Tag Archives: Love and Rockets

Poster Boy

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The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
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Do D.I.Y. posters—the Xeroxed or silkscreened posters you find on lampposts and kiosks in big cities, advertising bands and events—constitute a form of comics? The question is at least arguable. In 1975, theorist Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle posited that a comics page (and the double-spread that occurs after the turn of a page) is understood by readers in both linear and tabular ways. The panels on a page are read one at a time, in order, as the reader follows the linear progress of a narrative, but the page can also be read as a table or a map, as a single image subdivided and organized to impart information. (There’s a tradition of artists, beginning perhaps with Frank King and including Jim Steranko, Neal Adams and J.H. Williams III, who emphasize the overall tabular design of their pages much more than typical cartoonists do.) Both comics pages and D.I.Y. posters, then, function as single-illustration “tables” according to Fresnault-Deruelle’s definition—they have that tabular dimension in common.

A related point: many comics artists have made posters, and vice versa. One excellent book on posters is the RISD Museum/Gingko Press exhibit catalog Wunderground: Providence, 1995 to the Present (2006), edited by Judith Tannenbaum and Maya Allison (with design by Helene Silverman and Dan Nadel). Wunderground assembles posters from the Fort Thunder renaissance of Providence’s underground, by such key Paper Rodeo/Kramers Ergot/Monster cartoonists as Mat Brinkman, Brian Chippendale, Jim Drain and Leif Goldberg. One of the first selections in Wunderground is Brinkman’s Eagle Square (2000), (Update: Eagle Square is actually by Brian Chippendale) an image designed to mobilize opposition to the construction of a new strip mall:
 

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This poster has much in common with Brinkman comics like Teratoid Heights (2003) and Multiforce (2005), including the impossibly dense delineation of a surreal, maze-like environment and the focus on a single character navigating said environment (I imagine the cowboy on the left side of the poster following the path into the labyrinth). While I’m not sure how Eagle Square represents the cause—does the multi-colored tower represent the “historic mill complex,” the prospective strip mall, or neither?—the poster is an eye-catching companion to Brinkman’s sequential art. Robert Crumb’s album covers and comics reflect his love of “old-timey” music; Evan Dorkin channels his obsession with Ska music into his images for the American Skathic series of CDs and the milieu of his Hectic Planet series; and Mat Brinkman simultaneously makes comics, posters, and tapes of homgrown electronic music, ignoring distinctions between different media. Culture is culture.

I’m not writing this essay, however, to theorize the nature(s) of culture(s), even if such sweeping theories were possible. Instead, I want to tell a personal story about how comics enter into dialogue with music and with single-image posters. Teaching is part of the story too, since it happened during my “day job” teaching English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

In spring 2002 I taught my first class on comics and graphic novels, but it was a creative writing class, and I was charged with teaching the students the basics of visual storytelling. Which, frankly, was ridiculous: I can’t draw, I’m a mediocre fiction writer, and at that time the only comics theory and history I’d read was McCloud’s Understanding Comics. (No Feiffer, Kunzle, Witek: I hadn’t even seen Steranko’s History of Comics.) Still, I dove into the class because I was into comic books—especially, blindly, nostalgically, the 1960s Marvel comics of my childhood—and I got lucky: the students in that class were a ferociously sharp bunch, challenging me with controversial ideas (“Prince Valiant looks like book illustration to me, not comics!”) and generating better work than I expected.

One of the best students in that class was a junior named Chris Williams. Chris had been an Art major, but transferred to English when it became clear that his interest in cartooning (particularly Mike Allred’s American version of la ligne claire) didn’t jibe with the Art department’s emphasis on conceptual and abstract work. Some of my class assignments focused exclusively on writing—students were expected to write both a full-script comic and a Marvel-style plot—and Chris was very good at these. He truly excelled, though, when I asked the students to draw images to go along with their words. He put more background detail into his pictures than anyone else in the class, and his figure drawing, clearly inspired by Allred, was rubbery, expressive, and compulsively readable. My major critique of Chris’ art was that his images read too much like outlines, like ethereal diagrams of spaces and people, and I asked him to use cross-hatching and spot blacks to bring solidity to his pictures. Chris cheerfully ignored this suggestion, and even made a joke about my nagging; for one assignment, he turned in a splash page featuring a rocket blasting through outer space, but refused to paint the universe in shades of inky darkness. Chris’ astronauts flew instead through a field of white paper punctuated by lines indicating the bright areas of his fictional stars.
 
