Love and Rockets Vol. 2 #20

featuring “La Maggie La Loca” and “Gold Diggers of 1969”

Jaime Hernandez, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2007

56 pages

$4.50

Out of print at Fantagraphics

(First, a quick reader’s note: At this point I’ve read all of the all-Jaime/Locas L&R collections. For this, the final issue of Love and Rockets as a comic-book-format periodical, and for the three currently available volumes of its new squarebound incarnation, Love and Rockets: New Stories, I’m going to be reading and reviewing Jaime’s stuff on its own before starting over at the beginning with Beto. There are other ways I could play this, but I’m enamored by the idea of being all caught up with Maggie and company. And yes, this means LOVEMBER AND ROCKETS is on its way…)

The triumph of the continuity! Leave it to Jaime to use “La Maggie La Loca,” the inaugural strip for The New York Times‘ “Funny Pages” lit-comics section, to address one of the oldest, wildest, most sci-fi strips in his series’ history. Though the more outlandish details are largely (but not entirely–I spy a glowing robot head in one of those flashback panels) elided, Maggie the Mechanic’s adventures in the jungle alongside Rena Titanon and Rand Race are officially not retconned. I’m happy about this because I’m the sort of person who pulls for that early sci-fi stuff, encouraging folks who want to start reading the series to start there even though it’s so different in vibe and visuals from what it ends up being. I’m also happy because it means that Maggie’s translator for that time, Tse Tse, returns for the strip, revealing herself to have become maybe the smartest and most successful of the characters. (I’d always considered her the “lost Loca” and hoped she’d somehow find her way to Hoppers or the Valley.)

The strip’s story involves Maggie receiving an invite to come visit Rena on the private island where she hides from the admirers and enemies she made during her dual careers as a wrestling champion and a revolutionary icon. Maggie, of course, is just a humble apartment manager, and she spends most of the visit alternating between awe, jealousy, and contempt for her hostess, whose glamour and strength appears to have slowly edged into isolation and paranoia. But what makes the strip really worthwhile in terms of how it relates to the Locas strips of the here and now can be summed up by one panel: A nude, 40-year-old Maggie, standing with her back to us in all her craggy, doughy, Rubenesque magnificence, looking out the window at Rena, her back also to us, arms akimbo, her 70-plus-year-old back and arms still seeming hewn out of wood despite her age, staring down at gifts left by her devoted fans. But as that mirrored pose indicates, both women have essentially the same plight: To what extent are they comfortable with their achievements? To what extent can they let the people they love into their lives? To what extent are they just standing there alone–or is the important thing that they’re looking at people who care about them? Maggie may just be an apartment manager anymore, she may now get in way over her head (literally) when she attempts to have a fun island adventure like she used to, but the way Rena sneaks into her room at night just to watch her sleep reveals that the aging heroine could use a dose of the community and camaraderie that’s part and parcel of Maggie’s dayjob. A life spent fighting people in the ring and the streets has left her admired but alone; Maggie’s misadventure teaches her it’s okay to focus on the former to ameliorate the latter.

Accompanying the main strip is “Gold Diggers of 1969,” a flashback strip drawn in Jaime’s Sunday-funnies kiddie-comic style and concerning li’l Maggie as she bounces between her three other mother figures–her actual mom, her Tia Vicki, and her babysitter/mentor Izzy from back in her wannabe-gangsta teenage years–on a particularly dramatic day. Again we see the ways in which these strong women are weak (I was particularly tickled by the revelation that Izzy’s not a founding member of the Widows at all; sorry, Speedy), and the ways in which they draw strength by helping to protect people weaker than they. Little Perla’s way too young to really notice any of this, but I think that’s the point–flash forward about 15 years when she’s off gallivanting with Rena in the jungle, and she’s still mostly too besotted with hero worship to notice the toll Rena’s glamourous, dangerous life has taken on her. In much the same way that connecting with her new baby brother and her mom and dad makes young Maggie feel like part of a whole, so too does her semi-disastrous visit to Rena at age 40 help give a hero her strength back. What a kindly pair of comics.

