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 Love & Rockets was created 1981 by the three Hernandez brothers, Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario-- it's a sprawling, complex system of narratives covering multiple generations and dozens of characters, with dramatic shifts in style, genre and tone over the course of almost 40 years, so for all that it's touted as one of the triumphs of the comic book form, it can also be a little intimidating to approach. Since we're all stuck at home, what better time to dig in, then, or to dive back into a beloved and familiar masterpiece? This thread is to read along the two main strands of the Love & Rockets publications-- Jaime's Locas/Hoppers series and Gilbert's Palomar/Luba series. These are two really different kinds of stories with increasingly disparate styles, and while reading them alongside each other is a thrill, the easiest thing to do in terms of keeping things tidy and accessible will be to tackle them one at a time. Fantagraphics has published each brother's main series separately in a bunch of volumes that are available digitally or otherwise for a pretty fair price. Let's start with Jaime just because... well, I like him better. Maggie the Mechanic covers the stories from "Mechan-X" to "A Date With Hopey" for anybody reading in another format. This first volume is kind of a weird introduction to the Locas series-- for the most part, Jaime's stuff is down-to-earth, intimate stories about two women in a small California town and its orbit of punk scenes, artists, and assorted eccentrics, but Maggie the Mechanic kicks off with a bunch of issues about hover-cars and dinosaurs. It isn't bad at all, and it remains ambiguously relevant, but it is definitely not the most accurate barometer of what Maggie and Hopey's lives will look like as the series goes on. Anyway-- let's get to it. If you've read this before I hope you have as much fun as I'm having revisiting these older stories, and if you're brand new to L&R, get stoked. Edge & Christian's excellent overview from the chat thread: Edge & Christian posted:I can work something up for the thread, but if we're doing a Jaime/Hoppers book club: So-- for May, get your hands on Maggie the Mechanic or hunt down the material therein through whatever other means at your disposal, and let's consider that our first big goalpost. It's 277 pages so a pretty substantial chunk of comics! Alternatively this volume is made up of 29 separate chapters, which seems pretty tidy for roughly a chapter a day to focus on, giving people perhaps the weekend to get their mitts on the book, although obviously this would leave us at the cusp of volume 2 in early-middish June. (the first few stories in this volume were published in the self-published Love & Rockets #1 from 1981-- a copy of this was sent to TCJ and Gary Groth was so impressed that he picked the series up for publication under Fantagraphics from 1982 to 1996, when the Gilbert and Jaime stuff split into separate books for five years before Volume 2 picked up in 2001. But that's neither here nor there) How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 02:12 on May 11, 2020 |
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May 10, 2020 22:41
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For handy reference, here's your cast of characters for Maggie the Mechanic: and the cover of the first self-published issue, from 1981: 
How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 05:32 on May 12, 2020 |
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May 12, 2020 04:53
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The first volume is really weird, I've never seen a comic reinvent itself so radically while holding on to a consistent voice. The first couple of stories have a really strong Moebius vibe and are all about globetrotting adventure and then 40 pages later Jaime is nailing down his Dan DeCarlo thing and it's just a bunch of people hanging out talking about flies on the ceiling. I think for a lot of Maggie the Mechanic it's just about being along for the ride and frankly it is definitely not my favorite Jaime stuff-- I think in particular the long sequence where Maggie is narrating through letters home is kind of a stylistic dead-end and an excuse to draw a lot of (very cool) stuff that he just wanted an excuse to draw.
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May 12, 2020 17:41
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My favorite parts of the collection are the in-between where Jaime is still figuring out what kind of tone this world he's creating is going to have. "100 Rooms" is so strange and pulpy, but it's driven by the kind of complex interpersonal stuff that he'll shift towards a more realist mode later on. There's nothing really else like it in L&R that I can recall off the top of my head.
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May 12, 2020 20:10
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Yeah. The hideaway guy is kind of a dud but I love the sense of this enormous space they're all just dwarfed by, the way time gets swallowed up in this big sterile vault of leisure to the point that the characters all forget how long they've been there, what day it is, weird stuff like the corpse Izzy finds just melting away from the narrative, and the big party at the climax is such a tour de force of Jaime just getting to draw weird creatures.
