Penny Century

Love and Rockets Library: Locas, Book Four

Jaime Hernandez, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2010

240 pages

$18.99

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

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

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

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

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

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

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

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!

NOTE: Back when I worked for Wizard magazine’s website, WizardUniverse.com, I conducted a series of interviews with alternative-comics creators titled I CAN HAS COMIX? That title was a little problematic with some folks at the company — as were the transcription bills — but whaddayagonnado. I kicked the feature off on June 22, 2007 by speaking with Los Bros Hernandez, and I’m reposting the interview here because I think it’s a pretty solid introduction to/overview of the brothers, Love and Rockets, and what I get out of it all.

I CAN HAS COMIX?: GILBERT AND JAIME HERNANDEZ

In Wizard Universe’s new alternative comics interview column, Los Bros Hernandez reveal how their shared love of punk rock, sexy girls and Silver Age classics helped their epic series Love and Rockets launch the indie scene as we know it

By Sean T. Collins

I’ll admit that it took me a while to hitch a ride aboard Love and Rockets.

Despite the near-universal acclaim the series and its creators have received over the 25 years since the series’ first issue took the comics world by storm and kick-started a small-press revolution–the fruits of which can be seen at this weekend’s MoCCA Art Festival in New York City–there’s something daunting about it. For starters, it’s not just a straightforward one-man show: It’s an umbrella title for the work of Los Angeles-born brothers named Gilbert and Jaime (and sometimes even older sibling Mario), collectively known as “Los Bros Hernandez.”

What’s more, both Gilbert and Jaime have developed their own mini-mythoi within L&R, featuring enough characters to rival your average superhero universe. In Gilbert’s case, you have the busty, hammer-wielding femme fatale Luba and her friends, lovers, family and enemies, all swirling around the fictional Latin-American town that gives Gilbert’s “Palomar” saga its name. Jaime’s stories center on unlucky-in-love mechanic Maggie and her obnoxious punk-rock best friend/sidekick/sometimes-lover Hopey, wild women who are the stand-out members of a loose-knit group of L.A. ladies dubbed “Locas.” Both casts of characters age in real time, meaning some people who started the series as teenagers now have teenagers of their own, with their own adventures. The warts-and-all presentation of the series’ leads (particularly Jaime’s, in my case) can leave you as pissed of as you’d be at your own obnoxious friends.

And to top it all off, Love and Rockets has spawned two separate ongoing series using that title, a raft of trade paperback collections, two massive hardcovers housing nearly the entire “Locas” and “Palomar” sagas, and countless spinoff miniseries, graphic novels and even adult comix. Put it all together and it’s enough to make the friggin’ Legion of Super-Heroes’ continuity seem easy to follow.

Until now.

To celebrate L&R‘s 25th anniversary, publisher Fantagraphics recently began releasing awesomely affordable, handily portable softcover digest collections, starting at the beginning of both brothers’ epic storylines and giving readers their best chance ever to get in on the ground floor. With the first volumes (Jaime’s Maggie the Mechanic and Gilbert’s Heartbreak Soup) already in stores, the second installments–The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. by Jaime and Human Diastrophism by Gilbert–launched this week, with some of Los Bros’ best work ever on board.

I could go on about both brothers’ mastery of character development, creating people as flawed, funny, and fascinating as your best friends. I could wax rhapsodic about their sophisticated storytelling, which relies on the readers’ intelligence as it bounces back in forth in time and between dozens of characters. I could point out that at different times, it’s the funniest, raunchiest and scariest comic you’ll ever read. I could talk for ages about the gorgeous art–Jaime’s sharp, sexy, stylish classicism and Gilbert’s earthy, equally sexy surrealism. And I could say that while you hear a lot about “creating a universe” in comics, no one’s ever done it better than Los Bros–when you read an L&R story, you feel like you’re catching just a small glimpse of a world as big, sprawling, messy, funny, horny, heartbreaking and real as our own.

