Tag Archives: Locas Stories

“Lightning Only Strikes Twice Once, Y’Know”: Phallic Mothers, Fetishism, and Replacement in the comics of Los Bros Hernandez (Part II)

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In Part I, I discussed the Freudian model of fetishism, phallic mothers, and their importance to Gilbert Hernandez’s Poison River graphic novel. I’ll wait here if you want to go read that piece of mindbending wisdom. Waiting…waiting… Welcome back!
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What the preceding has to do with the Locas roundtable, or Jaime Hernandez’s work more generally, may seem a bit distant, but it all links, fairly directly, to the primary theme of the roundtable thus far: nostalgia. Jaime’s works function nostalgically, or seem to, and are frequently about nostalgia (however one wishes to define the term) and the traffic between past and present. Freud’s account of fetishism is, in fact, an account of nostalgia as well…nostalgia for the phallic mother…nostalgia for that originary moment before knowledge of sexual difference, and before the traumatic fear of castration.

The phallic mother represents a “perfect” time, a time of wholeness and unity in a number of ways. First, it is a time when mother and son are still joined together without the interference of the father. While the child may be aware of the competition with the father, he has not yet given up the notion that he will be forever joined to the mother and that their blissful union will be eternal. It is the threat of castration that frightens the child out of these utopian beliefs, at least for boys, but the attachment of desires to the fetish is an attempt to retain such a utopia, to hold onto this perfect past even after it is already gone. To fetishize a shoe (or an athletic support-belt) is to cling to the past with the mother, and to be “nostalgic” for it.

Second, the phallic mother represents a complete and ideal “whole” human being, who has both breasts and a penis, the complete and unified being the boy imagines his mother to be before the revelation of her (and the prospect of his own) castration. When the child learns of sexual difference, he learns that none of us are “whole.” We are one gender or the other, but never both, and so, it is “natural” to reminisce and to feel “nostalgic” for such an ideal wholeness even as one pursues a replacement for it in the field of romantic love.

Again, there is no reason why we must believe in the narratives Freud provides, but it does provide a useful heuristic for understanding Jaime Hernandez’s work as well and especially the stories collected in La Perla La Loca (which includes the graphic novel, Wigwam Bam and the stories which follow). Perhaps most central and helpful in looking at these stories is the central truth of these Freudian narratives, which is that “nostalgia” here is never nostalgia for something real, but is instead nostalgia for a fantasy of wholeness which never existed. Simply put, of course, the boy’s mother was never an androgynous whole with both a penis and breasts. This is, of course, merely a fantasy the boy has (or a fantasy Freud has and projects upon the boy in his story). Likewise, the mother was never castrated. Rather, she never had a penis from the beginning. Similarly, the boy never had a direct, unmediated, love affair with his mother uninterrupted by the father. Again, this is simply an Oedipal fantasy that serves to structure the boy’s psyche, but has no basis in reality. A fetish, then, is a replacement for something that was never there in the first place, a replacement for the female phallus that Peter Rio (in Poison River) searches out, but which was never present in his own mother. It is this model of replacing an absent original that is central to Jaime Hernandez’s work in general and Wigwam Bam in particular, and which helps explain the peculiar “emptiness” at the center of his nostalgic forays.

As evidence, it is perhaps worth recalling one instance of explicit sexual fetishism in Wigwam Bam, which occurs when Hopey spends a brief period couch-surfing with her friend, Jewel, in New York, after leaving another friend’s apartment. Jewel’s mother, Nan Tucker, has her own peculiar fetish, which rivals Peter Rio’s. While not fixated on a particular object, Nan pays a young woman, Crystal, to dress up as a much younger girl, and pretend to be her “baby,” allowing Nan to change her diaper, and role-play similar activities. In fact, as it turns out Nan organizes gatherings of famous TV sit-com mothers (of which she is one) who have identical fetishes and who bring their own “wards” with them. While conventional sex itself never seems to be in play in these relationships, and the girls are paid well to act their roles, the scenario certainly plays out in fetishistic fashion, particularly given the Freudian material cited in Part I.

The TV moms’ fetishization of youth encapsulates a similar kind of “nostalgia” to the kind that Freud discusses, if somewhat in reverse. Nan nostalgically attempts to recapture her own youth, both as a young mother, and as a child, paying Crystal to “act out” the wholeness and unity of mother/child relations that are central to the Oedipal scenario (if, in Freud, usually from the point of view of the child). Given Nan’s vexed relationship with her own daughter (whom she competes with for Hopey’s affection), like Freud’s version of the fetish, Nan here is nostalgic for something that never existed. With Crystal, there is an ideal union with a daughter who will always be young and obedient (because paid to perform that role), as opposed to her real daughter who is now an adult and disgusted by her mother’s behavior. In fact, it is strongly implied that these women’s entire careers on television, as sit-com mothers, is already a replacement for their own failed relationships with their daughters, and the young women they hire serve as replacements for the replacements…second order fetishes that help them to convince themselves of the original’s existence (while also disavowing it).

Here, Jaime provides a broad satire and mockery of a nostalgia for innocence and childhood, which belies the notion that Locas itself represents a simplistic foray into such nostalgia. Instead, via the logic of fetishism, Locas suggests that any such nostalgia is a longing for an absence, whether it be the mother’s phallus which never existed, or a perfect mother/child relationship that can only be simulated in sit-coms or by hiring a child not one’s own.

Nan Tucker’s nostalgia and desire for a perfect, originary moment of wholeness is not an isolated incident in Wigwam Bam, but is rather a synecdoche for its entire workings. As Douglas Wolk notes in his reading of WWB, perhaps the most clever formal trick deployed in its pages is the strategic absence of Locas’ most central character, Maggie Chascarillo (known also as “Perla” in the book in question). Apart from the first 14-page section of the 115 page graphic novel, Maggie does not appear in WWB and so the reader takes place in the grand search for her that is also enacted by its characters. In particular, Maggie’s childhood “punk” friends from Hoppers, spend the story looking for both Maggie and Hopey, who have traveled to New York (one in pursuit of the other). Izzy Ortiz, in particular, dealing with mental health issues of her own, becomes obsessed with the absence of Maggie and Hopey, cutting out the backs of milk cartons which picture Hopey in “Have You Seen Me” mode and taping them to her walls. Eventually, Izzy’s obsession with the missing Maggie and Hopey leads her to travel the country in search of the two friends, meeting up with a variety of Locas characters along the way.