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May 12, 2020 22:19
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Big Bad Voodoo Lou posted:Sometimes I'd have to reread a page multiple times just to confirm "Yes, he actually wrote and drew that, and I actually did read it." I think ironically it's one of the most authentic-feeling things in both brothers' work-- that sense of the world being large and unfathomably weird but people choosing to focus on what's in front of them just to keep a grip on things, or rather that day-to-day life, relationships, friendships, paying bills etc. is a meaningful enough labor that you just eventually shelve the dinosaurs somewhere else. I think alot about how grotesquely weird the blue worm poisoning symptoms are drawn in Beto's Julio's Day compared to how blase everyone else in the story is about it. Just like, you know, today I woke up, cooked, did laundry, did departmental busywork, read, wrote, checked the forums, without really thinking much about stuff outside that micro scale like COVID or Trump or mortgages or whatever. I like that feeling a lot. Weird comparison but it reminds me of when I was a kid picking up the Dragon Ball manga after seeing the Dragon Ball Z anime on TV, and finding that while the show (or what I saw of it) zeroed in tough guys fighting the manga had this whole world of goofy looking animal people. I think that disconnect makes some of the really brutal stuff later on (I'm thinking of "Browntown" in particular) hit a lot harder because it's this completely believable cruelty and suffering set against this unseen backdrop of dinosaurs and superheroes and spaceships. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 22:52 on May 12, 2020 |
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May 12, 2020 22:47
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Random Stranger posted:What did work was the character work, especially when the format broke. There's that page in the middle where it cuts back to home and everyone in the car is reading the letters and worrying if there's a cop behind them and dealing with the fact that maybe they shouldn't be that drunk. In those few panels we get more character definition and expressiveness in the art than appears in an entire chapter of the letters. I think this specific scene is an early instance of Jaime finding out what clicks. It's really magical especially since the epistolary segments with Maggie surrounding it are such a drag.
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May 13, 2020 05:44
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CitizenKrang posted:I think one of my biggest peeves with the book is that Jaime feels the need to pack dialogue into EVERY panel and doesn't really leave room for his cartooning to tell the story, which is odd because his art does such a great job at doing just that and would really benefit from some breathing room. I'm halfway through the book and don't think there's been a single panel without dialogue or narration. I'm excited to see how his storytelling matures. He's a really dense storyteller but I feel like once he has an established vocabulary with the reader about character and setting he pulls off a lot of really impressive wordless sequences, like this one from Wigwam Bam:  or from Chester Square: 
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May 15, 2020 02:51
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Here's a question for somebody smarter than me: Jaime likes to use "BAW!" to indicate a loud, dramatic sob. It's really striking to me for some reason. Like this:  This feels like something he got from somewhere but unfortunately afaik there's no OED for comic book sound effects and visual shorthands? Is this like...a John Stanley thing? Edit: Well, here's a "BAW!" from John Stanley's Little Lulu #35 (1951):  I've also found an undated Jimmy Swinnerton "BAW!" but I guess it's probably from the early 20th century?  It's really frustrating to me that pinning down this strip is as tricky as it is. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 21:37 on May 15, 2020 |
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May 15, 2020 21:29