Instead, in this joint interview with Gilbert and Jaime, I’ll let Los Bros themselves explain the inspiration of the series, reveal the dark secrets of the stories in the new digests, and announce their pick for the greatest superhero comic of all time. Through it all, it’s clear that when it comes to creating thrilling uncategorizable comics in Love and Rockets, the brothers are still armed and dangerous.

WIZARD: Take us back to 1981 when you guys started the books. What made you say, “Let’s do this”?

JAIME: Let’s see, 1981…I was being paid to go to junior college, so I didn’t want a job. I was just taking art classes and stuff like that. I wasn’t thinking about what I was going to do with my life–I just liked drawing comics. By that time we were drawing comics for ourselves, but we were starting to draw them with ink on the right paper and everything, not just on a piece of typing paper with a pencil. We wanted to print it somewhere but we didn’t know where, because it wasn’t your normal Marvel or DC fare. There wasn’t really much of a market for this stuff, we thought. We were still punk rockers in bands and we were just doing comics. We wanted to draw comics the way we wanted to see them, and we weren’t really seeing much of them out there.

GILBERT: Comics were our amusement for years, and what we were into was not what the mainstream companies were into at the time. We figured that by printing an underground magazine we would get it out there, mostly to see what the response would be–just something to do, really. It turned out that when we finally got our stuff together and put out a 32-page Love and Rockets comic, a fanzine/underground type thing, we were luckily noticed right away by Fantagraphics. The timing was just right–they were ready to publish their own comics. It took a little climb to get Love and Rockets going, but the response was very good, even in a small way at first, so that encouraged us to continue.

It’s not too often that people in the alternative comics area have that kind of success right out of the gate, but I guess you guys didn’t have a lot to compare it to. Before Love and Rockets there were the undergrounds, but they were sort of a different beast.

GILBERT: Yeah. Cerebus and ElfQuest were actually encouraging in the sense that it could be done, getting a following for a black-and-white comic. It wasn’t necessarily mainstream. Even though they were both geared for that audience, they were successful on their own.

Jaime, you had more “mainstream” elements in your early work, with its sci-fi flavor. Was that an attempt to tap the normal comics-reading audience, or was it just you following your bliss?

JAIME: It was pretty much just me. I liked drawing rockets and robots, as well as girls. [Laughs] It really was no big game plan. It was almost like, “Okay, I’ll give you rockets and robots, but I’ll show you how it’s done. I’m gonna do it, and this is how it’s supposed to be done!” I went in with that kind of attitude.

That’s definitely a punk attitude.

JAIME: Yeah. I’d see something was being done in other comics and I’d say, “Ah, no, no, that is not the way to do it. This is the way to do it.” That gave me encouragement to just do it. In the beginning, I was putting my whole life of drawing comics since I was a kid into this comic. When the characters started to take over, the other stuff started to drop out because it was getting in the way.

And the result was a book that’s been credited with inventing alternative comics as we know them, though that couldn’t have been your intention at the time.

GILBERT: I think that we did create a path, at least, using all our influences and what we saw about comics that we knew of since we were kids. That developed into mainstream comics in the ’60s, and undergrounds in the late ’60s, and then in the ’70s you’d have mainstream companies that would also publish black-and-white magazines–different things bouncing around here and there with a different format. That was encouraging to us as well. I think what happened with Love and Rockets is that since there really weren’t the kind of comics we were doing, that is bringing our mainstream influences into a new kind of comic, a new kind of underground, let’s say. An underground with more going on, hopefully. [Laughs] At least I would like to think so. It basically created a path for everybody to at least get on, not necessarily making it easier, but just [having] something there. It was just a different road to go down, and I think that is what we did somehow.

In each of your main storylines, you’ve both created these big, sprawling, interconnected casts over the years. Is that something that two of you talked over, or did it evolve spontaneously and separately out of what you both were interested in doing?

JAIME: I would say that it just kind of happened as the characters started to write themselves. I think because Gilbert started creating all-out characters, it just seemed like a good idea to me, or something. On my end, I basically just created characters that would fill in the gaps of the story. If I needed someone to say something in the back that was totally unrelated to the characters, I would create a character later on. What started out as a drawing of just somebody, I decided, “Hey, I’ll make that someone’s boyfriend.” While in the beginning they were just there to color up the place, after a while they started to take on lives of their own. That is how the characters started to multiply. What about you, Beto?