The Education of Hopey Glass

(Love and Rockets, Book 24)

Jaime Hernandez, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2008

144 pages, hardcover

$19.99

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The “all growns up” phase for the Locas continues. Looking back, the material collected in Penny Century was sort of the calm before the storm for our heroes and heroines–the point at which they’d matured, but the point before they realized they’d matured and started struggling with it. If Ghost of Hoppers was Maggie’s confrontation with adulthood, The Education of Hopey Glass serves up the equivalent for Hopey and Ray. It’s fascinating to me to see where their lives have taken them versus where they were–and more importantly, what they represented to Maggie–when they were first juxtaposed. For starters, this is a really weird and kind of silly thing to say about a comic book character, but I am straight-up proud of Hopey for becoming a teacher’s assistant. (Waiting for Superman can go pound sand.) It reveals a strength of character she’d always kept carefully hidden, an indication that beneath the hellion exterior, she’s actually, well, a good person, a person capable of caring about someone other than the Maggot. What’s refreshing about what Jaime is showing us here is that this in no way “fixes” Hopey, nor makes her suddenly respectable. She’s still a loudmouth bartender and an incorrigible womanizer with a wandering eye, and she still can’t seem to help but hurt the people who care about her. And on the more positive side, she’s still sexy and funny and badass and all the other things that have made her fun for her friends to be around. Her new job in a position of responsibility isn’t something she sacrificed the person she’d always been to achieve. Like the glasses she spends the storyline shopping for, it’s just a new accessory on the same old face, a new way of looking at things with the same old eyes.

Good ol’ Ray Dominguez, on the other hand, is more ol’ than good at this point. The rumpled, cigarette-smoking noir narration we encountered from him last time around is back with a vengeance, and the succession of endless nights of booze, broads, and loneliness it suggests tells us that much has changed over the nearly two decades since he first emerged as the safer, more caring alternative to Hopey in the quest for Maggie’s heart. This is not to say that he’s the full-fledged devil-may-care degenerate of the sort comprised by the circles his old friend Doyle and his would-be flame Vivian “The Frogmouth” Solis move in–on the contrary, his relentless narration is a litany of worrying that he’s too old, a given situation too hairy, a given woman too much trouble, a given dude too dangerous even to know. And yet through some innate inability to really stick up for himself and go for what he wants, Ray is constantly buffeted from predicament to predicament by the still more fucked-up people with whom he surrounds himself–a classic noir patsy protagonist, played mostly for Lebowski-style black laughs. Ray wonders aloud why he’s so fixated on the two years he spent with Maggie all those years ago, especially in light of what he eventually gets going with Viv, but it feels like less of a secret to us: He saw what he wanted and hung onto it. My fear is that the Frogmouth is too much of a (hilarious!) human disaster area to give him the gumption to do so this time around, but anything’s possible, and he seems to realize that it’s now or never.

What makes these two stories compelling and connects them to one another beyond the basic idea of the characters coming to terms with their age is how much the stories rely on the kinds of things only an artist of Jaime’s caliber can pull off for their telling. Hopey’s many loves and crushes–Maggie, Rosie, Grace, Guy Goforth, Angel, the woman at the eyeglasses store–are woven into an intricate web of eye contact and body language, glances and looks away, the clothes they choose to wear and what they look like naked. Half the story emerges from characters looking at how other characters look at still other characters. Ray’s story, meanwhile, takes place about 30 feet in front of a murder mystery, if you will, one that he and his friends remain half-aware of and half-willfully oblivious to as it approaches, takes place, and ripples out into its aftermath. As Ray does his thing, we’ll see people behind him start arguing and fighting, whisper to one another, disappear and reappear, shoot daggers at one another or look sheepish and sick. Ray putting it all together is one of the catalysts for him trying to get his own act together by the end of the story–and it wouldn’t have been possible if Jaime hadn’t been such a poet of bar fights and parking-lot conspiracies in the rear of the panels. Maybe adulthood isn’t just choosing a new way to see with your same old eyes, but also choosing not to look sometimes, too.

