A Love and Rockets Collection, vols. 1-15.

By Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez. Fantagraphics.

If you've never heard of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez--A Love and Rockets Collection gathers fifteen years of their work, published in serialized form from 1982 to 1996--you've been missing out on two of the hidden treasures of our impoverished culture.

Before we get to that, consider what the brothers' work has to offer. Consider Luba, the main character in Gilbert Hernandez's saga of the fictional Central American village of Palomar. Certainly she is one of the most complex figures in recent American fiction--daughter of an Indian field hand, onetime trophy wife of a nightclub owner with gangster ties and mother of seven children by five different fathers, she rises from bathhouse owner to mayor of Palomar. Or consider all the other magnificent, larger-than-life women in Gilbert's stories. (Indeed, as dissimilar as they are in most respects, Jaime's and Gilbert's stories share one trait: They are populated by strong and complicated and absolutely unpredictable women.) There is Chelo, the puritanical town sheriff; Tonantzin, whose desperate political ideals lead her to a tragic end; Pipo, who grows from love-struck teenager to hedonistic entrepreneur in the United States; and Luba's six daughters, who one by one seek out their future north of the border.

Consider also the friendship/love affair of Maggie and Hopey, which forms the heart of Jaime Hernandez's saga of Southern California. The pair meet as punk rock--obsessed teenagers and, over the course of years, are separated and reunited in the outrageous circumstances that characterize all great loves. Or consider Barrio Huerta, also known as Hoppers 13, the town on the outskirts of Los Angeles that is the setting for Jaime's stories. A working-class neighborhood of Mexicans, Chicanos, Asian immigrants, punk rockers and gang members, it is the kind of new American place that is almost never identified on our cultural road map, and never rendered so vividly.

In short, the Mexican-American Hernandez brothers' work is among the most vibrant literature published in the United States in the past fifteen years. Why, then, is it so little read? Well, the obvious answer is, Love and Rockets is comics--even worse, it's the long-form narrative comics usually called comic books. But I think that's only part of the problem; the others reveal many of the gaps in our fiction and culture.

1. The Comics Problem. Clearly any serious American comics work--and there is not much: Daniel Clowes, a serious (and seriously funny) comics artist recently estimated that there are fewer than twenty-five cartoonists creating serious comics in the United States--carries the baggage of the comics industry. And since the late thirties, that shrinking industry has been dominated by superheroes and, to a lesser degree, other adolescent genre tales (romance, westerns, horror). Despite two recent periods of genuine creative fluorescence--the "underground" movement of the sixties and seventies (identified with Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton) and the "independents" movement beginning in the early eighties (much of whose best work was first published in Raw magazine)--few comics published in the United States in the past century can truly be considered literature. George Herriman's Krazy Kat, Art Spiegelman's Maus, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell--and already we are near the end of the list. The Hernandez brothers' achievement is even more remarkable, then, for adding two significant names to this list.

2. The Culture Problem. It is hardly news that, although Latinos are the fastest-growing so-called minority group in the United States, Latino lives and cultures and experiences barely register in the mass popular culture. (Interesting factoid from The New York Times: The fifth-most-watched TV network is the Spanish-language Univision. And yet, how many Latino characters are there on English-language television?) In this respect, Gilbert and Jaime's work is a new event in our culture: a rich and all-too-rare portrayal of Latino lives in all their messy, unrepresentative splendor, and of Latino communities, from Central America to the cities of the North, in the Reagan/Bush/Clinton era.

3. The Formal Problem. Thinking critically about Love and Rockets means coming to terms with comics as a medium, and this is something almost no one has done very well. Despite some valiant attempts (Gilbert Seldes's landmark essay on Herriman from 1924 and Scott McCloud's 1993 book Understanding Comics), the comics medium still lacks a coherent critical language. For many writers the obvious metaphor is film, and certainly the techniques used by both Jaime and Gilbert are often consciously cinematic. (One example is Gilbert's depiction in the novel Poison River of a gangland killing that intercuts with two other scenes of urban violence, a la The Godfather.) But more often, the static nature of the page--its composition and panel-to-panel progression--creates effects that are unique to comics. Many of these effects involve tricks of time, and thus narrative, and are born out of the tension between the sequential nature of the form and the unity of the page as an object. (This is most evident in the brothers' shorter works, like Jaime's experimental "How to Kill a" from 1981, which depicts Isabel Ortiz's writer's block and nervous breakdown. The sparse text also breaks down and becomes part of the art and page design.) Thus, over a decade and a half, Jaime and Gilbert have also made a major contribution to the language and grammar of their medium.