Here again, Izzy’s search is clearly an act of nostalgia. For Izzy (and Daffy, and their friends), the friendship (with benefits) of Maggie and Hopey represents a prelapsarian utopian paradise that is linked to the punk culture of which they were all a part. The punk community of their youth, or the women’s imagined vision of it, rejects dominant culture’s series of hierarchies and divisions, including those of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The punk community’s rejection of consumerist/corporate capitalism is well-established, but the concomitant image of an angry, loud, violent opposition is largely eschewed in Locas, in favor of an image of a community which is accepting, multi-racial, gender-equal, and open to non-heteronormative sexualities. Maggie and Hopey, in particular, represent both the rebelliousness of the Hoppers punks (particularly in Hopey’s case), but also its friendly, open, and forgiving face (particularly in Maggie’s case). Their lesbianism (or bisexuality) is open to interpretation but is never censured or rejected by their fellow punks, whether male or female (many of whom are also “queer.”) The blurring of gender divisions, and therefore heteronormativity, is, as discussed in Part I, part and parcel of a hearkening for the pre-Oedipal, a time before such divisions are known. The Maggie/Hopey relationship (or the memory of it) serves as a fetish for Izzy, who desperately tries to track them down and regain the utopian promise of Hoppers in its younger, punkier, days.

It should be no surprise, given these thematics, that among the individuals Izzy finds on her journey are both a Maggie lookalike (an explicit replacement) and a “phallic woman” from her own youth, a woman who has undergone a sex change to become a man. Likewise, it is not surprising that this “real” phallic woman fails to hold the attraction of the utopia Izzy has imagined. S/he is a failed replacement for Maggie/Hopey, just as Peter Rio’s strippers are failed replacements for his (phallic) mother.

By the time Izzy finds Maggie and Hopey, of course, they are no longer “together” despite their earlier efforts to reunite. In fact, their brief blissful attempt to reignite their friendship and recover their youth is sabotaged by the racial difference that is rarely of explicit emphasis in the previous stories that take place in Hoppers. When Maggie is mocked at a party for being Mexican, she seeks solace in Hopey, who is less than sympathetic. When it becomes clear that Hopey, who is half Colombian, can “pass” for white, a racial divide opens between the two women that, perhaps, had previously existed, but which had gone unmentioned. Hopey’s casually homophobic reference to “art fags” (despite her own sexual orientation), further cements the ways in which the nostalgia for the “perfectly punk” Maggie/Hopey relationship is misplaced in “real world” New York, which, despite its cosmopolitanism, is rife with racism and homophobia.

Indeed, later in the story, we learn that the Maggie/Hopey relationship is itself merely a replacement for, or copy of, Maggie’s first “punk” relationship, with her best friend Letty, who introduced her to punk music before dying in a car crash. In a telling diary entry, Maggie writes, “I hope Hopey never dies in a car crash. Lightning only strikes twice once, y’know” (115). Hopey is here explicitly framed as a “replacement” for Letty, a fetish which covers up an absence, while attempting to replace the “wholeness” of the Maggie/Letty relationship, though Maggie worries that the replacement itself cannot be replaced.

Within this context, Ray D, Maggie’s next serious relationship (one which “culminates” in the recent Love Bunglers arc), serves as a replacement for Hopey, who herself is a replacement for Letty. Within a Freudian logic, Letty can only be a replacement for the mother (or the mother’s phallus), and Maggie’s expulsion from the maternal family home to live with her Aunt Vicki in Hoppers as a youth might substantiate such a reading. At the same time, the important point here is that regardless of the idealization of the Maggie/Letty relationship, it is clear that such idealization is a mirage, a hope for something which, like the mother’s phallus, never existed to begin with. The Hopey/Maggie relationship is, after all, similarly idealized, but is revealed to have many cracks in its façade.

Similarly, Ray D.’s relationship with Danita Lincoln is characterized as a replacement for his earlier affair with Maggie. In particular, Danita’s confidence in the level of Ray’s commitment vacillates. She worries both that she is merely a “sex object” for Ray and that he cares not for her as an individual, but as a Maggie substitute, even going so far as imagining Ray in her own bed, cuddling with his ex-girlfriend. Danita’s fears about her own “fetishization” (her transformation into a sex object and Maggie replacement) is played out in multiple scenarios. She serves as a nude model for Ray’s drawing/painting and as a stripper at the local club, Bumpers. Her friend Rocky suggests that Ray sees her only as an object, when looking at Ray’s drawing, as if he were one of the members of the strip-club audience. At that moment, Danita, who had initially been flattered by Ray’s appreciation, begins to wonder to what degree she is just a body, filling the space recently left empty by her predecessor. Likewise, where she once saw her stripping as an empowering experience of agency, she now begins to see herself through the eyes of her audience, as one of a procession of naked bodies on a stage, objects which occupy the same space, replacing each other at regular intervals.

In this scene, Wigwam Bam examines itself as well. Ray too becomes a replacement of sorts, not only of Hopey in Maggie’s life, but also of someone “real,” Jaime Hernandez himself. When Rocky accuses Ray of objectifying Danita, it functions as Jaime Hernandez accusing himself of objectifying her, and his other female characters for good measure, for it is he who really draws naked pictures of women, both for his own pleasure and that of his mostly male audience. Again, as in the case of his brother, Gilbert, the fetishizing and objectification of women is here brought up against a moment of self-examination and an acknowledgment that from Danita’s point-of-view, she cannot merely be a body for the pleasure of the male gaze or a simple replacement for the superior/utopian relationship that preceded it, even if that relationship never really existed in its ideal form. Danita’s self-conscious worry is, indeed, a sign of her subjectivity. Her vulnerability and determination make her in some ways similar to Maggie, but far from identical to her. Her assertion of her own subjectivity is a tacit critique of the practice of fetishizing people, of transforming subjects into (replacement) objects for the purposes of sexual pleasure, and it comes as no surprise when she leaves Ray, a tacit rejection of her objectification at both his, and Jaime’s hands.

The encounter/conflict here between Danita-as-object/replacement/fetish and Danita-as-subject/original here sets up the ways in which WWB and its immediate sequels take things a step beyond the fetishism on display in Poison River. In Poison River, there is a focus on fetishism-as-utopian-fantasy and then disillusionment with that fantasy. That is, the fantasy of reunification with the phallic mother is revealed to be a fantasy and the book closes on a note of disillusionment where everything is corrupted, gender divisions are enforced, and a bloodbath ensues. In the Perla La Loca stories, simple disillusionment is not enough, however, and Jaime pushes the narrative forward into a more “realistic” engagement with utopian premises.

