercols and my own experiences, were disproportionately the type who “didn’t read comics” except of course Archie when they were little. Even today, SiP will always be one of the first works mentioned in message board threads of “what comics can I get my girlfriend into?” (of course, responders almost never follow up with “what kind of books does she like to read?” as if women were, you know, individuals, with divergent tastes. But I digress.)

I’m too lazy to google, but I don’t recall that L&R comes up in those threads more often than most popular comics do (because anyone who knows a woman who’s liked a comic, or is a woman who’s liked a comic, will mention that comic, and the list inevitably and logically ends up all over the map). I think the height of L&R’s popularity was before my time, but by the time I was aware of it, its boosters were all Comics Journal reading types who want to educate me about Important Comics.

Now, I never would have read and loved L&R if not for those people, and I am a sucker for anything anyone tells me is Culturally Important. But we run an iconoclastic blog here, and suburban Archie-reading housewives will always win out over comics scholars, at least until Archie moms make up the majority of our readers. So why does Moore capture that demographic better than Hernandez?

Mostly because SiP is a straight-up soap opera, whereas Locas is only an homage to soap operas (of both the telenovelistic and professional-wrestling varieties) among other things. Maggie and Hopey have a semi-fraught relationship, where Hopey expresses frustration and jealousy over Maggie’s straight crushes and Maggie is hurt when Hopey viciously puts her down as a cover for her feelings of love. But those moments are very by-the-way, and usually played for laughs rather than drama. They do fall out and get back together occasionally, but it doesn’t really seem to matter why.

SiP was, what, fifteen years of will-they-won’t-they, while Maggie and Hopey’s sex life is more do-they-don’t-they, serving the cause of male titillation rather than suspense. You don’t ache for the women’s relationship to go to the next level, cause implicitly it has, and it was no biggie…. you just kinda hope Hernandez will get around to drawing the nitty-gritty. You want Katchoo and Francine to have sex because, the way the story’s set up, it will change everything.

Most importantly, SiP is both plot-driven and episodic in exactly the way TV soap operas are. The proportions of love triangles, scheming villainesses and flawed heroines and how they will all be changed forever drives every issue. This is great for getting a devoted, strongly identifying readership. But like soap operas, it gets really boring and repetitive and forced when it becomes clear that the creator is too attached to his characters to let them go. Which is why I quit reading years before, apparently, Francine and Katchoo Did It (and my sister insists that in her universe, SiP ended after “I Dream of You”).

Locas is a weaker soap opera, but ultimately a much more satisfying work to read straight through, because Hernandez doesn’t seem very invested in What Happens Next. He likes the locas, he likes their friends and surroundings, and he likes writing stories about them in all sorts of genres. He creates plot arcs, but he’ll nonchalantly scrap them (Maggie loves Rand Race, Hopey has a baby, etc.) when he gets bored of them, and may or may not revisit the continuity years later (note, of course, that I read all of the phonebooks of Locas together, one time, rather then following each issue over ten years like SiP, and this colours my readings). Background figures become stars and then fade out again, settings and tone drastically change around the characters.

On a superficial reading, it seems like Hernandez is just exploring whatever interests him, but what interests him ends up being more interesting than will-they-won’t-they, will-this-change-everything-forever. On the downside, the sheer virtuosity of Locas, and the people who recommended it to you in the first place, can give you the impression that there must be something else going on, something symbolic, or Literary. Maybe you’re supposed to be Learning Something from the characters, rather than lusting after them.

What a drag, man. Bring on the busty bisexuals in denial.

(disclaimer: i’m all strung out trying to finish drawing an issue, so please forgive all the hysterical italicizing and the Portentous Caps.)