But forget all that and consider the work. Gilbert's stories alternate between short, expressionistic, often wildly surreal pieces and the increasingly long, lush narratives of the Palomar saga. Human Diastrophism, his first long-form serious work, establishes many of the themes that Gilbert explores in greater depth in subsequent Palomar tales: the magical-realist setting of the village (pre-Hispanic statuary hidden in the nearby jungle), fear of the outside world (an unknown murderer loose in the village), the unpredictability of nature (an attack of marauding monkeys), the intrusive power of the North (represented by a team of archeologists), the primal power of sex and the dangerous power of art (the outcast Humberto draws portraits of the murderer Tomaso before revealing his identity to Sheriff Chelo). Poison River is an incredibly dense narrative that tells Luba's story from the fifties to her arrival in Palomar. Halfway through, the narrative jumps back two decades, and we learn that everything we thought we knew about Luba's marriage to Peter Rio, the nightclub owner, has another meaning. Along the way we meet dozens of sharply etched characters, from Marxist student rebels to urban gangsters, transvestite strippers to aging bandleaders, corrupt policemen to hungry orphans sniffing glue in the streets of the capital.

Poison River is usually hailed (by the few who hail such things) as Gilbert's masterpiece, but I prefer his other long work from the nineties, Love and Rockets. Set in Los Angeles shortly before the Simi Valley riots, it tells a Rules of the Game--style story interlinking characters from every stratum of L.A. society--a gay documentary filmmaker, his anorexic daughter, a group of skinheads who've beaten an elderly black woman, a punk rock band and Luba's daughter Maricela, working as an undocumented streetcorner flower girl as she makes her way in the North. Gilbert manages to break down the usual barriers in class- and race-segregated L.A., and to reveal the links between characters from North and South and places in between.

In contrast to Gilbert's huge canvas, Jaime's stories focus more intently on a handful of characters and their shifting relationships. His drawing style is more immediately charming than Gilbert's rough, expressionistic line, more consciously "cartoonlike." Wisecracking Hopey, with her spiky hair and wicked eyebrows, sets the tone for Jaime's wildly comic early tales--more rockets than love. But the more introspective Maggie (aka Margarita Chascarrillo, aka Perla) is the protagonist for most of Jaime's longer stories, which trace her journeys from Hoppers to the East Coast to borderland Texas; reading fifteen years of his work, one appreciates the growing complexity of his narrative style.

Wig Wam Bam, Jaime's masterpiece from 1990-92, starts with the adventures of Maggie and Hopey on the East Coast after a long separation, then bounces back and forth between the cold cities of the Northeast and Hoppers. Pulled along by an invisible narrative logic, we see broken love affairs, hipster downtown artists, backstage drama at the strip club Bumpers and manic Isabel Ortiz's desperate search for Maggie and Hopey. Indeed, so deliriously entertaining is Wig Wam Bam, one is barely aware that Maggie disappears twenty pages into the story. She reappears, in South Texas, in the stories collected in Chester Square, which set the stage for her most absurd, and romantic, reunion yet with Hopey.

Jaime's mastery of the comics form is best displayed in a handful of short stories and character studies from the late eighties. "Spring 1982" presents an untold part of the vagrant Doyle Blackburn's life. He's just out of prison and off drugs, working as a strong-arm escort to two strippers and trying desperately to stay straight. Doyle barely speaks through much of the tale, but the intricacy of his facial expressions and the repeated sequences of dark panels of Doyle's sleepless nights let us experience his struggle not to lose control.

In perhaps his strongest short story, "Flies on the Ceiling," Jaime returns to the subject of Isabel Ortiz's breakdown. We see Isabel on a pilgrimage to Mexico, after she has married and divorced her professor, had two abortions and tried unsuccessfully to break from her Hispanic Catholic upbringing and her dictatorial father. She lives as housekeeper and then lover to a Mexican farmer, and is temporarily drawn into the traditional life she had rejected. But then the voice of the Devil speaks to her from a crack in the wall, from an old beggar woman, from a dancing village beauty. Jaime presents the tale from Isabel's perspective, and innocuous visual details--chicken tracks in the dirt, a shadowy figure on a footbridge, villagers' smiles in the marketplace--assume an almost supernatural significance. After Isabel's confrontation with the past, her father and demons real and imagined, her parting from the farmer and decision to return to Hoppers are indescribably moving.

Why should you read Love and Rockets? Well, all of this writing, and I still haven't mentioned the anarchic bombshell Penny Century, or Gilbert's surreal comics biography of Frida Kahlo, or Jaime's wonderful childhood stories of Lil' Ray, or Gilbert's darkly comic autobiography "My Love Book," or Jaime's loving portraits of women wrestlers, or Rand Race, or... Or the last page of the Palomar saga, which brings together two worlds (Gilbert's and Jaime's, Palomar and Hoppers, South and North) with--what else?--six black-and-white drawings on a comic-book page.

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Author:	Markee, Patrick
Publication:	The Nation
Date:	May 18, 1998
Words:	1763
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