As Danita’s introspection suggests, while “fetishism” may, in some ways, envision a utopia wherein gender divisions, racial divisions, and divisions on the basis of sexual orientation do not obtain, they do so on the basis of a backward-looking fantasy to the pre-Oedipal. In such a fantasy, no individual in the present is fully acknowledged or accepted for their own sake, since they are always inevitably viewed as a replacement for someone else. As we have seen, Hopey functions as a replacement for Letty (and Ray for Hopey), while there are also a seemingly neverending series of Maggie replacements as well. In addition to Danita, Marcia/Marco, and the Maggie lookalike, we learn in “We Want the World and We Want It Bald,” for instance, that Hopey’s brother Joey’s girlfriend, Janet, is also a Maggie replacement, and plays a role in the sexual fantasies/fetishes that Joey inflicts upon her. In all of these cases, however, if one reads the stories “realistically,” as opposed to merely as an instantiation of Freudian theory, the danger arises of reading individuals as merely replacements for one another, as “fetish objects” as opposed to as autonomous subjects.

In fact, Jaime uses the pervasive theme of replacements and fetishes in order to probe and reject the tendency we all have to use people in our lives as “objects” for our own pleasure (fetish objects), as opposed to as subjects with autonomy. Danita may function as a replacement for Maggie for Ray (though this is somewhat questionable), but for herself she has autonomy. Likewise, Hopey wonders what Janet “gets out of” her fetishized relationship with Joey, when she seems to serve merely as a stand-in (again) for Maggie. Even Maggie herself is in danger of falling victim to a kind of objectification if we are content to view her simply as a “symbol” of phallic motherhood (a figure that remains an idealized symbol of wholeness, unity, innocence, and purity), and not as a complex, fallible individual.

This theme of objectification plays into Locas’ parallel exploration of the problems of capitalist culture to which punk is configured as an alternative. As Marx notes in The Communist Manifesto, capitalism reduces all relationships to “the money relation” (659), wherein individuals view other individuals not as human beings (subjects), but as a means to their own acquisition of wealth (objects), a weigh station on the way to the acquisition of capital. It is for this reason that Marx can articulate the existence in society of “commodity fetishism,” in which people put outsized importance upon specific commodities. If money is the only value in society, it should be no surprise that “pleasure” can only come from them. If one combines Freudian and Marxist logic, then, to fetishize a commodity (or object) is both to imagine a world wherein there are no divisions (and therefore no exploitations) and to value a world wherein those exploitations are inscribed upon the very object being fetishized. As a “replacement” for the phallic mother, the fetish object symbolizes a perfect “whole” world devoid of divisive qualities, while, as a commodity, it carries the trace and history of endemic class exploitation. The contradiction brings to our attention the limits of thinking through the logic of Freudian fetishism. While, symbolically, the “objectification/fetishism” may represent a challenge to the race, class, and gender divisions in a society, in social practice, to treat an individual as an object/fetish is to treat them, á la Kant, as a means to an end, as opposed to as an end in themselves.

All of this is clear in Danita’s rejection of her role as Maggie’s replacement, as well as in her eventual rejection of her role as a stripper. The stripper role is complex in the story, as Danita clearly feels like it gives her agency and power, but even though this is the case, it also positions her as the object of the male gaze, a position she is increasingly uncomfortable in occupying. In either case, however, it is interesting that, despite her role as the object of the gaze (as nude model for both Ray and the reader, and as stripper for both Bumpers and the reader), she never relinquishes her subjectivity, insisting that while she may be the object in the eyes of the “other,” she nevertheless remains a “subject” to herself.

Increasingly, the notion that all individuals are both subjects and objects becomes thematized in Locas, not merely for Danita, but for others as well. Maggie, in particular, occupies a similar position, when, in Chester Square she is turned into an accidental prostitute. Stranded without money and without means of transportation, Maggie twice “sells herself” sexually, becoming an “object” in the capitalist economy, and tacitly rejecting her role as symbol of the classless Marxist/punk utopia.

If punk culture rejects the ways in which the dominant culture puts everything up “for sale,” then it undoubtedly rejects the notions that individual subjects can be seen simply as “objects.” Prostitution, on the other hand, is, in many ways, the ultimate symbol for capitalism. In prostitution, almost literally, “everything is for sale,” as it is in capitalist society more generally. Despite the logic of the prostitution=capitalism analogy, however, Jaime rejects the most extreme of its ramifications in “Chester Square.”

In the pair of panels pictured here, we see a clash of “Maggie as object” and “Maggie as subject.” In the first panel, she imagines herself as the prostitute she eventually (if momentarily) becomes, “posing” as a sex kitten who invites her own “use” by the men just outside the door. It’s clear though that this self-fetishization is simply a pose, or fantasy, when she is surprised by the knock at the door. Her humorously exaggerated response reveals other facets of her personality, beyond just as an object for sexual use. The juxtaposition of the two panels reveals two women juxtaposed, one of aggressive sexuality and the other of an exaggerated modesty. The fact that the two women are actually one at two different moments in time reveals a complex individual, who, when beyond closed doors, displays contradictory and complicated impulses.

Of course, Maggie is not, here, exactly “behind closed doors.” Rather, her naked body (like Danita’s) is on display for the reader, and in the first panel, she looks at us, inviting us to “use her” as we will sexually. The second panel, however, deflates the pornographic quality of the first, reminding us that behind every “objectified” woman is also a subject and behind every prostitute who is transformed into a commodity is a woman who may be embarrassed, humiliated, or even, simply, modest in her “real” life.

Maggie’s impulse toward subjectivity (again, like Danita’s) and her resistance to her own commodification, makes her reject the man, Enero, who in subsequent pages mistakes her for a prostitute, even though she was willing to sleep with him for free. Ironically, however, when she invites the security guard in for a sexual encounter that is not supposed to be a monetary transaction, he makes the same mistake, leaving her money on the nightstand. Though mortified, the money allows Maggie to escape the Square, taking a bus to her Aunt Vicki’s, where she eventually tells her friend Gina about the incident, noting that “I really didn’t feel bad about doing it. Like it was no big deal” (153). Though she eventually backtracks on this claim, calling herself a “whore…trollop, floozy, harlot, doxy, cocette, chippie” (153), it is clear that while Maggie (and the reader) might expect her commodification, or objectification, to rob her of her subjectivity, in fact, she leaves the encounter in much the same way that she entered into it, as a complex woman who is not defined by this single act. In fact, she only begins to see herself as a “whore” when she tells someone else about it, viewing herself not from the inside (as subject), but from the outside, through Gina’s eyes. Doing so allows Maggie to view herself as she initially views the prostitute, Ruby, who she is, for a time, mistaken for, not as a human being, but as a commodity.