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I got caught up to where I first started reading Love & Rockets, a 1998 story which got reprinted in a McSweeney's comics anthology I got in 2005 or so. I guess I hadn't been fully aware that I've been following this series for almost half of my life-- it's the story from Penny Century #2 about Izzy getting anxious about her book reading and growing huge. Edit: Another kind of fun thing-- Jaime did a few pieces for the 1985-1987 Who's Who in the DC Universe. Two LoSH girls:   and this Jay Garrick from the hardcover's dust jacket:  (Beto contributed a Golden Age Hourman to the same spread:)  He has a sprinkling of other DC stuff that I've found (mostly via Michael Fiffe's blog) as well as a pretty cool Tom Strong story with Alan Moore. So as we get into stuff like "Maggie vs. Maniakk" and especially much later in the Ti-Girls stuff it's important to note an element of real affection and admiration for the super-hero narrative. The Maniakk bit in particular is very very much of the pre-Watchmen deconstructive mold (it came out in 1983) and I think the "Gods and Science" take on a lot of the same issues is a lot more compelling. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 16:50 on May 17, 2020 |
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May 17, 2020 16:35
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One of many kind of interesting curiosities from The Art of Jaime Hernandez: a 1985 ad for the L.A. clothing store Y Que. And a pretty neat Outlook cover from 1992: 
How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 02:59 on May 18, 2020 |
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May 18, 2020 02:43
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Roth posted:Finally got to start on this after procastinating. He definitely gets better at differentiating characters within the "cute brunette punk girl" mold as he goes and as the characters grow in and out of different fashions and body-types. Basically the most important characters are Maggie, the somewhat indecisive and introspective one who at this point wants to be a prosolar mechanic, Hopey, her more mercurial friend (and at this early stage they do look very very similar at some points), Izzie Rubens/Ortiz who is taller and older and very macabre, Penny Century the rich and statuesque one in a relationship with H.R. Costigan, and I guess Terry Downe, who early on is recognizable by kind of a John Romita Sr. Mary Jane haircut. Rena Titanon is important too but pretty easy to pick out because she's middle-aged and built like somebody who chews weak men up for breakfast. Rand Race honestly doesn't matter at all, the other mechanics also drop off the face of the earth in the near future. I forgot how loving weird and unsettling Dr. Beaky's whole deal is, aside from the silent twins every panel he's in has the weirdest body language and facial emoting.
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May 20, 2020 07:34
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Big Bad Voodoo Lou posted:I just started rereading the first volume of Gilbert's Palomar stories (Heartbreak Soup) for the first time in over 15 years. I know he often gets more credit than Jaime as a writer, but it's a lot harder to get into than Jaime's Locas material. Palomar's really good but I think Beto's been slipping over the past few years while Jaime keeps refining and refining. Everything about Killer is just super tedious to me and I really didn't get much out of the little series of pulp "adaptations" he did. Everytime Boots is in the background of some Fritz nonsense making a horrid face, that's me, the reader.  Edit: 
How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 10:07 on May 20, 2020 |
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May 20, 2020 09:56
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I'm interested to see if peoples' perceptions of Hopey have changed since the 80s letter pages or what, because before I read L+R I was definitely led to believe that Jaime's stuff would be kind of a love story about these two characters rather than what I think it actually is, a story largely about Maggie and the various orbits she falls into. There's a bit in some interview I read where Jaime talks about how he tried to never give Hopey thought balloons or interior monologue captions because he wanted her to be opaque compared to Maggie-- with Maggie you always understand quite crisply why she's not doing something, with Hopey you aren't 100% sure why she is. And honestly I think the series itself rarely tries to sell Maggie and Hopey as some kind of idealized pair-- Hopey's definitely a poo poo head a lot of the time. I think the series is at its most interesting during the chunks where they're not anywhere near each other at all, but have to deal with the other's influence at a distance.
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May 22, 2020 17:40
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The Art of Jaime Hernandez is really cool, it has a lot of rarities and a bunch of nice info.
