“I was sitting around putting words together that might sound cool, words that represented what our comics were all about. Emotion and technology were the two themes that I ended up with. ‘Robots and Romance’ was the closest thing, but too genre specific. ‘Love and Rockets’ was a little more abstract, something people could project on what the meaning might be. ‘Love’: a sweet emotion or a biological survival mechanism; ‘Rockets’: technology or a pet name for intense romantic love.”
Gilbert Hernandez
LOCAS GIRLS (für Aytug Ungor)
Love and Rockets stories gradually gave way to slice of life stories about Maggie and her circle of friends in and around the fictional Huerta, a city outside of Los Angelos modeled after Hernandez’s home of Oxnard. In Love and Rockets, Hernandez Brothers create genuine and well rounded queer characters and stories as a challenge for mainstream comics. From Maggie’s and Hopey’s years as two underage punks to their middle ages, brothers’ Love and Rockets chronicles are contained everyday life, thus stories are mainly realistic; but they do not follow traditional patterns of storytelling and story content.
The most dominant mainstream comic subject is the super hero; however Hernandez enjoyed the less celebrated super heroes, and particularly interested in depictions of women in comics, and those featuring prominent female protagonists were burned into his mind at an early age, with the Archie triumvirate of Betty, Veronica, and Josie the most appealing and beautifully rendered. Raised by his mother, with aunts and other female relatives always pitching in, women were the most powerful adult presence in his life, though he did not consciously articulate the impetus behind the strong females in his comics until later. For the Hernandez kids, comics were the most important mass cultural sustenance during the 1960s. On the other hand Hernandez was addicted to monster movies; and he was lucky in that his youth coincided directly with the early to mid sixties horror craze, not only in television but also in the Warren published magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland and horror comics Creepy and Eerie, which were must haves from the beginning. There was something more to comics than superheroes and Archie. Wrestling became another mid sixties obsession, with a tradition of regional stars, similar to the television horror movie hosts, whose merits the whole block of kids would excitedly debate. Like comics wrestling was another love passed down to the kids by their mother, who recounted lore about earlier villains from television broadcasts she watch in the 1950s. The Mexican combination of wrestling and monsters was perfect and absolutely irresistible, and 1962’s Samson vs. The Vampire Women was a moment of pure revelation: “This guy’s a wrestler; a super hero and he fight against monsters. This was everything we ever wanted in one movie.” An even more potent reaction came when Hernandez and his brothers discovered another early sixties gem, Doctor Doom, depicting women tag team wrestlers who fought monsters: “Now girls?! It was everything I wanted.” Hence, both wrestling and monster movies and comics provided some of the earliest Latino images the brothers were exposed to.
As Jaime grew into adolescence in the 1970s, his own superhero comics were often dominated by powerful women whose defining characteristics would later coalesce into Maggie and the Love and Rockets cast. At the end of the 1970s the dominant superhero comics had lost their innovative exuberance for Hernandez. So the brothers started looking more to the newly prominent genres of science fiction and fantasy and began to submit comic stories of their own.
Under a cover by Gilbert, the self published Love and Rockets no.1 was printed in an edition of approximately eight hundred. The humble, black and white magazine straddled the space between the fanzine culture that the brothers had been involved with for a number of years and the do it yourself energy born of the punk world. Their introduction spells out their approach: “We, the brothers Hernandez, have tried to get into the comics jungle for a few years now, but could never seem to make the right connections…Our own comics with our own ideas; our own mistakes and our own accomplishments.”
Love and Rockets series employed certain genre trappings; beauty, truth and art all found all over the map and includes homages to the two pioneering Silver Age super hero greats: Steve Ditko, by way of some machinery borrowed from the cover of The Amazing Spider Man no: 33, and Jack Kirby, via fearsome god Torombolo. “Maggie the Mechanics” in Love and Rockets was a Mexican American mechanic prodigy working in the science fiction tinged world of the Prosolar Mechanics, but the focus is on the tangled lives of Maggie and Hopey, and their wide ranging and interconnected stories of joy and heartbreak, which would define Hernandez work for the next twenty five years. The stories of Maggie and Hopey are intentionally never high concept but instead about people and how they live.
Love and Rockets series represents a pivotal point in the burgeoning alternative comics movement. Published independently of the mainstream, these alternatives were distinctive in subject matter and narrative strategies, and have come to represent an important moment between the heyday of the undergrounds and the widespread critical and commercial attention that is being paid to graphic novels today.
Love and Rockets stories may have been a masturbation fantasy; the women are certainly beautiful, and drawn with an unmistakable sexual vitality. But that same vitality infused everything in Hernandez’s stories, from the telephone poles to the exhaled plumes of cigarette smokes. This drawn world has a pulse; and so did these sexy women. Unlike most of the female characters from lowest brow pulp to the highest brow art, Maggie and Hopey were subjects burning with agency. When we first meet Maggie, she sexually desires men and is crushed out on Race Rand, a mechanic that she works with. She also sexually desires women, more rarely, and Hopey, consistently; but her relationship with Hopey is undefined, and remains so throughout the entire series. Although the two have sex and live together, Maggie doesn’t claim the identity label bisexual, or attend any groups or events organized around sexual identity. While Maggie is hooking up with men, Hopey pursues relationships with women, many times living with them but never settling down as a result of her inability to take life and relationships seriously. In later years though, Hopey lives with a girlfriend, but her infidelity causes her relationship to fall apart. And if their on- again, off- again sexual relationship was titillating, it was all the more so because of the rich, authentic delineation of their complicated personalities and their emotional rapport. Perhaps Hernandez tolerance the other characters have for Maggie and Hopey’s bisexuality. And perhaps his men aren’t drawn with the same lavish sensuality as their women. His captivating female protagonists, led by Maggie and Hopey are masterfully delineated with humor, candor and breathtaking affection, and come to life within Southern California’s Mexican- American culture and the punk milieu’ heyday.