GILBERT: It would probably be my mainstream influence, with me. Like in, say, Peanuts: You could follow the strip with Charlie Brown and Linus for a few days, and then it would shift to Lucy and Violet. But you wouldn’t lose what the strip was about; it was because all the characters were so well informed that you are always in the Peanuts world. Even if sometimes it was about Snoopy or Sally Brown or whatever, you were always there. That’s on the high end, but in the middle there would be the Marvel Universe, actually, for me. I always liked what fans complain about now: the fact that they were all interconnected. If you needed something heavy and metallic and electronic, you went to Stark Industries. If you needed power, you went to Reed Richards’ unstable molecules. I always liked the crisscrossing of that. Of course it went into madness eventually [laughs], but at first it was very intriguing to a kid. It was something new for superheroes, that interconnecting. In the Hulk comic you could mention Stark Industries, and Iron Man or Tony Stark was nowhere near it but you knew what they were talking about. That is what I liked about it: that interconnecting, even when stuff is off camera. That is pretty much what inspired me to go ahead and do that with mine. That way, you just have a larger canvas to work from.

That’s a big part of L&R‘s appeal–you get the sense that we are following this handful of characters right now as they do things during the course of their day, but that if we just took that camera and moved over a couple of blocks, you could catch someone else in the middle of what is going on in their lives, too.

GILBERT: Yeah, and another aspect is that is how our family worked as well. That’s something we brought from home. Our family, our cousins, aunts and uncles were all interconnected the same way. That was an influence as well, the family unit.

JAIME: Yeah, it was a big family. Our aunt had six kids and our other aunt had six kids.

Talk a little bit about your main characters. In your case, Jaime, it’s Maggie and Hopey, the stars of The Girl From H.O.P.P.E.R.S., and with Gilbert it’s Luba, the main attraction in Human Diastrophism.

JAIME: Maggie started back in high school, where I wanted to create a character I could put into any type of story I wanted–send her to outer space, back to time, to her grandma’s house. She was just a drawing at first, and I just started to think wherever I go, Maggie goes. It took a while, but I put a lot of my thoughts into her, and that’s why she’s the main character and the stories follow her. I created her friend Hopey out of just wanting a sidekick, and seeing the punk girls in L.A. at the time; that was when I was first going to the punk shows. They just kind of hit off together. My Betty and Veronica, you could look at it that way. Or my Batman and Robin. [Laughs] They just worked. When we did the first issue, that was the first response I got: “I like your girl characters.” I went, “Cool, because I like doing them!” [Laughs] That is basically how that started, and Maggie continues because I know her so well and I can put a lot of stuff into her.

GILBERT: My work around the beginning was similar to Jaime’s: a science fiction, two-girls-hanging-out-type thing. Once Jaime’s came out, the response to it was immediate. I could see how much more defined it was [than mine] and how much potential it had. Jaime had already grabbed it and was working that side of it just fine, so I abandoned my stuff and thought, “What is it I really want to say that’s different?” I just kept going back to the idea of this imaginary Latin-American village [called Palomar]. The more I thought about it and the more I felt it out, the more it seemed right. It was completely different from what Jaime was doing. Even from the beginning I thought that Love and Rockets should be a bigger thing. It shouldn’t be just all the same thing, and since Jaime was taking care of that part of it, then doing something completely different but still on the same page would make Love and Rockets a bigger thing, a bigger work of art. So that’s where the encouragement came from, bouncing off the fact that Jaime’s was done and already the response was good, so all I had to do was fill in the rest. I was a little freer, actually, to do something that might not have been commercially viable. I think that Palomar was a little chancier than doing the girl/rocket stuff at the time.