I did have an influence on Chris in one way, though: I loaned him all of my Love and Rockets collections (13 of the fifteen that collected the entire run of the original L & R magazine), and they blew his mind. He loved how Jaime Hernandez out-Allreded Allred, how Jaime stripped his drawings down until every line carried expressive meaning. (He also noticed that Jaime was a wiz at laying down big slabs of ink.) He fell for the stories too. Chris played guitar in a loud slow-core band called Maple Stave, and he connected with Los Bros’ love of rock and roll, and their attempts to import the speed and recklessness of the music (such as the out-of-control, almost abstract orgy in Gilbert’s “Bullnecks and Bracelets”) into verbal-visual terms. During this period, Chris drew and xeroxed a zine that combined an irreverent approach to the superhero genre, tonally very similar to “Mechanics,” with a stone-cold swipe of Jaime’s line-up cover to Love and Rockets #1 (which is itself—as revealed in The Art of Jaime Hernandez book [2010]—a riff on a Raymond Pettibon illustration on the back of a Black Flag 45). At the end of our class, Chris returned my L & R books, along with two surprises: he gave me the two volumes that I didn’t own (House of Raging Women and Hernandez Satyricon), and he drew me an original comic strip about what he’d learned (or tried to learn) from the art of Los Bros.
 

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After Chris graduated from college, he went home to Raleigh and took a bookstore job. He also saw lots of bands in various Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill venues—Local 506, Nightlight, the legendary Cat’s Cradle—and Maple Stave occasionally opened for headliners like Port Huron Statement and Section Eight at these venues. Most importantly, he kept at his art, experimenting with screen printing and crafting images with splattery, phantasmagoric colors. Many of Chris’ interests collided in 2004 when bars and galleries started hiring him to screen-print gig posters, and he’s crafted over two hundred since, most of which can be seen at his Storenvy site here. I’m proud of the work he’s done, I delude myself that I had a little influence over his creative direction, and I’m impressed by anybody who can make art pay.

Chris has come back to ASU for visits (once to attend an opening reception for an exhibit of his work at the campus art gallery) and during these visits we’ll sometimes get together for a lunch that typically ends with Chris giving me copies of his newest posters. I like them all, but I have a favorite, an image of a soldier dressed in olive-green fatigues sitting in a field of red plants. The soldier is an immediately legible cartoon abstraction conventionally situated in the center of the composition, while the plants are a network of indistinct, slashing brush lines that represent energy as effectively and abstractly as Kirby Krackle: the result creates vibrant friction between two different modes of comic-book expressionism.

I’ve framed and hung this image on the wall of my living room, next to original art by Ben Towle and Richard Thompson, so I can’t scan it. My version of Chris’ image has no text on it, but he recycled the picture (and, presumably, the screen) for a 2008 gig poster, and it’s the following, without blue lettering, that greets guests as they walk into our parlor:
 

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After decades of over-indulgent comic book reading, my default mode is to narrativize every image I see, wrap them in stories that tame their visual extravagance. Initially, the story I ascribed to Chris’ soldier-in-a-field was tragic: he’s manning a military radio, waiting for a message that’ll reassign him to the Front or bring him bad news about the point platoon. (Note the worn anxiety on his face.) Yet now I wonder if this original tale was too pessimistic. Maybe the soldier has exiled himself to the blood-red field, to tune a civilian radio and listen to stations and music banned in the barracks. Maybe his life was saved by rock and roll. Maybe a network of beats and notes link Jerusalem Crickets and Maple Stave, comics and posters, teacher and student, me and you.