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May 22, 2020 22:48
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I'm willing to hazard that Boots is the only part I unreservedly like in the post-Palomar Gilbert stuff with Fritzi and Hector and all that:
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May 24, 2020 23:26
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I feel like both brothers are obviously really forthright about making art that's not only about sex but also sexy to them personally, but while I feel Jaime always has a solid grasp on how his characters are thinking and acting, Gilbert is increasingly just doing really idiosyncratic fetish stuff, like the belly-dancing and the walnut thing and the endless on and on about Luba and Fritzi and Petra's breast size. Which like, good for him but it's a weird shock to gradually go from early Palomar stories which felt super honest and unsentimental about sex to scenes where everybody is just casually standing around talking about their stunt corsets. It's even weirder because it's not even necessarily sex positive-- everybody is always hung up on weight and size in a way that feels really heightened and artificial, and it all feels especially when weird when it's juxtaposed with the stuff about the kids, like when you alternate between Venus stories that ran in Measles, for kids, and then really leering stories about Petra with Venus hanging around the margins. It doesn't help that Hector feels like a really poor attempt to have a Ray-like character without any of the charisma that Jaime gives Ray. Like I can't imagine a Gilbert equivalent of The Love Bunglers, something that ties together decades of narrative in a way that's affectionate and honest. There's an emotional distance or detached interest in catastrophe and excess that I think is deliberate. I like the bits in "Boots Takes the Case" where she's just clinically describing peoples' penis sizes and tallying up orgasms, it feels like as readers we're kind of being invited into relating to her own method of "reading" the situation around her-- voyeuristically and dispassionately. I think it's a shift that comes about a little after Poison River which I think is often super heartbreaking and raw, whereas the long backstory about Maria and the other sisters begins to dip more into an interest in exploitation topoi and exploring narrative excess as an ends to itself. I get a weird feeling about how a lot of his depictions of queerness dovetail with this sensationalist turn-- I hated everything with Isabel, the way she was treated by the story and by the characters as a biological curiosity and a duplicitous kind of half-person, or how exploitative and coercive the relationship between Pipo and Fritzi is portrayed. I think it's interesting that you pinpoint Ofelia because I agree. I think Ofelia is a really great character and a much needed stable point among the Gilbert characters, like Heraclio and Carmen were much earlier (Chelo too in a way), and I think when she exits things really go off the rails into pure kitsch hedonism which I respect but don't really find enjoyable. Rereading it all again, I don't know. It's really absorbing because he just structures story in a way nobody else does. Where he magnifies, where he cuts away, it's so interesting and strange (I'm thinking in particular about how the really pretty lurid deaths of Fortunato, Gato, and Sergio are handled) but I just don't think I like it much. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 00:16 on May 26, 2020 |
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May 25, 2020 23:56
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lifg posted:I’ve only read the Locas stories, so the above post is baffling and enticing to me. I think it's a solid idea, although the recent Fantagraphics collections make some weird decisions in terms of printing order, so you're not always getting a straight chronology per se. I do feel like Gilbert hits the ground running with Palomar a little more quickly than Jaime does with the Locas stuff, Heartbreak Soup is excellent from page one.
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May 26, 2020 01:57
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A lot of it is in Amor y Cohetes but I'm not sure if all of it is. I think that Comics Dementia is mostly slightly more recent stuff (90s onwards) but I could be off.fez_machine posted:Gilbert got his weirdness/experminental out in most of the non-Palomar stuff he was doing in Love and Rockets, where as Jaimie has basically stayed on variations on Locas for his entire career. Hm, I don't know, I think that even a lot of his "main" projects are really at their best when he dives back into magical realism and this almost numinous element of strangeness. I was thinking of the tree in "Spirit of the Thing" and I think Poison River that gives whoever approaches it what they want depending on how long they can bear to see it reveal itself, the "bird research" people in Children of Palomar, stuff like that. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 17:18 on May 26, 2020 |
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May 26, 2020 17:11
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Oh yeah, there was a Beto/Darwyn Cooke miniseries that I very very vaguely remember.
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May 28, 2020 00:09
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Edge & Christian posted:I think the majority of Beto's stuff is collected, at least projects of any length; contributions to anthologies almost always get left behind whether it's down to rights issues, creators not wanting to reprint them, or there just not really being a space for them. In terms of major works not printed as "Love & Rockets" from Beto: Most of Adventures of Venus is also collected in Luba and Her Family, interpolated in between a bunch of stuff with Petra and co., which... makes them read a lot differently than they did in Measles. Edit: I would have also sworn on my grave that Fatima was a Fritz thing but whoa, I guess not.
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May 28, 2020 01:49
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"Human Disastrophism" is a masterpiece and then right after it "Love & Rockets X." I reread "Is This How You See Me?" today and I think it's like apex Jaime, and it hits so differently for me at the age I am now than it did when it was coming out. I also think it's Jaime at his warmest and at his most pitched fondness for the characters, god, it's perfect.
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Jun 10, 2020 23:02
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Big Bad Voodoo Lou posted:.. that's some James Ellroy poo poo. quote:And was Blas really just a good friend who cared about Peter, or did he have ulterior motives the entire time? He definitely made everyone suspicious, but Peter had a soft spot for him, and he seemed skilled at worming his way into everyone's confidences. I remember wondering this too and waiting for it to pay off in some more sensational way.
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Jun 17, 2020 08:15
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