JAIME: I could tell you that Gilbert’s approach helped me a lot in taking the girls out of the science fiction, to handle stuff more at home. Gilbert was the older brother, anyway, so he really did everything before me, ever since we were little. [Laughs]

GILBERT: What’s very interesting about the science fiction stuff is that the question we get asked the most, at least out loud, is “Where is the rocket? That’s the real Love and Rockets.” Oddly, that’s the smaller segment of the audience–they’re just more vocal. The real audience is the one who followed Maggie and Hopey’s adventures as real girls, so to speak, and the Palomar stories. That is the real Love and Rockets reader. But for some reason we have the most outspoken ones saying, “When are you going to do the rockets? It’s called Love and Rockets!” That’s fine, we love doing rocket stuff, but the real Love and Rockets is what we are famous for.

You mentioned that the audience has changed, and now the less genre-y things are actually more commercially viable. Jaime’s had his work published in The New York Times, your recent collections have gotten major mainstream-publication review acreage–could you ever have seen this coming?

JAIME: I think that for me, it was more a case of, “One of these days, sure, I’d like my character standing next to Charlie Brown and Betty and Veronica and Superman.” But I was just hoping we would be able to continue doing it and hopefully make a major living off of it because I didn’t want to do anything else with my life. It was like, “Oh boy, I can continue!” But “How long is this going to go?” I wasn’t even thinking about it. Twenty-five years later, I’m going, “Wow, a quarter of a century and I’m still allowed to do this?” It’s amazing. I just think back to all the talented people I knew in the past who had to stop because they just couldn’t live off of doing their comics.

GILBERT: The one time I got thrown was when we were getting a lot more attention doing Love and Rockets and people were really accepting what we wanted to do in it. What really threw me was when I got to a point where readers would tell us, “I used to read Batman, but now I read your stuff.” I thought that was really creepy. I’d go, “You mean you’d rather read us than Batman?” Batman, Superman, all that stuff–they were icons when we were growing up. Nobody ever thought somebody would rather read stuff that wasn’t that. It just threw me and was something I never really thought about, that someone might like a different kind of comic outside of the Big Two. For us it was always a note of encouragement: “We just better step up to the plate then. If this is what they are saying about us, if this is what they like about us, then we better be good!” And we’ve done our best to stick to our guns about giving the most honest comic we can–coming from our point of view, of course. But it threw me for a bit. It seemed like we were being scrutinized for a while, like, “Okay, this stuff is getting more attention than The Incredible Hulk, so let’s see what they’re gonna do next.” We were like, “Oops!” The only thing you can do is try to get better. Otherwise you’d crumble if you tried to compromise or change things.

What do you think of the new digest versions of your work?

GILBERT: For me, I just trust our publisher. I don’t have the say of how it is going to be packaged, because I couldn’t tell you how, so I have to trust them a lot. I think it’s great if it’ll just give us shelf space. Don’t colorize it or something like that. [Laughs] But as long as it’s presentable and someone will put it on their shelf, that’s all I can ask for.

Jaime, your latest digest includes “The Death of Speedy” and “Flies on the Ceiling,” two of your best-known–and darkest–stories. How did each of them come about?

JAIME: Back before “The Death of Speedy” and “Flies on the Ceiling,” I did this story about Speedy talking to his friend about his sister Izzy. He mentioned how she was all normal and then she went to Mexico and came back weird. When I wrote that, I didn’t know exactly what happened to her. I got that question every time: “What happened to Izzy in Mexico?” I’d say, “Oh, I’ll tell you one of these days.” But to myself I was saying, “Yeah, when I find out!” [Laughs] It took almost 10 years to write. It all came from that, and it took on many forms and shapes and sizes till I finally did “Flies on the Ceiling.” With “The Death of Speedy,” certain continuity was building up in the drama, and all of this was building up to where I wanted to kill somebody. I wanted someone to die. But it was another one of those things where I thought, “I’ll show you how to have someone die.” I was going to challenge myself and everybody else. Speedy became the guy just because of the way things were going: I wanted to kill a main character, and he was a victim of my plans. [Laughs] It didn’t have to be him, but it ended up being him. Years after that I asked myself, “Should I have ever killed him?” It was just one of those things that he fell victim to.