Ghost of Hoppers

(Love and Rockets Book 22)

Jaime Hernandez, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2006

120 pages, hardcover

$18.95

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Jaime Hernandez has long displayed an infrequently utilized but alarming alacrity for horror. The Locas comics’ outbursts of genuine violence have been scary–I’ll never forget Hopey getting stomped on in the bathtub and staggering out, leaning naked against the door frame, or Speedy half-lit by the streetlight, a portrait of a young man at the very moment he hits rock bottom that chills me to my very soul. But in general the real terror, the real exercises in creating and sustaining horror imagery, emanate from Izzy Ruebens. Maggie and Hopey’s long-suffering, eccentric mentor has slowly withered, almost, over the years, from the semi-comical parasol-wielding goth of the strip’s early, punky days to the stoic, emaciated, frequently naked presence we’ve seen in Penny Century and now Ghost of Hoppers. Whether she’s simply mentally ill or genuinely haunted (and the two aren’t mutually exclusive possibilities, to be sure) is almost immaterial. In either case, the danger comes simply from seeing what she sees. The shadows, the stains, the shattered and inverted crucifixes, the black dog, the flies on the ceiling–these are monumental horror-images, frightening not because of some physical threat they present but the violation of reality they represent. They’re frightening by virtue of their very existence. Something is wrong with them. All of the damage they’ve caused–and based on what we know of Izzy’s guilt over her abortions and suicide attempts, the damage that caused them–has been self-inflicted.

At first I struggled with why Jaime would choose this particular storyline–Maggie Realizes She’s All Grown Up, basically–to delve deeper than ever into this aspect of the Locas world. I mean, this thing becomes a horror comic toward the end, easily the most sustained such work in the whole Locas oeuvre. What does any of it have to do with the misadventures of Maggie, the story’s protagonist? But then it clicked: She, too, is threatened here by the violation of her conception of reality. Is she the badass punker she always thought she was, or has she grown up to be a square like everyone else? Is she basically just a fun-loving straight girl with one exception that proves the rule, or might she be physically and emotionally attracted to other women after all? Is she okay with the friends-with-benefits relationship she’s had with Hopey since time immemorial, or does she want something more? Were she and Hopey really the center of the universe, or were there equally vibrant and vital relationships that continued on without them? Can she maintain her self-image as a troublemaker when she’s at a place where she really kind of hates trouble? Does Hoppers–her neighborhood, her hometown, her group of friends and fellow travelers–still exist in her mind as a screwed-up but happy place to visit, or has the passage of time rendered that all a lie? No wonder the black dog chooses now to pay her a visit. She had so much to be frightened of already. Thank goodness that life sometimes grants even hapless Locas an exorcism or two on the house.

Penny Century

Love and Rockets Library: Locas, Book Four

Jaime Hernandez, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2010

240 pages

$18.99

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Grown-ups! More or less. This volume collects stories that follow the conclusion of Love and Rockets Volume One, the initial years-long run of the series’ comic-book format–first in spinoffs and standalones, then in L&R Volume 2–and it’s clear Jaime took the dividing line seriously. From the largely wordless wrestling action of “Whoa, Nellie!” to the less spotted-black-driven line art of the “Maggie & Hopey Color Fun” (here presented in glorious black and white), the comics in Penny Century look less dense and read that way, too. Maggie and Hopey seem to have settled down, somewhat–no longer careening from adventure to adventure or disaster to disaster, still involved in the lives and schemes of their eccentric friends but no longer completely swept up by them, still romantically (or at least sexually) entangled with one another but not to the all-or-nothing extremes of the past. The most frantic strips in the collection, “Chiller!” and “The Race,” are a late-night driving-alone mind-playing-tricks-on-Mag freakout and an out-and-out dream sequence respectively. The horns on H.R. Costigan’s noggin, heretofore the Locas strips’ only remaining visual link with their sci-fi roots, are explained away. The most outlandish thing that happens here, Izzy’s magic-realist transformation into a giant, is tied to her very adult concern about an upcoming reading from her recently published memoir, and the comic’s last remaining great free spirit, Penny Century, spends most of the book hiding from attention and is then widowed. Even the “who’s who” portrait page at the back of the book has been cut. The wild-oats-sowing crises of the sort that drove “Wigwam Bam” and “Chester Square” are over. The Locas have matured.