Love and Rockets and Lesbians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The index to the Locas Roundtable is here.

Exes and Ohs

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Click images to enlarge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The index to the Locas Roundtable is here.

Jaime and His Readers

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In their essays on the recent appreciation of Jaime Hernandez at the TCJ website, both Noah and Caro ask, What makes JH’s work a masterpiece, and if you can’t tell me that, then why should I, as a potential reader, care? These are good questions. And I’m going to provide an answer that, in the spirit of HU, should piss-off just about everybody. Ready?

The TCJ appreciation is not about Love and Rockets but its readership. This is necessary and also unfortunate.

Before I go on, let me clarify two things. First, I’m using the term masterpiece in its colloquial sense, as in a superlative work. I’m not going to worry over canon formation here, nor am I going to suggest the need for criteria for determining worth relative other works. Second, by arguing that that TCJ roundtable is about the readership and not the comic, I don’t mean we should disregard it. As will become clear, I think Love & Rockets is, and always has been, part of a conversation about what comics can be. To read Love & Rockets without reading the conversations about it would be to read only part of Love & Rockets. Basically, I’m arguing that the quality of the comic book Love & Rockets is less important than its role in creating a reading public of a certain character, bound together by their shared attention to the comic.

This argument derives from the work of Michael Warner, whose book Publics and Counterpublics argues that publics are the outcome of texts that address them as such. So, I’m going to offer a quick and dirty account of Warner’s theory of publics, explain why it is important to understand contemporary North American comics not simply as works of art, but as loci for the formation of publics, and finally, why assessing the quality of Love & Rockets is, in many ways, beside the point of the TCJ Roundtable. I’ll also argue that this is OK.

Warner makes the case that a public is created by shared attention to text. Texts, he argues, “clamor at us” for attention, and our willingness to pay attention to certain text and not others determines the publics we belong to” (89). By giving our attention to a text we recognize ourselves as part of a virtual community bound by that shared attention, and as part of an ongoing conversation unfolding in time. The classic example would be the local newspaper, which in addressing its readership constitutes each reader as a member of a locality. The daily paper does this because it encourages readers to imagine themselves as part of a virtual community, defined by a common civic-mindedness and a commitment to that text as a way to make sense of the multiple texts affecting their lives. They do this not only through reading but also through letter writing, impromptu conversation, and so forth. The daily newspaper metaphor points to another aspect of the relationship between texts and publics; namely, the publics constituted by texts “act according to the temporality of their circulation” (96). The daily rhythm of the paper is a daily reminder of one’s status as part of a public, a status that is part-and-parcel of one’s identity.

The flipside of this is that if the text ceases to receive a level of attention necessary to sustaining it, not only does it go away, but so too does its public, and with that public, a part of each member’s identity. Understood as such, it is easy to see why the cancellation of a TV show, magazine, or comic book creates a level of anxiety seemingly disproportionate to its quality as an artifact. Publics exist by virtue of attention, something that in today’s world, has been stretched incredibly thin. We’ve got many, many texts vying for our attention. Moreover, traditional rhythms of circulation have been thrown out of whack by innovations in comic book publishing, and, as Warner himself notes, the Internet. But I’ll get back to these points in my discussion of the TCJ roundtable. Now, I’m going to explain why this theory of publics is crucial to understanding North American comics.

Here’s a bold statement that is likely as false as it is true: North American comic books have, until very recently, been a means to public formation first, and a art form second (if at all). And this includes Love & Rockets. I’m not an authority on comics history, but my understanding is that superhero comics took off in part because they were created and edited by members of the science fiction community—a public constituted by fanzines—who understood itself as defined by its devotion to a textual form that many in society treated with contempt. This sense of community was fostered in letter columns, fanzines, and eventually conventions. It’s even easier to see public formation in Marvel superhero comics… Stan Lee addresses the readers as friends, in on the joke, but also serious about what the text they’re reading means to them relative other publics (true believers vs. everybody else). He directs their attention to the history of his comics’ circulation, he answers letters, and he asks readers to find mistakes in continuity. In exchange for their attention to the minutiae of circulation the careful reader receives a “No Prize,” as if to say that attention is a reward in itself. After all, its what makes you part of a public, which is what makes you who you are.