Do you ever wish you could bring him back to life, Superman-style?

JAIME: That’s the cool thing with Love and Rockets: You can always have flashbacks. It doesn’t mean they come back to life; you just tell a story that happened not to screw with history. Which I get really close to, sometimes, just because it’s tempting. I can always bring Speedy back–just in the past. I don’t want it to become formula. I have to do it right.

Gilbert, in your case, again, it’s fairly dark material, since “Human Diastrophism” is about a serial killer preying upon Palomar. What made you let loose this violence on these characters in this town you created?

GILBERT: There was no direct line, no conscious effort to be that dark. It just sort of came out as the stories were developing. Whatever darkness there was is from my unconscious. I don’t really know what the source, but I just wanted darker stories. I was also tired of the cramped format, doing a few pages an issue; I wanted to do a longer story, and the longer the story is, I feel I have to give more. I was basically doing stories unchecked, throwing everything in that I could. In those days I would write stories thinking, “When I finish this story, if I get hit by a truck the next day, then I’ll be satisfied that this is my last story.” I don’t do that anymore. Now I think, “Oh, that was my first story,” and that works just as well when I work. “This is my first story, I’m just getting started, I’m just learning.” In the old days it was the other way around: “Okay, if I’m done with the story then I’m done, but I better get down to business.” I wanted to do the world in a microcosm that had death and rebirth. Everything that you can imagine in an epic story, I tried to stick it in one big story. Like Jaime’s story, I chose a character because whenever you are dealing with a story that big and that universal, the characters that you hurt the most have to be ones you care about, unfortunately. You can’t just make up a character and kill them, because it doesn’t matter. If it’s a character that the readers cared for to a degree, that’s what gives the story more resonance, especially in a large story like that. We don’t really do it to shock or anything, but it’s just part of life.

That is what I was going for with that. And once I was done with it and it did get very good response, then what do you do after that? You just start all over and do your damnedest not to cheapen the story. You try not to refer too much to that story, unless it’s little things you need that you left out or something. Jaime and I are clever enough to bring back those characters in a legitimate way, without cheapening it. In Jaime’s “The Death of Speedy,” you never really see what happened–it could have been somebody else and not Speedy who was killed. There’s that little twist that you can do and make it convincing. The same with Tonantzin setting herself on fire in my story. I could very well say it wasn’t her, it was a set-up. I’m just saying that we’re able to do stories where we can make it work–we’re just not going to. It’s too easy, it’s too pat, and it just cheapens the earlier story.

The characters in both the “Locas” and “Palomar” stories aren’t like the ones in Peanuts or in Riverdale High or in the Marvel Universe–they age in real time. Why’d you make that choice, and do you ever regret it?

JAIME: First of all, it was Gilbert’s idea to actually age them. I’ll let him explain.

GILBERT: I was thinking of a sprawling epic that took years to complete. I think I aged them too quickly for my taste now. I definitely regret that it was a little too quick compared to how long we have been doing it. We’ve been doing it for 25 years and that is not really too quick, but it is in terms of comics because I’m still doing them. I’m not done with the characters that are getting older. What happens is you get the “Tiny Yokum syndrome”: The old strip Li’l Abner was about a bachelor who was being chased by a lovely woman, [and eventually] they married and had a kid. Well, now Li’l Abner is responsible. He can no longer have wacky, nutty adventures because he’s married and has a kid. He has to stay home and take care of the family. What they did was create a character, his little brother, named Tiny. Basically, Tiny had the adventures that Li’l Abner could no longer have–but we don’t know Tiny, we know Li’l Abner. The problem that happened with aging my characters too quickly is that I had to come up with characters to replace the older characters, and it’s not as good. I’ve had several characters to replace my main character Luba, but none of them are Luba. That presents itself in that way, even though some readers probably don’t even know who Luba is because they only read the new ones. That’s fine, but it’s something I regret a little bit, and I keep pushing the main characters back.