Ironically, perhaps, Jaime takes this opportunity to indulge himself, if not his characters. He transforms Ray D. into a sort of hard-boiled hard-luck case, whose first-person narration captions speak of falling in with femme fatale Penny and cruising for action like the least violent installment of Sin City ever. He tells his longest li’ Locas story yet in “Home School,” which reveals the origin of Izzy’s undying affection for Maggie in a fashion that’s adorable–and carefully observed–as young Maggie’s plight is revealed to be heartbreaking. He has Penny avoid the impending circus her life is about to become by also avoiding clothing. He draws page after page after glorious, please-study-this,-Avengers-artists page of women’s wrestling action, an absolute master class in conveying the physical consequences of bodies in motion and collision.

And in the collection’s gutsiest, flashiest move, he turns one of his long-running storytelling innovations into ostentation by completely eliding Maggie’s entire marriage until we learn of her divorce. Obviously, the Locas stories are full of events we only find out about after the fact–from Esther’s forced haircut to Ray and Penny’s affair–but usually the characters involved were off-screen at the time. Maggie, on the other hand, remains our main character for the bulk of this book, so finding out she married a dude during that time comes as a shock. It’s kind of gratuitous, even–it’s Jaime doing the Jaime-est thing he could possibly do with his signature character. Why? Why not? That ends up being a sufficient answer. Sure, we go along with it in the end in large part because the flashback history we discover between Maggie and Top Cat Tony is convincing, and because Locas has always been about the past’s bizarre on-again off-again romance with the present. But mostly we go along with it because it’s fun, because Jaime has earned the right to even the most spectacular stylistic flourishes–sort of how Tony’s okay with Maggie’s dalliances with Hopey, since, well, that’s Maggie. Settling down often just means owning your weirdness.

Perla La Loca

(Love and Rockets Library: Locas, Book Three)

Jaime Hernandez, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2007

288 pages

$16.95

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Things take a turn for the unpleasant in this volume. I don’t mean sad or heartwrenching–they’ve already done that; I mean unpleasant. Taking a look that old negative review of Locas I wrote, I’m pretty sure this is where Jaime lost me completely the first time around. Ray can’t get it together enough to hang on to Danita, and she skips town. Doyle can’t get it together enough to hang onto himself, and he skips town. Penny’s pretty much settled into the unfulfilling life of being Mrs. H.R. Costigan, theoretically banging out kids with her manservants as a way of passing the time. Maggie brings disaster everywhere she goes (though she means well, at least). And Hopey! With the image of her smoking on the toilet while pregnant still fresh in our minds from the last volume, she she falls in with a bunch of people just as glib and nasty as she is–only as it turns out they’re even worse, and several people are beaten nearly to death for her to learn that lesson. Love and sex were never quite “carefree” in the Locas stories–people pined and got hurt at least as often as they had a great time or did really romantic and loving things–but in this volume the sex gets downright seedy, transactional at best and joylessly fetishistic at worst. It’s a book about creeps.

Fortunately I’m now able to accept that. I don’t know what the hell came over me when I wrote that old review, to be honest. In what world does making art about creeps necessarily constitute and endorsement of being a creep? Upon this re-read it’s quite clear that Jaime is in no way rah-rah’ing Hopey’s behavior, which he consistently depicts as show-offy, designed for audience consumption. I mean, she elbows a crowd of prostitutes out of the way to go down on someone, and out-hipsters everyone by declaring an aging TV star’s pedo-fetish lifestyle: “I think it’s super-cool.” No one must ever accuse Hopey Glass of being in any way square! As we see from flashbacks to her as a squirmy little girl refusing to sit still for a photographer, and as a teenage asshole subjecting her loyal friend Daffy to a humiliating encounter with an S&M whackjob, she thrives on other people’s disapproval. She lives to be a magnificent bastard. Only this time around, the bastardry comes back to bite her.

Maggie is a much nicer person and therefore her story is a lot nicer, but she’s now getting less out of her basket-case love life than ever. Far away from anyone with whom she ever had a good thing going–Hopey, Ray, Casey, even Speedy or Race–she falls into a pattern of breaking the hearts of the people who are interested in her and screwing up the lives of the friends who aren’t. Her chaos has become contagious. And her now-rare moments of sexual intimacy use cash as a buffer. “The real secret is that I really didn’t feel bad about doing it,” she confides, “Like it was no big deal.” What a relief that must be to her, since “everything is a BIG DEAL” is basically her life story!