The episode, then, like Danita’s posing and stripping, refuses a simple subject/object dichotomy, where there is an “original” subject of fantasy (the phallic mother), and a series of objects that replace her (fetishes). Instead, the replacements themselves are subjects, who may be objectified by society, or the individuals they interact with, but who cannot be reduced to such a function. Concomitantly, the book suggests that the ideals of acceptance of differences of race, gender, and sexual orientation are not proposed simply as symbols of a mythological or utopian punk past, but are instead cast forward as a goal for society that we must attempt to achieve in the present. When Maggie and Hopey reunite at the close of La Perla La Loca (or at the close of the original run of Love and Rockets), they do so only after they separate over issues of racial discrimination and homophobia. That is, if they are to move forward and reunite, they must overcome such differences, rather than “pretend they never happened” as fetishism (in Freud’s account) attempts to pretend that castration never occurred.

Again, this is explicitly emphasized in the closing pages of “Bob Richardson,” wherein Maggie has a dream/fantasy that Hopey never left her for the East Coast tour with her punk band which provides the impetus for much of the action of Wigwam Bam. Like the fantasy of the phallic mother, Maggie’s dream is a fantasy of wholeness and unity that predates all of the divisions that infect their relationship in the weeks, months, and years to come. Instead, however, Maggie “wakes up,” to be “slapped in the face” by all of the people she’s hurt in the interim (or whom she believes she has disappointed). She can only move forward, here, by rejecting her “dream” of a perfect past untainted by her own errors and those made by those around her.

The rejection of fetishism-as-nostalgia is articulated clearly at the close of Wigwam Bam, wherein Nan Tucker hires thugs to brutally beat both Crystal and Hopey as a warning to cover up the beating (and possible death) of one of the other fetishized play-acting “babies.” There, a fixation on a supposedly utopian “childhood” is explicitly coded as “dangerous,” resulting in a rude awakening to the realities of a world wherein self-interest trumps all. Though Nan and the sit-com mothers fantasize about a perfect union with their fetish “children,” in the end such a fantasy cannot stand up to naked self-interest, as they are willing to sacrifice (and brutalize) the fantasy to protect themselves. Wigwam Bam is not, however, the end of the story, and the brutality of exploitation and cover-up we see there (and also in Poison River) tell only part of Jaime’s story.

In the aftermath of the disillusionment of Wigwam Bam, Maggie, Hopey and their surrounding cast of characters consistently reject the notion that “living in the now” must simply mean the objectification and commodification of others, and the abandonment of a more utopian community which, it turns out, was always a fantasy to begin with. Instead, they search for a way to love and accept others’ subjectivities even after the corruption and commodification endemic to capitalist society. Even after Maggie is commodified as a prostitute, she moves forward in an attempt to make a better world for herself and her friends. Likewise, when Maggie is arrested at the close of “Bob Richardson,” Hopey abandons her self-interest in order to join her in the police car. Similarly, when Gina intuits her friend Xo’s need to win a wrestling match, she chooses to throw the match to her, despite the fact that she knows she will not get the reward for doing so that she wishes (159). Perhaps most tellingly, despite the abuse she has sustained at her hands, Maggie seeks out the regular Chester Square prostitute, Ruby, in order to make amends and to treat Ruby as a human being: a subject, not an object, despite her profession.

As Ruby herself articulates, then, the ultimate goal of the “love” of Love and Rockets is then a “love” of mutuality, openness, and intersubjectivity in the present, and in the real world, not a nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed in the first place. While there is certainly the notion in Locas that our present world is one of exploitation and objectification, there is also offered the possibility that even within that world, we need not see others merely as “means” for our own ends. When Hopey and Gina sacrifice themselves for the good of their friends, we are, perhaps, free to read those actions as self-interested, but it perhaps makes more sense to seem them as acts of love. Maggie’s variably successful efforts to make amends for her past behavior in the closing pages of “Bob Richardson,” both with Ruby and others, similarly indicates the importance of looking forward, not back.

Continually, then, as several of the other entries in the roundtable make clear, Jaime revisits the past in the ongoing Locas serial not to revisit a sentimentally idealized ür-time but to expose the ways in which the past was never like that. As in the Freudian account of fetishism, the phallic mother never existed, and so our attempts to return to her, or to an idealized past, are merely a series of self-deceptions. The recent storyline of Browntown, in particular, serves to remind us that the past is not a place free of exploitation, division, and oppression and is therefore not something to be nostalgic for, or to fetishize. Rather, as Jaime’s characters age inexorably along with us, we are reminded that if we want such a place to exist, we must work for it in the present, and hope for it in the future.
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The Locas roundtable index is here.
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More Works Cited
Hernandez, Jaime. La Perla La Loca. Seattle, Wa: Fantagraphics Books, 2007.

Marx, Karl and Friedrick Engels. “From The Communist Manifesto.” 1848, 1888. The Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Second Edition. Eds. Vincent Leitch, et. al. New York: W. W. Norton, Inc., 2001, 2010. 657-660.

Locas Roundtable Index

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This is an index of posts in our Locas Roundtable. Links to each post will be added as they go up.
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Deb Aoki, From Hoppers to Honolulu: A Fan Letter to Jaime Hernandez

Noah Berlatsky. When You And I Were Young, Maggie

Jones, One of the Jones Boys, Why 50 Million Jaime Fans Can’t Be Wrong

Marc Sobel, Thoughts on Love & Rockets New Stories 3 and 4

Derik Badman, La Maggie, La Superhero

James Romberger, Exes and Ohs

Richard Cook, Love and Rockets and Lesbians

Robert Stanley Martin, Rereading the Locas Stories

Jenny Gonzalez-Blitz, Locas…Y La Loca Perdida

Jason Michelitch, Disjointed Glimpses, or, The Wrong Way to Read Locas

Corey Creekmur, Remembering Locas

Eric Berlatsky, Lightning Only Strikes Twice Once, Y’Know”: Phallic Mothers, Fetishism, and Replacement in the Comics of Los Bros Hernandez, Part One, and Part Two

 
 


Pulled this image from this Inkstuds post, which includes a mixtape by Jaime. Can’t go wrong with Johnny Cash, James Brown and the Pixies (though that is not the Dolly Parton song to pick.)

