Its time again for another Weekly Comics Hype. I tend to do these alphabetically, and this week brings me to the Ls on my shelf and the phenomenally entertaining series Love & Rockets by Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez. This is effectively an anthology series, with each brother telling stories in their own, separate worlds, and occasionally adding unrelated strips alongside them. This week I want to tell you about some of Jaimes stories of Maggie Chascarrillo and Hopey Glass; Gilbert will get his own entry in a couple of months.
Hopey and Maggies stories, unofficially grouped by readers under the umbrella titles of Hoppers or Locas, are set in the fictional town of Huerta, California, sort of an imaginary version of Oxnard, in a world with a few more sci-fi trappings than our own. In the earliest stories, Maggie was honing her amazing skills as a mechanic while pining for a rocket pilot called Rand Race. There are strange heroes and mystery men in their world, but always far over the horizon and rarely impacting the people of Hoppers, as Huerta is usually known. 1980s post-X punk rock, decades-old family rivalries and televised wrestling have a far greater pull to the close-knit, predominantly Hispanic community.
Moving in something approaching real time, the Hoppers stories begain in 1982 with Hopey and Maggie in their late teens, roommates and occasional lovers. In todays stories, they are pushing 40, living apart but still oddly bound together, much to the amusement of friends who know theyre meant for each other, but the conflicted, flighty and hopelessly unlucky Maggie cant ground herself long enough to get a firm grasp on her life.
The stories arent about anything world-shaking or incredibly tumultuous. Using an incredibly light tone but very deft touch, Hernandez is able to firmly define his characters in a way most writers just dream about. Consequently, readers care, sometimes achingly, about their dreams and foibles, and so the strange, yet mundane melodramas that happen to everybody in the real world become really involving when they happen to characters you care about so much. And the creators masterful ability to shift focus and tone becomes breathtakingly exciting, whether youre watching Maggie drafted into managing her slightly mad aunts wrestling career or youre watching the astonishingly bleak and inescapable Death of Speedy, when one of the communitys neer-do-wells spirals down to an end, intent on wrecking the lives of everyone around him on the way.
Ive always found Love & Rockets to be a very difficult series to write about, because the comic medium is most often, and most effectively, a plot-based one. But Jaime Hernandez is perfectly capable of going for years at a time with only the vaguest hint of plot. A new job, a move, a new relationship, a band breaking up, a bad dream, any of these can spark a moving and vitally engaging story about how the characters react to the changes in their lives, and five pages spent trying to sneak into a punk club through the back door can be more vibrant and affirming than five pages in an adventure comic spent saving the planet. Hernandez just does his job so perfectly that flashback stories or newly-recounted anecdotes from side characters are every bit as welcome as a new appearance.
I occasionally liken the series to the film The Last Picture Show, where almost nothing of consequence happens, but everything that does nevertheless manages to be incredibly consequential. If you enjoyed The Last Picture Show, then you will really find yourself sucked into Love & Rockets.
Unfortunately, collecting either Hernandez brothers storylines is made quite complicated by the way they are published. Since any given issue of Love & Rockets or one of its side comics can contain any number of pages by either creator, and the stories run for as many pages not episodes as is necessary to tell the story, the earliest collected editions are quite haphazard in their presentation. Personally, I find the earliest Hoppers stories, with their borderline sci-fi trappings, very unengaging, so Id recommend newcomers start with the third volume, Las Mujeres Perdidas, which includes a 71-page story called The Lost Women, along with 60-odd pages of stories by Gilbert.
The first six Love & Rockets editions similarly mix material by both creators. By volume 7, The Death of Speedy, each brother has a book, mostly, to themselves. Volume 9, Flies on the Ceiling, picks up the Hoppers story, which continues in volume 11 (Wigwam Bam), volume 13 (Chester Square), volume 16 (Whoa, Nellie!, which focusses on the side characters and is not really essential), volume 18 (Locas in Love), volume 20 (Dicks and Deedees) and the newly-available volume 22, Ghosts of Hoppers. (Curious readers might want to visit the Love & Rockets page at Millarworlds trade.paperback.list to make a little visual sense of the breakdown.)
In any case, because this is not a series where ongoing plots are in any way essential, and because the stories are often told with flashbacks, it really does not matter where you start. You will learn the background and fall in love with Maggie no matter which volume you begin with, so dont let the amount of available material and the curious manner its collected dissuade you from sampling this series.
If you enjoy what you find in these books, you might enjoy owning Locas, a giant, 780-page hardcover which reprints almost all of the Hoppers stories from volumes 1-13. This is one of the most beloved of all the books on my shelves.