So what conclusions are we to draw from all this? It’s taken me a while, but I’ve come to the conclusion that drawing a conclusion is the wrong thing to do. There’s not some message being sent here about, I dunno, punk or fluid sexuality or sex work, which are sort of the common threads of the two big stories here–the Hopey-centric “Wigwam Bam” and the Maggie-centric “Chester Square”-to-“Bob Richardson” suite. The message, I think, is simply to be found in the fact that there are two big, separate Maggie and Hopey stories here. They’re not symbols, they’re people. Here you have two people who were once so inseparable and similar that their friends and enemies called them The Incest Twins, and now they’re finally, really living apart. When two people have formed their identities in such an inextricable way–in Maggie’s case it’s so profound that it’s the exception that proves the rule of her sexual orientation itself–what happens when you extricate them? Well, they make some really shitty life choices, they have a hard time figuring out who they are, they hurt some friends, they get some other friends hurt, they make still other friends wonder if they were really such great friends to begin with, they hurt themselves, and they start–barely–to move on. All in the hands of the kind of artist who can draw characters to have family resemblances or to look enough alike that other characters can’t tell them apart, but we the readers can even while seeing those resemblances. Story made possible by sheer chops. Damn.

The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S.

(Love and Rockets Library: Locas, Book Two)

Jaime Hernandez, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2007

272 pages

$14.95

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Do you ever stop to think that David Lynch’s work doesn’t make sense? No, not in that way–I don’t mean in terms of story logic, I mean in terms of his aesthetic/generic approach. In that case, your answer is probably “No, I haven’t.” But seriously: Pre-Beatles rock and roll nostalgia, soap-operatic melodrama, supernatural beings, naked ladies, small towns, Los Angeles, non-linear narratives, hideous violence, Angelo Badalamenti…there’s really no reason why all of that should get lumped together, or why all of it should work together, but somehow it does and so you almost never pay attention to what a hodgepodge it is. Something about what Lynch does, the confidence with which he does it, makes it feel seamless, like “of course” rather than “what the?”.

Looking at the cover for The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S., I realized the same is true of Jaime Hernandez’s comics. There isn’t any particular reason for a sprawling slice-of-life saga to concern itself with punk rock, Mexican-American teenagers and twentysomethings, a pair of on-again off-again girlfriends/best friends, barrio life, and professional women wrestlers, with a soupcon of comic-book sci-fi thrown in now and then–no reason beyond that’s what Jaime was interested in making comics about. But you read a story about Hopey ditching Maggie to tour with the shitty punk band she’s in with her ex-girlfriend, and Maggie getting over that and the murder of the dude she’d been into for years/her Goth friend’s cholo kid brother by becoming the sidekick for her aunt/the women’s heavyweight champion, without batting an eyelash. That’s what a Jaime comic is, the same as a David Lynch movie is doppelgangers, broad comedy, hot sex scenes, early ’60s pop classics, a cameo by some impossibly cool rock star, and someone getting their brains blown out. He created his own kind of story.

So that’s thing #1 that struck me about this collection, wherein the sci-fi stuff is largely dropped once you get past the opening section (and is outright rejected in a cheeky self-parodying strip that ends with present-day Maggie tossing aside a “Maggie the Mechanic” comic book with a “yeah, right”) and wherein the Locas material goes from being a really good comic to a really great comic. Thing #2 is that Tom Spurgeon is right to list “memory” as one of Jaime’s hallmarks, above and beyond “spotting blacks” or “portraying rock and roll in a way that actually captures what’s awesome about it” or “drawing cute girls in bathing suits.” I think it’s the introduction of extensive flashbacks that makes this material so strong, so fascinating, and so epic in scope. For starters, it’s fantastic in a fannish way to learn the “origin stories” of Maggie & Hopey (“The Secrets of Life and Death Vol. 5,” “The Return of Ray D.”), Hopey & Terry (“Tear It Up, Terry Downe”), and Izzy (“Flies on the Ceiling”). A student of superhero comics like Jaime was obviously gonna cotton to the appeal of that sort of thing.