Remembering Locas

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Whenever Jaime Hernandez decided (presumably in the shift from the “Mechanics” storyline to what would thereafter be identified as “Locas”) that his loosely linked narrative would unfold well into the future, and, more significantly, that he would mark that duration through the visible aging of his characters, his comics inevitably introduced operations of memory that would be experienced by both his characters and his readers. Most daringly, Jaime allowed his main character, Maggie, to gain weight as a sign of her physical aging, along with the many other changes in her relationships, location, and lifestyle (a term which might here refer to both her shifting sexual and musical preferences): such shifts represent what, outside of comics, we might call a life. It’s worth reinforcing how unusual this is in comics, which often employ a persistent present tense, in which characters never age; and only a comic of a certain duration (say, thirty years) will realize the full effects of this technique. By directly injecting chronology and temporality into his narrative (along the lines most famously pioneered by Frank King’s Gasoline Alley), Jaime brings the impact of the past on the present through directly into play.

While the treatment of memory in comics may be most fully evident in comics memoirs, which (at least since Art Spiegelman’s Maus) have often employed sophisticated formal means to represent relationships between present and past on the static page or, often, to collapse temporal gaps in order to render powerful, often traumatic, memories, the play of memory has in fact been central to mainstream comics as well, particularly following the rise in significance for readers and creators of what fans now summarize as “continuity.” DC’s company-wide Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985) was not only an attempt to clean up the company’s messy and contradictory history, but, more audaciously, a bid to wipe clean the memories of longtime DC fans. But powerful memories aren’t effectively repressed, especially by corporate design or external control. A poignant Deadman story by Alan Brennert, tucked away in Christmas with the Super-Heroes 2 as soon as 1988, suggested that the outrageous notion that post-Crisis readers were simply expected to forget the prior existence of an “officially” eliminated character like Supergirl Kara Zor-El was simply unenforceable. Indeed, the rise of comics fandom (and collecting) was built upon acts of “unofficial” collective memory which rendered DC and Marvel’s loosely connected series as linked serials, transforming semi-autonomous pulp fictions into something like tribal chronicles devoted to (somewhat) logical unfolding and overarching narrative sequence. By 1990, when Grant Morrison retrieved the Psycho Pirate (also ostensibly banished from revised DC history) for his self-reflexive run on Animal Man, the supposedly forgotten DC multiverse came roaring back in a flood of tears (the cover of Animal Man 24 depicts the Psycho Pirate literally weeping old DC comics), with Morrison’s subsequent work for DC dedicated in large part to remembering rather than forgetting ever minor character or event in the company’s history. (DC’s previous injunction to forget has in large measure been turned into a demand that loyal readers, like Morrison, remember everything.)

While Jaime Hernandez’s work at times draws upon (usually with parodic affection) the sort of continuity that now undergirds superhero comics, the chronology he more fully employs is closer to the plotting of soap operas or other long-form narratives that may have created without master plans, especially those like long-running television serials or film franchises (begun without conclusions in mind) in which creators must not only keep the narrative ball rolling, but account for the actual bodies of actors playing characters visibly aging before the eyes of their audiences. While superhero narratives now imply that their accumulated events unfold in time, most still have to figure out fantastic (or spuriously scientific) reasons for their main characters’ slow or halted aging despite the passage of time such comics otherwise exploit by drawing upon what had seemed long-abandoned threads. While “Locas” might easily be criticized for lacking a tight coherence across its full span (a criticism I find misapplied to a work that thrives on the fragmentation, improvisation, and spontaneity of punk rock, among Jaime’s more obvious aesthetic models), Jaime has increasingly relied upon a narrative unfolding which is simultaneously ragged and intricately woven (images that recall the original meaning of a “text” as a weaving), often moving forward by leaping back (though flashbacks) or, in his most recent work, through what appears to be an audacious leap into the future. This structure seems willfully incoherent at times, yet increasingly committed to exploring the ability of memories, whether vivid or half-forgotten, to deepen the impact of successive stories in his series. There are clear narrative (and commercial) risks involved in this strategy: Jaime’s work increasingly rewards loyal, long-time readers and is therefore perhaps less and less inviting to newcomers. (The same is true of most mainstream superhero comics, despite weak attempts to reach new audiences through reboots and relaunches every so often.) As a reader who has been with Love and Rockets over the long haul, my own response to the developing “Locas” stories is deep satisfaction and emotional reward in what seems to me one of the richest reading experiences in the history – that is to say, historical experience – of comics.

For instance, much of the general narrative context for the recent and lauded “Browntown” from 2010 derives from a summary of the Chascarillo family’s circumstances by Speedy Ortiz within a single panel of the 1984 story “Locos.” In a following story, “Young Locas” from 1985, Maggie’s best friend Letty’s death was announced, with a (drawing of) a photograph (reminiscent of the notable use of photographs in comics memoirs such as Maus and Fun Home: as Susan Sontag famously claimed, “all photographs are memento mori.”). That early story and traumatic event will be narrated from Letty’s perspective and more fully depicted in 2011’s “Return for Me.” (And “Browntown” and “Return for Me” function as flashbacks of a sort in relation to the five-part “The Love Bunglers” that surrounds them in the two most recent volumes of Love and Rockets.) The full impact of each narrative, in other words, relies upon the invocation of the reader’s memory across the gap of a quarter-century. Only an artist who has established an exceptionally loyal readership (or obsessive re-readership) can perhaps get away with such literal suspense, leaving readers hanging for more than two decades. Again, it seems inevitable that a new reader (who may still appreciate Jaime’s considerable skills as an artist) simply won’t have access to the long-term effect such connections have for others.

Insofar as such instances rely upon a long memory (or, more realistically, re-reading), they seem appropriately attached by Jaime to traumatic events, which are commonly understood (in the now vast literature on the representation of trauma in various media) as unassimilable when they occur. Trauma is typically experienced as a delayed response, in the process Freud termed Nachträglichkeit, or “deferred action,” which recognizes not only a delay in full understanding, but assumes a revised understanding of an earlier event in light of later circumstances and the clarity or obfuscation provided by retrospection. (Lacan translated the term as après-coup, like Freud’s German term more commonplace in French than the typical English translation, which sounds a bit technical. Both psychoanalysts wished to convey the common experience of such temporal disruptions to psychic life.) While the suspense – again, the quite literal suspension of narrative resolution through delayed narration – Jaime has built into his narratives may seem to ask a great deal of readers seeking more autonomous or self-enclosed episodes, the gaps he sustains may be more accurate representations of the way in which traumatic memories function than more efficient and concise narratives provide.

