saavedra77 | Love & Rockets Retrospective (Reply)

Meeting Love & Rockets creators Jaime (or "Xaime") and Gilbert ("Beto") Hernandez last weekend put a lot of things in perspective, for me. After following their work for so many years, I had a wealth of questions about their creative processes, influences, opinions, intentions. And, of course, I was curious whether the sense I had of them would be borne out in person. I'm pleased to say that it was, and that the experience of talking with them only deepened my appreciation of their art:

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The first Love & Rockets story that I read was a piece by Beto called "For the Love of Carmen": Set in a little Central American village called "Palomar," it sketched the relationship of the bookish Heraclio and his practical-minded wife, Carmen.* One of the first things that the reader learns about Heraclio is how his reading habits set him apart from his family and neighbors, as he struggles to explain to anyone and everyone what Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude has to do with their lives. If you've never read either Garcia Marquez or Beto Hernandez, let's just say: a lot. Both Garcia Marquez' and Hernandez' fictional communities--Macondo and Palomar--can be viewed as dioramas of Latin American life and history, both are told in the form of sprawling sagas of family and locality.

Here are Carmen and Heraclio from the cover of Love & Rockets #16, which featured "For the Love of Carmen":

"For the Love of Carmen" drew me in for all kinds of reasons: I loved the characters, the portrayal of family relationships, the sense of place. The story also announced itself as participating in a larger conversation, responding to an influential work of fiction, and in the process saying something about how art objects enable us to engage in (parodoxically) lonely relationships with people who are far away, relationships that our peers may not understand or share. Indeed, the story initiated precisely that kind of relationship for me, opening up an imaginative world which I've never tired of returning to.

During Sunday's panel discussion, someone asked Gilbert how he negotiated writing about la vida latina for an English-speaking audience.  Part of his answer had to do with writing about what you know. But then he expanded on this, talking about how directors like Fellini and Kurusawa reached him, even though their films were rooted in worlds that he felt relatively little connection to. He admired them for "getting at something universal" not by distancing themselves from their own cultures but by "digging down deep" into those worlds--which he suggested was one of the things that he aspired to in his own work.
Unlike me, though, I think that most Love & Rockets readers started out as fans of Xaime's "Locas," Maggie Chascarillo and Hopey Glass. Personally, I wasn't drawn to this strip's earlier stories, which took place against a highly whimsical background of rockets, dinosaurs, robots, and superheroes.  But as Locas (as Xaime put it the other day) "outgrew the rocket ships," I found myself becoming more and more attached to its central characters, Maggie and Hopey. It's helped that the two of them are basically my exact contemporaries, and that they've moved from adolescence through adult life more or less on the same schedule that I have (only my life hasn't been nearly as exciting ...).  Even if you don't happen to share that with them, though, the beauty of Locas consists in the complexity and closeness with which Xaime develops these characters; as Gary Groth has put it, Maggie and Hopey might be the most fully-realized characters in comics.

On Sunday, someone asked Xaime about the reactions he'd gotten from fans as Maggie, Hopey, Ray, and the rest changed over time--particularly the way that Maggie had gained weight as she got older. Xaime responded that when he "started getting hate mail" about the new, fuller-figured Maggie, "I thought: 'perfect.'" In other words, "that was the moment" when he was sure that he'd done "the right thing" by letting her age naturally.

This is Hopey (left) and Maggie (right) from the cover of Love & Rockets #31, in 1989, when they both still had that chola look:

The cover Love & Rockets #48 provided a thumbnail of how Xaime's depiction of Maggie had evolved from 1982 (see the panel on the lower right, with goggles) to 1995 (the central, color image):

Of course, I'd argue that Locas' appeal by this time goes way beyond soap opera (or even the novelty of a Latina punk soap opera): over the years, the strip has veered from the daft to the tragic (and back again), encompassing screwball comedy, pointed character studies, jokes, parables, arguments, dreams, nightmares.

Mind you, the brothers don't appear to take themselves all that seriously:

For all his talk about universality, for example, Gilbert was more than a little amused by the fact that his and Xaime's work is now being taught in college classrooms. He wondered aloud whether academics who included his work in their syllabi recognized "how much self-indulgence" went into his strips.

Another questioner asked how the brothers' work was affected by burning Latino political issues like undocumented immigration, L.A.'s gang culture, etc. Did they consider their work self-consciously "political"? Had they been involved with organizations like La Raza? Gilbert responded first, leaning forward and deadpanning: "I live in Las Vegas, and there are no politics [there]." Xaime couldn't resist a sly smile, venturing that he was "all about power to la gente," but that "I've never been a good team player."

Modesty aside, though, the question wasn't entirely unfair: after all, L.A.'s gang culture has been an ongoing theme in Xaime's Locas, especially in the late-eighties story arc The Death of Speedy, while Latin America's history of political violence forms a recurring theme in Beto's Palomar stories--particularly in his brilliant graphic novel, Poison River. Moreover, both commented at various points about having "something important to say" in these stories.

I think that the point that Xaime and Gilbert were trying to make, though, is that their art and storytelling were driven more by intuition and experience, by a sense of play, and by the integrity of their characters than by elaborate plots or any kind of didactic "message." Which is, I think, another way of saying that their work has the kind of open-endedness that enables them to surprise us, even after twenty-five years.

Finally, here are los hermanos Hernandez themselves, Xaime (left) and Gilbert (right):

*In a weird coincidence that I couldn't help mentioning to Gilbert during an autograph session, one of my siblings is also a strong, petite, hardheaded woman named Carmen, who's married to her childhood sweetheart. Moreover, said sweetheart's name is Gilbert ...