Love & Rockets emerged at a decidedly different moment in comics’ history. This is important because, as you will recall, publics act according to the temporality of their circulation. The public L&R addressed was the public bound together by the ruminations of The Comics Journal, and of other comics aspiring to a level of artistic sophistication that had yet to be realized in a significant way. It was, in short, a text that in its initial incarnation constituted an audience in a manner consistent with its aspirations for the medium. It was part of the medium, inasmuch as it came out regularly, ran letters, and so on. But unlike the superhero comics that surrounded it on the racks, Love & Rockets did not assume a new readership every five years. Nor did it require a status quo be maintained in order to insure the brisk sales of toothpaste and hastily cobbled together cartoons. In short, it promised comics readers a text that would reward sustained attention, and honor their identity as part of a community of readers over the long term. (This suggests that Dave Sim’s commitment to 300 issues was crucial to constituting the incredibly robust public constituted by Cerebus. But that’s a whole different post.)

What is remarkable about Love & Rockets is that it has made good on this promise for many years. Moreover, its publisher’s commitment to keeping the books in print has made it possible for the public to grow. And aside from the occasional detour, Jaime’s central storylines continue, which allow for the renewal of a reading community… a public that understands itself as defined by its ongoing attention to the text. This is no small thing in an age when publics from and dissolve according to the logic of direct-market orders and cross-media synergy.

That said, the rhythms of its circulation and appreciation have been disrupted by changes in the comics market, and in the forums for discussing it. When Love & Rockets began, it’s public entered into a relationship with the text fostered by the weekly trip to the comics shop, the letter column, and fan magazines like TCJ. As Frank Santoro pointed out in his “The Bridge is Over Essays,” Love & Rockets is no longer part of a larger community of comic readers. It comes out as a book now, and not in a monthly pamphlet. This isolates its public from the institutional frameworks that incubated it. Similarly, with the end of TCJ’s regular publication in print, and the balkanized world of online criticism, consensus about what comics are worth reading, what comics criticism should look like, etc. The public constituted by Love & Rockets is understandably nervous.

This talk of publics, and the disruptions to Love & Rockets rhythm of circulation leads me to why I think the appreciation is necessary, but also unfortunate. The roundtable in necessary because it does what public must periodically do to maintain itself in the face of threats to its existence. Hernandez just produced a work that by his own admission he will have trouble following up. Absent the imperative to monthly publication, and of a regular, print forum for praise and blame, the burden to compel the effort falls to the public that exists because of it. What we are seeing here is epideictic rhetoric, an effort to affirm a public’s taken for granted ideas in order to argue for why Love & Rockets should continue.

The appreciation is also unfortunate. It is unfortunate because is relies on shared and implicit assumptions to bring the community together, which in turn implies a certain “you had to be there” exclusionism. In this respect, I agree with others that more attention to the “why” of Love & Rocket’s value would have been salutary to the goals of the appreciation. In this respect, the appreciation was a missed opportunity to expand the public.

Ultimately, I think we have here a really interesting example of the intersection between artistic form and ritual performance. That it inspired the HU to go off on taken for granted values (Love & Rockets as soap-opera in particular) also suggests that whatever threat the Internet poses to this public, it also puts it into a larger conversation. So, while the bridge between publics is gone, its been replaced by a confusing, and to my mind much more interesting, network of bridges.
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This is part of an impromptu roundtable on Jaime and his critics.

Love and Rockets: The Love Bunglers

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[This article contains spoilers throughout]

 

The ending to “The Love Bunglers” is but one ending among many in Jaime Hernandez’s Locas saga; all of them pretending to a certainty derived from an earlier age of innocence.