Jaime, earlier you compared Maggie and Hopey to Betty and Veronica, but in this case there’s no Archie. Both of you focus on female characters. Was that a conscious choice? Did you just like drawing girls or did you really think you had something to say about women?

JAIME: I think it all started when I was a budding teenager and Gilbert was a teenager, and he said, “Jaime, you should start drawing girls.” And I went, “No, I can’t do that–Mom will kill me!” And he just goes, ‘No, it’s cool,” because he was drawing girls left and right. I started and I thought, “Oh God, I can’t draw girls–[mine] are so terrible!” Then after a while you couldn’t stop me. It all started from wanting and liking to draw women. They are much more fun than drawing men. I thought, you can have your cake and eat it too if you do your comic starring the women instead of the men. You can have men, but you get a lot more done if you are drawing a character you like. At the same time, it’s something Gilbert talked about earlier: When I was young, I always felt that if I was going to put something in my comics, I had to back it up. I had to step to the plate and be responsible. So there was always talk about T&A–“You just like women as objects” and stuff. I was like, “No I don’t–look!” So I started making them characters. I thought, “That’s easy! Just do it! I don’t have to feel responsible to create 10-hundred male superheroes to 10 female superheroes–I can just concentrate on the female superheroes!” That’s how it started for me. Gilbert was well on his way before me, being the older guy. I just followed along.

GILBERT: A lot of Love and Rockets is just simply what we wanted to do, even superficially–if we feel like drawing a person wearing these clothes, doing this thing, just because we feel like drawing that. Most of the time it’s a woman doing it. Then we started giving the characters personalities, like Jaime said, having our cake and eating it too. There was a weird little rub there because we kept getting asked, “Why are you doing women?” Just the fact we were asked that all the time, it was like, “Something is wrong here if you have to ask us why. Why do anything? Do people ask Frank Miller why his stories are so violent?” People are fine with violence but they’re nervous about women for some reason. So we are always up to the challenge. We stick our elbows up and go, “Look, we’re gonna do this and we’re gonna do it as best we can.” We kept getting encouraged–the more we did it, the more good response we got. Then every once in a while, “Why do you do women?” and I thought, “It is really a boys’ club out there, isn’t it?”

JAIME: It was almost like the more they told us not to, the more we did it. It was like, “I don’t see anything I’m doing wrong here. What am I afraid of?”

Who do you consider your peers? What other comics out there interest you?

JAIME: It’s harder for me to say now, because I’ve gotten so locked in this Love and Rockets world of mine, creating my stories and not looking at anyone around me, so I don’t know. I guess it’s competition on the shelves: “Who’s taking up my shelf space?” That’s how it is [now]. When Gilbert and I started out, it was like we were welcomed by the mainstream when the comic first came out, but we didn’t have the heart to tell most of the mainstream, “We don’t want to do what you guys are doing.” I didn’t want to be an assh— about it or anything–we were getting all this support–but we thought, “Oh, so you’re gonna do Secret Wars? After we talked about how there’s a new comics world, you’re gonna go back and do that? Well, fine, you do that, but don’t ask me why I’m not.” It wasn’t till more alternatives and people with their own goofy comics like ours started popping out that we started to get these peers coming out of the woodwork. I would say when the Peter Bagges and the Dan Clowes started coming out too, we kind of formed this little… I don’t want to say club, because everyone lived in a different state. [Laughs] But we liked seeing each other at conventions and events like that.

GILBERT: Were you talking about peers now?

That would be the follow-up. Are you also “head-down,” like Jaime?

GILBERT: I am, pretty much. I’m just so focused on getting work out that I look for influences and for other things to inspire me, [and] rarely is that another comic book these days. One reason is that alternative comics, as far as series go, are barely there anymore. Love and Rockets is one of the few that comes out on a relatively regular basis that continues this old tradition that is pretty much gone now. It’s mostly graphic novels and online comics. It’s just different, and a different way to get ahold of comics. The alternative comics they call pamphlets now are simply not around like they were. I don’t look at comics on the Internet. I don’t really look at the Internet too much. I’m focused on writing the best comics I can, and that takes up most of our lives, really. I don’t want to dis anybody or ignore anyone–I’m just not really focused on things outside at this time.