And of course, flashbacks serve to flesh out Jaime’s ever-expanding cast of characters. In that interview I ran the other day, Jaime mentions how he’d pick out characters he’d drawn in the background and use them whenever one of his main characters needed a new boyfriend, say–fleshing out the Locas world with stuff that’s already present. Flashbacks do the same on a narrative level: You don’t need some big character-revealing adventure with new character Doyle, say, with all the implications that might have for where you want to push the present-day story of everyone he interacts with, when instead you can rewind a few years to “Spring 1982” to see what he was like then. The contrast that arises between the genial slacker we met earlier in the volume, with his tousled hair, stubbly chin, drooping cigarette and shit-eating grin, and the scowling ex-con and ex-addict so scared of his potential to do wrong that he literally flees town we see in this flashback story says more than enough about the potential for characters in the Locas-verse to grow and change.

But from a formal perspective, this is where Jaime really starts playing with gaps on comics’ atomic level, that of panel to panel transitions. There’s this one great, totally unnecessary bit where Maggie’s fearsome aunt Vicki’s wrestler boyfriend comes to Maggie to divulge that Vicki really does care about how Maggie feels about her, but rather than stick that in a word balloon or three, Jaime jumps from a panel on the left in which the guy says “Wait, kid. Listen to me a second…” to a panel on the right where Maggie, already storming away, says “She said that, huh? So what am I supposed to do, feel sorry for her when she breaks my arm?” You’re not jumping from place to place or era to era here, you’re not doing anything that might occasion a jump cut in a more traditionally executed comic–you’re just skipping a non-essential part of a conversation, without missing a beat. Time is porous in Jaime’s hands, prone to dropping out from under you or skipping back and forth within a single page, let alone from story to story. The rise to prominence of flashback stories reflects that on an “as above, so below” level.

Most importantly, though, I think, is that this collection is where death becomes a presence and a factor in the characters’ lives. Not the impersonal, absurdist, satirical deaths caused by the depredations of Maggie the Mechanics mad sci-fi robber barons (and wasn’t it funny that the science fiction adventures Maggie had were the opposite of escapist–she was constantly hoping to escape from them?), but the death of family members and friends and babies, murder and the threat of murder, criminality and insanity. It’s the volume where you learn how Speedy, really without even thinking about it, has hurt too many people over the years too badly for them to stay close to him when he needs them the most; how Izzy is so haunted by guilt that, regardless of how literally you want to take what we’re shown here, it’s become a relentless, inescapable presence in her life, quite literally destroying her personality. Awareness of death, of our mortality, is part of what makes us distinctively human; I think the ability to remember is just as integral to us. Certainly that’s the argument Jaime makes when he ends “The Death of Speedy Ortiz” with a one-page flashback to a wedding reception of no particular importance. Memory is how we fill in the gaps death leaves behind.

Maggie the Mechanic

(Love and Rockets Libary: Locas, Book One)

Jaime Hernandez, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2007

272 pages

$14.95

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If it weren’t for Jacob Covey and Bryan Lee O’Malley, I don’t think you’d be reading this post. Aside from Jaime Hernandez himself, they’re the two men most responsible for persuading me to pick up the digest editions of Love and Rockets that Fantagraphics began releasing a few years back, and for how hard those digests clicked with me when I did. Covey’s attractive design of the digests made the most of the power of Jaime’s art, individual panels of which work as stand-alone images as strongly as those of any cartoonist ever to put pen to paper. (I recognized that even as a Jaime skeptic.) Combine that with bright colors and the digest format itself–chunky enough to feel substantial, light enough to fit in a backpack and be read comfortably on the train or the beach, tailor-made to be lined up on a bookshelf–and you’ve got a series of books that are compulsively collectable and readable. O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series served a prophetic role in this regard: A format that’s similar (though not identical) and similarly delectable; crisp, stylish black-and-white art incorporating a variety of traditions and influences into the basic alternative-comics tradition; a fast and loose approach to genre fiction that uses it as a spice rather than the main ingredient; compelling portraits of an incestuous social circle of music-interested, kind of feckless young people with disastrous love lives…reading Scott Pilgrim primed me for revisiting Jaime’s “Locas” material, ready to accept it for what it is (“Locas”!) rather than what it isn’t (“Palomar”). No, I could never go back and recreate the experiences of the long-time die-hards who grew up with Maggie and Hopey in every individual issue; but barring that, I’d found the ideal combination of content and format. Putting it all in fun little digests rather than a big portentous hardcover somehow made it all click.