Your local comic shop would enjoy your custom; new books ship on Wednesdays, so why not stop in after work?
Hopey and Maggies stories, unofficially grouped by readers under the umbrella titles of Hoppers or Locas, are set in the fictional town of Huerta, California, sort of an imaginary version of Oxnard, in a world with a few more sci-fi trappings than our own. In the earliest stories, Maggie was honing her amazing skills as a mechanic while pining for a rocket pilot called Rand Race. There are strange heroes and mystery men in their world, but always far over the horizon and rarely impacting the people of Hoppers, as Huerta is usually known. 1980s post-X punk rock, decades-old family rivalries and televised wrestling have a far greater pull to the close-knit, predominantly Hispanic community.
Moving in something approaching real time, the Hoppers stories begain in 1982 with Hopey and Maggie in their late teens, roommates and occasional lovers. In todays stories, they are pushing 40, living apart but still oddly bound together, much to the amusement of friends who know theyre meant for each other, but the conflicted, flighty and hopelessly unlucky Maggie cant ground herself long enough to get a firm grasp on her life.
The stories arent about anything world-shaking or incredibly tumultuous. Using an incredibly light tone but very deft touch, Hernandez is able to firmly define his characters in a way most writers just dream about. Consequently, readers care, sometimes achingly, about their dreams and foibles, and so the strange, yet mundane melodramas that happen to everybody in the real world become really involving when they happen to characters you care about so much. And the creators masterful ability to shift focus and tone becomes breathtakingly exciting, whether youre watching Maggie drafted into managing her slightly mad aunts wrestling career or youre watching the astonishingly bleak and inescapable Death of Speedy, when one of the communitys neer-do-wells spirals down to an end, intent on wrecking the lives of everyone around him on the way.
Ive always found Love & Rockets to be a very difficult series to write about, because the comic medium is most often, and most effectively, a plot-based one. But Jaime Hernandez is perfectly capable of going for years at a time with only the vaguest hint of plot. A new job, a move, a new relationship, a band breaking up, a bad dream, any of these can spark a moving and vitally engaging story about how the characters react to the changes in their lives, and five pages spent trying to sneak into a punk club through the back door can be more vibrant and affirming than five pages in an adventure comic spent saving the planet. Hernandez just does his job so perfectly that flashback stories or newly-recounted anecdotes from side characters are every bit as welcome as a new appearance.
I occasionally liken the series to the film The Last Picture Show, where almost nothing of consequence happens, but everything that does nevertheless manages to be incredibly consequential. If you enjoyed The Last Picture Show, then you will really find yourself sucked into Love & Rockets.
Unfortunately, collecting either Hernandez brothers storylines is made quite complicated by the way they are published. Since any given issue of Love & Rockets or one of its side comics can contain any number of pages by either creator, and the stories run for as many pages not episodes as is necessary to tell the story, the earliest collected editions are quite haphazard in their presentation. Personally, I find the earliest Hoppers stories, with their borderline sci-fi trappings, very unengaging, so Id recommend newcomers start with the third volume, Las Mujeres Perdidas, which includes a 71-page story called The Lost Women, along with 60-odd pages of stories by Gilbert.
The first six Love & Rockets editions similarly mix material by both creators. By volume 7, The Death of Speedy, each brother has a book, mostly, to themselves. Volume 9, Flies on the Ceiling, picks up the Hoppers story, which continues in volume 11 (Wigwam Bam), volume 13 (Chester Square), volume 16 (Whoa, Nellie!, which focusses on the side characters and is not really essential), volume 18 (Locas in Love), volume 20 (Dicks and Deedees) and the newly-available volume 22, Ghosts of Hoppers. (Curious readers might want to visit the Love & Rockets page at Millarworlds trade.paperback.list to make a little visual sense of the breakdown.)
In any case, because this is not a series where ongoing plots are in any way essential, and because the stories are often told with flashbacks, it really does not matter where you start. You will learn the background and fall in love with Maggie no matter which volume you begin with, so dont let the amount of available material and the curious manner its collected dissuade you from sampling this series.
If you enjoy what you find in these books, you might enjoy owning Locas, a giant, 780-page hardcover which reprints almost all of the Hoppers stories from volumes 1-13. This is one of the most beloved of all the books on my shelves.
Your local comic shop would enjoy your custom; new books ship on Wednesdays, so why not stop in after work?
salome:
Thanks so much for your sweet comment on my set!