JAIME: I find that when I go to a comic store I leave with an old Marvel or DC archive 99 percent of the time.

It is kind of a golden age for that stuff. The sheer volume of old stuff that is coming into print in really nice books is amazing.

JAIME: Gilbert told me recently that they did the complete [Steve] Ditko Amazing Spider-Man, and I’m just achin’ to go and get that.

GILBERT: Actually, that just came out, and here is a plug for Marvel. I think that now that that’s collected, the Ditko-[Stan] Lee Spider-Man, I think we finally have a book to show and put down and say, “This, for me, is the best superhero comic ever right here.” There has been stuff that has been pretty close, like [Will Eisner’s] The Spirit and [C.C. Beck’s] Captain Marvel and other things, but this, to me, is the grail of superheroes. It’s great to have it in a package like that. Which means I have to rebuy it. [Laughs] I’ve bought that stuff so many times now in different formats.

JAIME: So this is what we’re influenced by, see? [Laughs] We have nothing to show about the new stuff–this is all stuff we liked when we were kids.

What does Love and Rockets have that would appeal to the kinds of readers who haven’t said yet, “I used to read Batman, but now I read you guys?”

JAIME: It’s more difficult these days, because there are more ways of getting ahold of comics with the Internet and different things now. I think what hooked people, the mainstream readers, from reading Batman or Superman and went to Love and Rockets is that [we] were serialized at the time. New stories about Maggie and Hopey were continued from issue to issue, new stories about Palomar continued from issue to issue. The reader could identify with that, reading a serialized adventure that was similar, superficially, to reading a Batman comic. Now Love and Rockets is different, a little more fragmented, a little more experimental, a little more idiosyncratic, I think. It’s different from how mainstream comics are read now. I get a bunch of free [mainstream] comics every month, and I look at them, and you got to be really into them to know what’s going on. You have to be a fan of that particular book to know what is going on. It’s a different day now, a different way to look at comics now, so it’s probably not as easy to grab that audience these days.

I know when I started getting into you guys it was difficult because of the array of formats and editions that were out there: You had the ongoing series, the trades, the spinoffs…But I feel like now, with the digests, it’s nice and easy. In the same way that now a lot of the superhero comic book companies are collecting the complete Lee-Ditko Spider-Man and all these big giant historical runs of series in these easy-to-follow collections, it’s now a better time than ever to get in on the ground floor of Love and Rockets and start from the beginning pretty easily and affordably. I’ve seen it happen around the office–those digests spread like wildfire.

JAIME: I imagine that is what is going to happen with reprinting this old stuff. It’s sort of like seeing 11-year-old kids with Ramones shirts now–three of the main Ramones are dead. [Laughs] Their music is over 30 years old now, and 11-year-olds are into the Ramones! So you never know. There could be a Lee-Ditko Spider-Man comeback with kids. Who knows?

GILBERT: I met an 8-year-old kid a couple of years ago whose mom kept badgering him: “This guy draws comics! Tell him who your favorite Spider-Man artist is!” And the kid, under his breath, goes, “Ditko.” I was like, yes! [Laughs]

JAIME: Ditko quit in ’67, so it was a long time ago. It’s kind of cool, things being in perpetual print.

Any closing words of wisdom?

GILBERT [in mock-pretentious voice]: We’re not only mainstream geeks here– we’re actually progressive artists. [Laughs] I’m kidding. I don’t know about the progressive part and I don’t know about the artist part. [Laughs] We’re going to continue doing Love and Rockets projects that strike our fancy. And I have a couple of other books coming out. One will be a Dark Horse miniseries which will eventually become a graphic novel called Speak of the Devil–that’s in stores this July. I have another graphic novel coming out in June called Chance in Hell, and that’s my first actual graphic novel with Fantagraphics. It’s in the digest size–not quite as small as manga, but around that size. Hopefully, the casual reader will be like, “Hey, there’s a small book–it must be manga!” [Laughs] That could help!