It is 1988 and Hernandez is writing and drawing the second part of “The Valley of the Polar Bears”. Hopey has left Maggie to go on tour with Terry’s band. Maggie has found new happiness in the arms of Ray Dominguez. They walk arm in arm into a happy future. The words of an imperfect prophet suggest that she could be coming to “the end of her whirlpool”.

She isn’t.

A few hundred pages on and it is 1996; the faithful reader now faced with the closing pages of “Bob Richardson”. Maggie and Hopey suddenly meeting for the first time in “years” at the back of a police car after a series of setbacks; finally together again as they once were 50 issues prior. The perfect ending.

Each of these moments as final as a relationship, wedding, or birth in our own lives; everything apt to be corroded by time.

These periodic assertions of finality are recapitulated in “The Love Bunglers”. Here old past times are recreated…

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[1985 —> 2011]

…and ancient paths retread.

 

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[1985 —> 2011]

The pair of lovers (Maggie & Ray) stuttering, burning brightly, fizzling out, and then rekindled over the course of a few chapters and over 20 years of comics. If likened to a piece of music then a kind of ritornello with elaborations bordered by tuttis where the orchestra plays as one.

This symmetry is reflected in the construction of Jaime’s story and the positioning of “death” in between the story of the two lovers. The first is a kind of foreboding where Maggie’s brother, Calvin, traumatized by abuse, and with a mind to save his sister, beats his tormentor to a pulp. That figure is later seen tortured by obsessive ruminations over the validity of his actions; these thoughts now carried to their natural conclusion of eternal vigilance over his sister. He is a ghost walking the streets, lost in shadow but ever ready to reiterate the past and its tragedies. A personification of his sister’s own state of mind.

In the latter half of “The Love Bunglers”, Letty, Maggie’s childhood friend, becomes an unwitting sacrifice to that tragedy — first pushed into the background by Maggie’s despair at her father’s unfaithfulness and then slowly rebuilding an old bond with her friend. There is space enough to wonder why she has been thus displaced, whether this can be put down to Maggie’s new found wariness or simply her mother’s shame at the preceding events; now spreading like a disease through her family, all of whom are kept close to the nest in light of the recent affliction that has unfolded.

Both of these episodes present themselves as answers to Maggie’s insecurities, always alluded to at various points in Hernandez’s long running series but now brought to the fore. As Ray Dominguez lies bleeding on the ground towards the close of the story, his skull crushed by a brick wielded by Maggie’s deranged brother, Hernandez offers his readers an encapsulation of this pattern of self-flagellation. Ray’s vegetative thoughts of Maggie seguing into Maggie’s own recollections; a gentle push into reconstruction and reminiscence on the part of the author.

Panel 1. It is 1997 and Hernandez will soon be embarking on his much lauded homage to Charles Schulz in “Home School” — clean, elegant lines, wiry hair, and brick walls.

In “6 Degrees of Ray D. Ation”, Ray meets the young Maggie for the first time. There is a hammer hanging over Ray’s head held by a young Maggie, just as so many years later her brother will hold a brick over Ray. He is a willing victim, a deer caught in the headlights. She, his unwitting “scourge”.

Panel 2. Maggie moves back to Hoppers after her parents separate. A friendship is rekindled and Maggie emerges from her shell.

Panel 3. A pose which mirrors that at the end of “The Death of Speedy”.

The school year is coming to a close and Ray has managed to get an art scholarship and will be leaving town. Soon Letty will be dead, a crutch taken from Maggie.

Panel 4. “The Return of Ray D.” (1986). A moment between panels and between pages. Maggie has just been kicked out of her friend Danita’s house and has been wandering the cold streets at night. “Three-thirty in the morning an’ my bed is fifteen miles away…” Ray has been away for 3 years and they meet unexpectedly at a doughnut shop. He only recognizes her after the fact. Maggie remembers that she once started a rumor that they went out “cause I liked him. Like I liked Race…and Speedy…”

 

Panel 5. “The Death of Speedy Ortiz” (1987). Ray has just seen his friend, Litos, shot in the face, and he is sitting together with Maggie in a hospital. “Why are you the only sane person here?” she asks. A moment of quiet as Maggie rests on his blood stained shirt, and then she leaves him to meet Speedy who will be dead within moments.