In addition to calling upon memories across years, even decades, of “Locas,” Jaime also often treats the function of memory (as well as fantasy, a topic that demands its own attention within Love and Rockets) at the level of the page or sequence, and often as the operative dynamic between juxtaposed panels. As others have demonstrated, the Hernandez brothers are masters of transitions, though not in the way typically praised in mainstream comics. As Charles Hatfield has noted, despite their preference for standard “grid” layouts, both Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez “nonetheless take a drastic approach to narrative elision …” relying on the technique Joseph Witek calls “uncued closure,” which (as Hatfield says) “pits image, image-series, and page surface against each other.” Shifts between panels are often surprising and jolting, more in the tradition of Eisenstein’s theories of montage, in which he defined the dialectical relationship between shots as “collision,” rather than the smoother “linkage” favored by his equally brilliant contemporary Pudovkin, which might define the transitional goals of most comics creators. (Early comics suggest the form experienced some anxiety in this regard, as in Winsor McCay’s numbering of his panels, or in the arrows that guide readers in the dynamic fight sequences in Jack Kirby’s early Captain America pages, devices that seem to indicate some concern about readers’ abilities to move forward correctly.) Jaime typically avoids the nondiegetic clarifications that hold the hands of readers moving through more conventional comics: the small boxes that carry us across time or space with a helpful “meanwhile …,” “later that day …,” or “At a secret hideout on the other side of the world …” as well as the more recent technique shared by mainstream “widescreen” comics and contemporary films that provide “on-screen” titles identifying a location and perhaps date and time to guide readers. In Love and Rockets (which is hardly unique in this regard) the leap across panels can be uncertain and disorienting rather than obvious and “invisible.”

In their exploration of memory at all levels, the sequence of stories centered around Maggie and Hopey in Volume II of Love and Rockets is exemplary. (This material was first collected in the volumes Ghost of Hoppers and The Education of Hopey Glass, which were combined to make up the recent “collected works” volume Esperanza; this material is also all found in the larger volume Locas II). The “ghost” referred to in the title Ghost of Hoppers is explicitly Maggie, experiencing the genuine nostalgia of return, in the original Greek sense of the pain — rather than fuzzy warmth the bastardized use of the term connotes — one experiences upon returning to a “home” that will never again exist as one once knew it. (Maggie experiences nostalgia the same way Ulysses does: it hurts.) But she might be just as easily described as haunted rather than a haunt herself: she’s haunted by memories of the past that return in (appropriately for a comic) strikingly visible and sometimes fantastic forms (a demonic dog and dog-footed child). In a larger sense, the second volume of Love and Rockets is haunted by memories of the (younger, somewhat more carefree) first volume, and so the reader of this series – returning to familiar yet changed characters and settings after the gap the Hernandez brothers imposed through a hiatus of about five years – is also called upon to recall that past which constantly burdens the forward progress of these characters and this narrative. (Whether they wanted to or not, it’s worth recalling that the Hernandez brothers “returned” to the familiar narratives of Love and Rockets because of fairly consistent reader demand. Despite work on other projects, they seem fated to never escape the persistent drag of their most successful creations.)

In order to represent the tricks of memory (or, again, the transition from objective reality to fantasy or dream, a comics tradition that goes back at least to McCay) Jaime may present panels in a sequence that requires the reader to briefly back up, understanding transitions not just by forward movement but through brief retrospection, a step back in order to move forward with an understanding of how the ground has shifted. The propulsive forward motion that seems to define the consumption of comics, panel by accumulative panel, is in this case staggered by a movement that shuttles between projective and retrospective understanding. (For an otherwise strained cinematic comparison, consider the famous transitions in the films of Yasujiro Ozu, which are often only clear once they are over.) In a number of instances, Maggie wanders through panels which otherwise represent her past, like a dreamer; more complexly, the shift from present to past is made via panels in which the adult Maggie looks out a window at herself as a child, with each version drawn in a distinctive style: the adult Maggie is more realistic, the child Maggie is more cartoonish. (The sequence in fact dramatizes the moment when little Perla accepts being called Maggie for her future.) Emphasizing their complex status as a couple and pair across the full history of “Locas,” Hopey will view herself as a child in the same way in another sequence. Such sequences are briefly disorienting, and only fully comprehensible through a reading that steps back for confirmation before securely moving forward: in one panel Maggie is looking at some kids; although the stylistic shift should cue us, only the identification of one of the children as “Perla” in the next panel clarifies that a temporal shift has taken place, and thus we re-read the previous panel in light of what follows it. We come out of this detour into the past in the same way, via a panel of Maggie-in-the-present again looking out the window (but now from the interior rather than the earlier exterior) at Maggie-in-the-past. In a few more panels, Maggie will see herself and Letty pass by: in the cinema, these would be misleading eyeline matches, organized to imply spatial contiguity and temporal simultaneity, but which in fact articulate impossible spatial and temporal coordinates, only available in memory, dream, or delusion.

Jaime is celebrated for his representations of children, in a style that derives (as he acknowledges) from the kid-comic traditions of Dennis the Menace, Little Archie, and (to a lesser extent) Peanuts. But it’s not often noted that he does not always draw children in this way: these “cartoonish” kids are often children as they appear in memory as opposed to representations of his characters in the historical past, who retain more realistic qualities. Jaime’s characters seem to remember their own childhoods in the visual idiom of early kids’ comics. In other instances, children are drawn in a style that matches depictions of adults, as in the devastating flashbacks of “Browntown” and “The Love Bunglers” in his most recent work. But when his characters recall themselves or others as children, such memories seems to signal the artist’s recourse to his own memory of how children appeared in comics when he was a kid. (This is loosely related to the technique, perhaps first employed in Alan Moore’s run on Supreme, of having the memories and/or history of that Superman knock-off drawn in the style of Silver Age DC comics, in marked contrast to the generic style of contemporary superhero comics otherwise employed by Moore’s artists.)

Although a number of critics have questioned or criticized the notion of “collective memory,” which might be another term for what we attempt to define as “history” (all too often in its most “official,” hegemonic forms), Jaime Hernandez’s work across the past three decades relies – for at least some of his readers – on a relay between the memories of his characters, his own narrative sensibility, and the recall of his audience. (Fantagraphics of course plays a considerable role by keeping everything in print: in terms of the preservation of memory, we might call the many collected volumes of Love and Rockets an archive.) Reading “Locas” is, in effect, remembering “Locas.” This is not to say that Jaime’s narrative has no future (a promise his last work, again, takes to a surprising new level), but that it seems bound to remain haunted by the persistent past.
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The index to the Locas Roundtable is here.