And so, instead of being put off by Maggie’s borderline-bipolar hysterics, Hopey’s surliness and occasional cruelty, and Penny’s bombshell ridiculousness…well, that’s who they are, isn’t it? I feel like it’s somehow an insult to the whole critical project if I say “I used to find them all pretty annoying, but then I learned to accept it and move on”–like, c’mon, was it really that simple? And the answer is yes! Instead of bashing my head against the fact that they weren’t more together, or that they weren’t falling apart in the way my personally preferred alternative-comics protagonists tend to fall apart, I suddenly found myself digging it. For example, it’s funny and endearing watching Maggie fall all over herself around the alpha males she’s attracted to, and to contrast this with the alpha females with whom she surrounds herself as friends. Izzy Ruebens, Penny Century, and Hopey Glass are all a bit whacked-out in their own ways, but the personas they’ve constructed for themselves as a way of dealing with their problems are rock-solid, even overwhelming to newcomers. Maggie Chascarillo, by contrast, is an open book–even her attempts to cloak her true feelings send an equally true message in block letters five feet tall. Her inability to repress herself is her charm, and it’s reflected by the physical business Jaime is constantly involving her in–crashing hoverbikes, breaking machinery, ripping her pants, getting tossed around by wrestlers and thugs and explosions. She’s sort of an explosion herself!

(On a related note, I almost threw Terry Downe on my list of the alpha-Locas, but I can’t get around that one heartbreaking panel in this collection where her glacial hardass facade crumbles and she begs Hopey to tell her what Maggie has that she doesn’t. Hopey’s hold over Terry is that she brings out the Maggie in her.)

Making his protagonist a basketcase (albeit a sexy one–let’s be honest, that’s a big part of the appeal of this material too) is just one part of what impresses me so much any time I revisit this material: I’m struck by just how confident it is in itself. What I really mean by that, of course, is LOOK AT THIS FUCKING COMIC. Can you imagine what the reaction would be if a cartoonist today came out with a debut with the chops Jaime’s displaying in the very first issue? Keep in mind I’m not just talking about the crosshatchy prosolar-mechanic sci-fi stuff: The second story is “How to Kill a…,” a wordless, increasingly abstracted portrait of Izzy as a young writer, hinting not only at the formal mastery Jaime would later display (it’s all jumpcuts and comics-as-design), but at the psychological (and supernatural!) depths Izzy’s gothy exterior would be revealed to contain years later.

And on a narrative level, Jaime spends no time at all explaining his world, why it bounces back and forth between a realistic portrait of young poor Latina punks and a light-hearted science-fiction satire of Reagan-era Latin-American political upheavals. Like magic realism gone Marvel Comics, it just throws you right into the deep end and expects you to swim. This is true even if you’re just talking about the realistic stuff, the person-to-person relationships, and it’s established right in the fourth panel, where Maggie complains about having had too much to drink last night: These comics predicate themselves on things that already happened. Nearly any time a new character is introduced, they’re after money someone owes them, or getting teased for the crush they’ve been nurturing on another character for years. It’s an in medias res world.

Okay, so a lot of it will be filled in with flashbacks eventually. We get a glimpse of this in “A Date with Hopey,” the story that concludes this volume and is its strongest single strip. Our hapless hero Henry’s one and only appearance relates how his sporadic, intense friendship with Hopey evolved into unrequited love, ended in rejection, and now exists as a bittersweet memory; the laserlike precision with which the story pinpoints powerful emotions nearly everyone has experienced serves as a model for the future of the Locas stories. (And, contra what I used to think, it’s proof positive that Jaime is fully aware of the damage Hopey can carelessly inflict, even as its her carelessness itself that makes her so irresistible.) But the way you’re just dropped into Maggie & Hopey, Already In Progress, is pretty much why I continue to recommend this volume, rather than its relatively sci-fi-free successors, as the place to start if you’re interested in Jaime’s work. I understand why that doesn’t work for everyone–and it’s true, the earliest comics are relatively talky and old-fashioned-looking as befits their influences. But if you start late in the game, you’re not just missing dinosaurs and rocketships and robots and superheroes and such–you’re missing what really feels like a couple years in the life. Even by page one, we’ve already missed so much!