There is no “coming out” moment for Hopper’s girls and girls’ relationship remains undefined. In relation to claiming a sexual label, their sexual identities are not “in the closet” or “out”. Neither Maggie nor Hopey verbally identifies the meaning of their sexual desire and activity; hence their gender and sexuality function as a form of open secret. They both continue to date and have a sexual relationship other people, while sleeping with one another; even during Maggie’s marriage. Maggie and Hopey’s sex scenes seem arbitrary and isolated; they take up very little space, which are specialized in one-frame sexual scenes; sex has happened often in the middle rather than at the conclusion of the plot. Just by following this kind of storytelling strategies authors subvert norms through the use of temporal shifts and cyclical, ongoing plotlines.
Such groundbreaking depiction of everyday, ethnically diverse lives, which Hernandez has continued to expand, deepens and interweave in his stories, in his most impressive achievement. However, it is not his merely subject matter, but rather how he treats the material, that is revolutionary.
Though Maggie and Hopey are best friends, their personalities are from the beginning, set up as virtually contrasts. Maggie’s, life is dominated by perpetual introspection and doubt – she is virtually the only character who has a constantly running internal monologue – and Hopey is in constant action. Such strong oppositional definitions slip as their stories grow and expand, as Hernandez has masterfully delineated the quirks, temperaments and unpredictability in their on-again off-again relationship, in which the play of image and dialogue is crucial. What Hernandez accomplished immediately in his comics was the application of varied short hand cartooning skills to further model the emotional range of his reality based characters. The reader has come to know his cast as they would friends through spoken dialogue, quirks, and facial expressions and through what is said about them by other people. In Jaime’s stories research comes pretty much exclusively from his day to day life, and, if not from direct observation, then from stories told by friends and family.
In addition to his treatment of ethnicity and the punk world, Jaime also depicted sexuality- and sex, which as he says is usually drawn bad, therefore not very attractive- in a light never before seen in comics Maggie and Hopey’s relationship was gracefully grounded in larger ways of living, depicted humanely. Like the depiction of these women’s lives, the depiction of sex did not stem from a projected male fantasy (intended to be enjoyed by men, as in the majority of undergrounds), instead Jaime opted to show it like it is normal life – like it is, to take away taboos associated with it. Stories of Jaime did not view sex as a taboo to be smashed, but as a natural part of life. Hernandez only made Maggie and Hopey’s physical relationship overt (Locas 08:01 AM, 1986) when he felt it made sense to their characters, a strategy telling consistent with his overall approach; one which never deals in mainstream comics’ language of stereotypes, a narrative sensibility that relies on climatic moments.
Depicting Maggie and Hopey in a sexual relationship was in itself a political act, a statement of equality in the political climate of 1980s Reagan conservatism; and therefore Hernandez contributed drawings to publications promoting homosexual rights, including AARGH (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia). Hernandez was the first to represent women as fully formed characters outside of what men wanted that to mean (entire history of the empowered super heroine mold), paving the way for myriad nuanced views of sexuality in the medium.
In his willful rejection of fixed genres, but mostly in his immersion in the world in which he was living, Hernandez used comics to create a language that did not belong to the comic book environment of time, predicated on escapism and idealization. Maggie, Hopey and the gang opened up a vista outside the male superhero dominated comic world, allowing space for not only female characters and female voices but for all manner of disparate subjects and approaches. Hernandez allows his characters to be contradictory; and his characters refused to be defined and refuse to bow down to what the readers want them to be. Jaime’s characters don’t ingratiate and his comics as a whole truthfully reflect a world. But never in expected special ways, instead openly flouting any commodified depictions of punk or Los Angelos. Jaime never falls back on the old entertainer’s trick of making the readership feel superior to his characters, but he also never allows to reader to get too close or comfortable.
As the explosively deconstructionist undergrounds demonstrated, comics are inherently self reflexive medium. So for an artist as immersed in the form as Hernandez , he use any and all artistic and commercial genres, romance, science fiction, super hero, real life character types, in these early comics, reconfiguring them to create an inner reality. Jaime’s stories were a combination of his newly exhilarating life and the popular culture loves of his childhood; everything sensibly fits together in the surprisingly seamless world in which Maggie resides.
Most of Jaime’s early stories center around adventures: “Mechanics” 1982-83, “100 Rooms” 1983 and “Las Mujeres Perdidas” 1984-85 follow Maggie through a journey in which her personality begins to be defined, gender roles are upended, and realistic characters intermingle with cartoon archetypes. From the beginning Jaime’s stories tweak and humanize these stock character types, thus deepening and entire history of popular culture throwaway, fusing text and subtext. In all of these stories the adventure frames and moves the narrative, also serves to places the characters in unfamiliar situations and thus challenge the preconceptions both in comics and otherwise.
Hernandez’s inimitable ear for dialogue and eye for the telling detail; ethnic diversity; shifting narrative perspectives and tenses; a dignified voice given to the marginalized or dismissed; seemingly slight pop culture references that provide the springboard for deep emotional experience; and characters who always resist easy definition and who constantly thwart stereotypes based on gender, ethnicity, physical appearance or lot in life.