Disjointed Glimpses, or The Wrong Way to Read Locas

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I started ingesting Jaime’s work through osmosis when I was a little kid hanging out in the back of my father’s comic book store — images in ads, articles, seeing the covers of his books on shelves, hearing conversations about Maggie and Hopey. Love and Rockets was an aesthetic space that existed for me in the abstract long before I ever read the comics themselves. (In one sense, that adds a layer of truth to Noah’s assertions re: nostalgia, in that the Locas stories all bring me a nostalgia for the mysterious allure they exerted on my young mind before I’d read them. I get wistful just looking at their cover fonts!)

Despite being around Love and Rockets comics since an early age, I didn’t read any of it until much, much later, and I didn’t start at the beginning. The first comic by Jaime Hernandez I ever read was “Flies on the Ceiling,” which still ranks among the most astonishing comics works I’ve ever laid eyes on.

Most of the elements that make Jaime one of my favorite cartoonists are present in “Flies on the Ceiling”:

– the achingly beautiful drawings that find the perfect mixture of realism and cartooniness, seemingly effortless in pulling from the best of both worlds

– the breathtakingly controlled compositions, with their deep blacks and bright whites, attention to both diegetic space and abstract negative space to create enviromental
verisimilitude and broad visual dialectics at the same time

– the ability to draw the most nuanced facial expressions in the history of comics, and to know exactly when to give them up for broad caricature

And, above all: the gaps.

Reading a Jaime comic brings to mind the old cliche about listening to Jazz – “It’s not about the notes they play, it’s about the notes they DON’T play.” Jaime’s work is full of sudden narrative gaps – abrupt jump cuts and unexplained transitions that, for me, are the most exciting element of the reading experience. I get a rush whenever my brain has to reconcile two disparate moments next to each other on the page. This page from “Flies on the Ceiling” is one my favorite comics pages of all time:

There’s another kind of exciting narrative gap in Jaime’s work, which has most recently been cited as the cartoonist’s greatest flaw by Robert Stanley Martin in his essay for the roundtable: the persistent referencing of past or future events between Locas stories.

As I said, my first Locas story was “Flies on the Ceiling,” which coincidentally Martin uses as his prime example of what he thinks doesn’t work in Hernandez’s stuff. Rather witheringly, he writes, “as anyone who’s been around a Trekkie knows, fannish types place particular value on details and resonances that casual audiences either miss or don’t understand. It’s sad that Hernandez, with all his talent, undercuts his work by catering to this proclivity at a larger readership’s expense.”

Now, I don’t know that I’m a casual audience (though my gut suggests I may qualify as a large readership), but I do know this: when I first read “Flies,” I could absolutely tell that there were details and resonances that I wasn’t fully understanding – and I considered that a feature, rather than a bug. There was already so much to tease out of the dense and fragmented structure of the story that it made perfect sense to me to also have to ponder after unexplained history. I enjoyed the friction of the unknown.

Similarly, and maybe more pertinent to the Locas stories as a whole (“Flies on the Ceiling” being in many ways a stylistic outlier), I read “Ninety-Three Million Miles from the Sun” with only a cursory non-textual idea of who Maggie and Hopey were, and no familiarity with any of the other characters aside from seeing the covers to some of the Penny Century comics. And I loved it – maybe as much for what I was missing as for what was there. The vibrancy of the characters and the visual mastery of the art was complemented by the vast ocean of story that appeared to float just beyond my reach, hinted at throughout but never fully explained.

And let me be clear: I’m not saying that I was excited because I knew there was a huge backstory that I could eventually catch up on. I was excited by the suggested existence of backstory that as far as I was concerned may or may not actually exist as drawn stories. What I respond to the most in Jaime’s work is the gap between the captured moment and the suggested context. This sequence from “Ninety-Three Million Miles” (this is the entire sequence, by the way – an example of Jaime’s abrupt cutting) encapsulates everything I love about Jaime’s work not already on display in the earlier page from “Flies.” The mixture of realism and cartoon tropes, the chaotic, fun, and funny relationships between characters, and the embedding of this moment in an unseen narrative context.

Even now, having read most of his work, there are still beautiful absences in the narrative understanding Jaime offers. One is the strange genre territory the Locas universe sits in, where someone like H.R. Costigan can exist alongside Ray Dominguez, where there can be rocket ships and super heroes and a mansion with 1000 rooms, and also the streets of Hoppers. Another is that, despite a voluminous body of work, Jaime has yet to exhaust the pasts or futures of his characters – witness the pairing of “Browntown” and “The Love Bunglers,” or the Lil’ Hopey sections embedded in “The Education of Hopey Glass” (the next book I read after “Ninety-Three Million Miles,” if you want to further chart the perversity of my Hernandez timeline). There are still things we can wonder after.

In theory, I understand that the continuity and references might keep some people from enjoying the work because they think that they’re missing something. But in practice, I have a hard time really accepting that as a legitimate complaint about LOCAS. For me, Jaime’s work isn’t a continuous narrative to be ingested in order and “properly understood.” It’s a web of moments, interconnected but not interdependent. Noah’s right in his article on nostalgia that “simply knowing there’s a whole is itself a delight,” but I think he misses (or simply disagrees) that the moments themselves are also a delight, and that the moments exist in a constant tension with the unseen whole that provides something more than merely nostalgia.

I think part of the reason Jaime’s work functions this way for me is the much-ballyhooed “realism” of his characters. I’ve lost track of what everyone means by “real” or “authentic” in these discussions, so to clarify: I mean that the characters in LOCAS exhibit an emotional verisimilitude that convinces me above and beyond suspension of disbelief for the purposes of a story that they “exist” in some way. Jaime’s mastery of body language and facial expression is part of it, as is his finding that sweet spot between specific realistic draftsmanship and universal cartoonish simplicity. But it’s also in the way his characters act towards one another, the way they speak in the sometimes-clunky but always genuine dialogue. There’s no good way to put it that doesn’t sound fannish or essentialist, but Jaime’s characters just convince me. So much so that in any given moment of a Hernandez comic, I feel as if I’m stealing a glimpse of a fully formed reality, the rest of which is just concealed from view.

(I know Caro has asked, rhetorically, why “real” should count as an inherent positive quality of a fictional character when we are all surrounded by actually real people who would be more deserving of our attention if what we’re looking for is emotional verisimilitude. To me, this is a false equivalency. A person is a person and a character is a character. I don’t watch my friends and family with an omnipotent eye for my own entertainment. There are inherent responsibilities and detachments, different empathies that come into play, interacting with a fellow real human being. The purpose of a “real” character isn’t to supplant real life, but to reflect it, offering you a way of experiencing and thinking about people that actual people can’t ever supply. Conversely, real people offer experiences that fiction can never supply. That’s why we need BOTH.)