 

 

Panel 6. A Mess of Skin (1987). Hopey has left Maggie to go on tour with Terry. Left to her own devices back in Hoppers, Maggie accidentally jumps into a car thinking it is driven by Doyle and sees that it is being driven by Ray. They hook up to Daffy’s consternation. All this before that joyful and ephemeral conclusion mentioned above.

 

Panel 7. Maggie is posing for Ray but she’s stiff and lifeless, finally delegating her duties to Danita who soon shacks up with Ray. It is the beginning of the end for the couple, all this belied by a strained smile, happily ignored by readers of the time hoping for a reunion with Hopey.

Panel 8. “Ninety-Three Millions Miles from the Sun”. The end of the affair. Maggie says a final goodbye to Ray before Hopey puts her through another trauma and she disappears for the duration of “Wigwam Bam”.

 

This before that other blissful and temporary end which closed the magazine sized issues of Love and Rockets. The end of an era. The magazine’s circulation dropping from its heydays, partly due to the Hernandez Brothers fascination with convoluted narratives, dead ends, and indefinite resolutions.

Panel 9. “Life Through Whispers”. Doyle meets Maggie for the first time in years, and he’s worried that she’s seen him with his new squeeze. We never see her expression until this moment. Her visage is a mask of stern resignation, so far from the girl that grew up in Hoppers, the demons still clinging to her soul. The memories of happier times now tainted by experience.The one time mechanical “prodigy” now doing maintenance in an apartment block.

Ray’s expression is filled with an unaccountable sadness, staring and not daring to speak. The heady days of youth now extinct, the colorful costumes of the past long forgotten, life settling into a predictable landscape of drab buildings, anonymous clubs and darkened streets. When Jaime demonstrates his love for the feminine form in one of Ray’s life drawing classes earlier in the story, the entire process is viewed with a sense of bemused distraction by Ray. It seems almost like a casting away of “youthful” ways, a disdainful glance at a game from another age. This is a bleak middle-aged, lower middle-class existence conveyed not by picturesque chaos but by Jaime’s increasingly somber environments and restrained linework. Nowhere is this spartan existence more visible than in “The Love Bunglers”, the artist’s expressive line held in check like the lowering of a narrator’s voice.

In the fourth to final page of “The Love Bunglers”, Maggie looks into the mirror having found out that Ray has been in a near vegetative state for almost 2 years —  a direct reference to the two pages of retrospection that have preceded it. What happens in the moment between those two panels is, of course, a mystery.

Perhaps a moment of resolution; perhaps the desire to remember clearly everything that has gone on before. A clean slate from which to draw the best of memories and less of the pain. If Maggie’s problems can be placed down to her memories, then it might be said that Ray finally gets his girl because he has forgotten so much.

In the end, the attacker (that personification of psychological damage) is somehow forgotten. The author reasserting the points of connection between Maggie and Ray, tearing them down and then rebuilding them. Ray’s mind in a constant state of questioning, his memories containing real and feigned histories.

His lover’s face is placid, understanding, and yet indecipherable — the cartoonist inviting his readers to recall the couple’s years of bitter struggle, before accepting the lies of a pleasant but capricious present reality.

 
_________
This is part of an impromptu roundtable on Jaime and his critics.

#7: The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez

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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

Human Diastrophism Revisited: The Penultimate Page

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[Note: This is a blog interlude pending the publication of Matthias Wivel’s discussion of Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature]

Of the comics which emerged through the independant press during the 80s, few comics have acquired as high a reputation as Gilbert Hernandez’s Human Diastrophism. The recent roundtable on Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature has provided me with an excuse to revisit this comic after a space of some 20 years. This was prompted by Noah’s disappreciation of the second last page from that story which is produced below with Noah’s commentary following:

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