(I also don’t quite understand or believe Caro’s comment that “Emotional verisimilitude and compelling characters and being real are just the bare minimum I expect of competent fiction. It’s not what gets you praised; it’s what gets you published.” There’s a difference between a character being well realized enough for you to go along with a story; another for you to be truly convinced of the character’s inner life. If the latter is really as ubiquitous as she seems to imply, then she exists in a literary universe I am unfamiliar with.)

Lastly (and this is a point too important to bury at the end of an overly long and discombobulated essay, but here I go anyway) Jaime’s work sends me because I have an inherent love for the aesthetic of comics themselves, and his comics exalt those aesthetics. This is a position our host tends to disagree with – it seems (and Noah, please correct me) that he places more value on plot and character choices independent of form than on the ways in which formal choices craft plot and character. I camp out on the opposite side of that formulation. For example, in his Jaime essay, Noah called attention to this two-panel sequence in order to say of it, “You see Maggie from a distance, and then in close up. It’s not an especially interesting or involving visual sequence…”

Whereas, to me, there’s a wealth of information in these two panels. In the first panel, Calvin is standing between the young kids and the young adults. He’s clearly apart from both, but he’s turning away from youth and facing a sexually fraught tableau – his blossoming older sister flirting with his rapist. The dark shadows on the underside of the tree make the scene in the distance forbidding but also contrasts with and then highlights the two figures below. The second panel is dramatic not for its shifting perspective, and not for the readers seeing Maggie as post-pubescent for the first time (as Noah posits), but for Calvin seeing his sister as a complex and somewhat frightening part of a world he doesn’t understand but which causes him pain and humiliation. It’s Calvin seeing the laughter in her eyes next to the older boy, and it’s the dismissiveness of her words cast against Calvin’s confused feelings of jealousy and protectiveness towards her. These are all present in the form itself, and are inseperable from the content.

The greatness of Jaime’s characters and storytelling has as much to do with the way his drawings exist on the page as with the particulars of his plots. To me, there is joyful aesthetic purpose in characters existing inside stark black-and-white fields, in characters existing simultaneously as realistic and cartoonish, and in the composition and arrangement of images on a page to create a sense of movement and life. These elements are just as much a part of “who” these characters “are” as their actions within the plots they inhabit. Just spending time with these drawings – with these characters (same thing) – is enough for me to say that Jaime is one of the best.
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The index to the Locas Roundtable is here.

Locas….Y La Loca Perdida

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My first exposure to Love and Rockets came as a surly adolescent girl trapped in a level of Hell that Dante didn’t foresee—the suburb-meets-desert outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona. You can read virtually any recent news article about the place to imagine what a fun childhood that was sure to be for any kid surnamed “Gonzalez”—particularly one who oscillated between dysfunctional introversion, temperamental outbursts and endlessly sardonic sarcasm. (Given some of the racially based rudeness I was exposed to from both other kids and adults though, I regret nothing!) But after a divorce, remarriage, and determination to reinvent life someplace far, far away from New York in both geography and spirit, this was the place my (Irish-American) mother brought me to, to live out my teenage years as a Hopey Glass-type personality already on her way to an Izzy Ortiz adulthood.

Love & Rockets came into my hands not through the local comic shop, where it was kept on an 18 & up shelf, but the zine rack of a Tempe based punk/alternative/whatever record store called Zia’s. Both Jaime and Gilbert’s work was wonderful, but the stories of the gang from Hoppers, the Locas, resonated with an immediacy to my adolescent self, due to the more recognizable factors – they were Latinas, but American ones as well, existing within both those cultures, as well as in the punk subculture. And did I mention that Hopey Glass was also of mixed parentage? An identity that was one, the other, both, none,a fact usually ignored but that could also be a source of contention.

It was all too easy to see where the punk scene could appeal to someone like Hopey in that respect, as well as the occult-obsessed and mentally unwell (see I told you I was well on my way) Izzy. Or even the constantly flustered Maggie (I know I haven’t mentioned her till now, but she never captured my imagination the way the others did. Young adult literature was already full of Awkward Insecure heroines who everyone secretly thought was a real Swell Gal.) When I was young, and those characters not much older, punk, death rock, et al were viewed as a mythical “safe zone” where it didn’t matter if you weren’t quite “right” or having an identity crisis. In theory it was the place to not only be a social outcast, but to make it yours on a whole other level. Even if that theory didn’t always work out in practice.

So there were these relatable elements, to be sure, but to me Jaime blended them with something beyond that yet also familiar (as is it’s nature) – magical realism, a style associated with, though not exclusive to, Latin American writing. This was especially prevalent in the earliest work, where fantastical elements would be introduced into the story in a naturalistic way, and it seemed that in Las Locas’ world, robots, dinosaurs, superheroes, and spaceships were viewed as though they were as ordinary as a weekend punk gig or a dramatic scene with your girlfriend or boyfriend. If anything, the latter seemed to have greater impact in the course of the story. Which I suppose gives weight to the critique that it’s essentially a punk-rock version of a soap opera, and I wouldn’t argue that point in the least. In several places the story seemed to dovetail from slice of life into again these fantastic elements, but in a way that seems highly self aware, as if it is the intent to create—not-a parody—but almost a meta-referencing of telenovellas, or of both American and Spanish comics. Rand Race in particular emphasizes this. If the Locas were relatable to me, Rand was a stiff cardboard cut-out of a human, a square-jawed, muscular male lead of the sort that would be found either in an adventure comic or a soap opera. And of course there’s Penny Century, a headstrong, adventurous young woman who can have nearly anything she wants—and who wants nothing more than to be a superhero. And hell—he even got in a classic feet-up “Condorito” iplop! here and there!

This blend of the familiar and the fantastic did for me what magical realism is supposed to do — gave me a sense of a world where there was so much possible beyond the mundane existence of my surroundings. Did I believe I would find a world of spaceships and dinosaurs? Well, no. But that I would leave Arizona, that there was a full spectrum of experiences to be had beyond what the majority of the culture around me was telling me I was limited to, and that even when I wasn’t sure if my demons were real or figments any more than I was about Izzy’s, it would be part of the full tapestry of being.

And maybe someday, I’ll find rockets, tambien.
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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.

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