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Summary
Summary
After Jaime's two-part super-hero epic from Love and Rockets: New Stories #1 and #2, we return to the enthralling minutiae of the "Locas" cast's lives for the first time in three years. In the main story Ray finally gets his date with Maggie: The couple goes to an art opening and to dinner, they discuss the crazy world of dreams, and Maggie asks Ray for a huge favor. Also in this volume, "Brown Town, Blue Sun," a new installment in Jaime's beloved "little kids" flashback series: A ten-year-old Maggie and her family move away from Hoppers to a desert ghost town... And on the Gilbert side of the ledger, "Scarlet by Starlight" is a story starring Fritz (of High Soft Lisp fame) that (in contrast to #2's silent masterpiece "Hypnotwist") consists entirely of a 14-page dialogue scene. "Killer/Sad Girl/Star" picks up the "Sad Girl" character from LRNS #2, and how no one in her family takes her budding film career seriously.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
These latest tales from the art comics trailblazers are sure to draw readers in with their melancholic tone and the adventurous comic art that has enthralled readers for decades. The volume is bookended with Jaime's Ti-Girls stories. In the first, titled "Daughters of Doom," we see Jaime's superheroes going wild, both narratively and visually. The caped and powerful Ti-Girls fight, fly and reflect on the changes taking place in their universe. Gilbert's stories stand at the center of the volume. "Sad Girl" is the story of a busty teenager nicknamed Killer. The story follows her as she tries to get back at her ex for dumping her by acting in a movie that everyone is wrongly convinced is porn. This is classic character-driven storytelling from Gilbert and will be welcomed by all the Luba fans out there. His second story, "Hypnotwist," is the cherry on top of this volume, with its wordless narrative of a beautiful young woman who travels the streets of a dark city, seeing strange, lovely and horrifying sights along the way. The narrative's dreamlike quality and its rich and mesmerizing imagery make it a surreal tour de force. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Three years into Love and Rockets' format switch from several-times-yearly comic book to annual trade paperback, the Hernandez brothers have finally hit their stride with a collection that is every bit as satisfying as the peak years of the long-running series. Gilbert opens with an uncharacteristic sci-fi saga that casts his sometimes-actress character Fritz as a sensual alien half-beast, followed by a sequel of sorts in which a fledgling actress from last year's Love and Rockets volume prepares to star in a remake of the tale. Both stories benefit from Gilbert's boldly confident graphics. But longtime fans will respond most strongly to Jaime's linked trio of stories featuring his beloved Locas characters, all limned in his elegantly economical style. First we get a brief update on the status of his long-suffering heroine Maggie Chascarrillo, followed by a lengthy, revealing flashback to the childhood days of Maggie and her siblings. Then, back in the present, Maggie goes on an achingly poignant date with former lover Ray Dominguez. A quarter-century after Love and Rockets first rocked the alt-comics world, both brothers remarkably remain at the top of their game.--Flagg, Gordon Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
JAIME HERNANDEZ'S comics often provoke bursts of laughter - not necessarily because they're outright comedic, although they sometimes are, but because they're so ingeniously constructed. His new graphic novel, "The Education of Hopey Glass," begins with a hilariously perfect set piece: Esperanza Glass, known as Hopey, an ex-punk rocker who's been appearing in Hernandez's stories since the early '80s, is trying on frames for her new glasses and rattling off impressions of what she associates with every pair. ("Holy cow! Cubs win!") She's also flirting with the saleswoman, who's too young to pick up on Hopey's cultural allusions. Hopey's in her 40s now, and over the next few pages Hernandez makes it clear that the impulsive insouciance that made her so charming in her early 20s has gotten her nothing but an ant-infested home and a long-suffering girlfriend. "Day by Day With Hopey," the first of the book's two sequences of brief vignettes, follows a week in Hopey's life as she prepares to start a job that actually requires responsibility: teaching young children. (When Hernandez draws little kids, his vivid evocations of body language give way to an endearing, exaggerated style, all vaudeville scenery-chewing and wailing "Peanuts" heads.) It also sneaks in a few appearances by Hopey's best friend and Hernandez's best-loved character: Maggie Chascarrillo. A former hotshot mechanic who's now settled into her middle-age spread as the manager of an apartment complex in the San Fernando Valley, she's given up on most of her ambitions, but she seems more centered than she's ever been - and Hernandez gets across her personality shift more with images than with words. The other half of "The Education" is a romance on the periphery of a crime story. Ray Dominguez, another long-time Hernandez cast member, is getting involved with a loudmouthed stripper/actress named Vivian, whose previous boyfriend, a small-time criminal, has just been whacked. The details of the murder gradually emerge as Ray and Vivian wander through hopeless auditions and terrible Los Angeles parties and seedy little comic-book conventions, but the story's really about how Ray is still hung up on Maggie, years after they've broken up. It's a crisply orchestrated black farce, a ballet of frustrated and misdirected desire presented with delicious economy of language and line. What keeps it from collapsing into cynicism is Hernandez's obvious affection for almost all his characters. Like most of Hernandez's books, "The Education" was initially serialized in "Love and Rockets," the series he's shared with his brother Gilbert since 1982. The two virtually never collaborate, and they could scarcely be more dissimilar in style, but their work appears side by side so regularly that they often simply call themselves "Los Bros. Hernandez." After 50 issues as a magazine and another 20 in a more standard comic book format, "Love and Rockets" has now entered its third incarnation, as an annual paperback book subtitled "New Stories." Jaime's cover for the first volume shows a gigantic superheroine calmly removing the Art Deco top of a skyscraper and replacing it with a propeller beanie. That's pretty much what the brothers are up to on the inside: having established themselves as masters of the subdued, lit-fic-style graphic novel, they're hauling the rockets back onto the launch pad and blasting off. GILBERT HERNANDEZ, in particular, has made a near-total break with the densely plotted family dramas he's best known for, shaking off the characters who've clung to him for the last few decades. His half of "New Stories" includes a horrific Jodorowsky-ish fable in which a wandering man bloats up into a monster, a free-associative fantasy about Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis look-alikes fighting a legion of aliens with spears, and a where-did-that-come-from short involving a gambling kangaroo and a street of humanoid peruses. In other words, he's bashing away with a crowbar at the polite, more or less realist boundaries of his Palomar and Luba stories; what he's lost in the depth and historical sweep of that material, he's regained in feral, foaming energy. (The prolific Gilbert has also been writing and drawing manic "adaptations" of non-existent potboiler B-movies, including last year's "Chance in Hell," the recently serialized "Speak of the Devil" and the forthcoming volume "The Troublemakers") Jaime Hernandez's contribution to "New Stories" sticks with his familiar cast, but it's just about the weirdest, most radical thing he could possibly draw, given his reputation: the first two chapters of a scifi superhero serial, "Ti-Girls Adventures No. 34." Beatríz (Penny Century) García, a social-climbing friend of Maggie's, has acquired superpowers and is out of control; a defunct team of superheroines reunites to try to track down Penny's missing daughters in outer space. "Ti-Girls" is as playful as any of Jaime's more down-to-earth work, and he's quietly been setting this one up for years. Flip through "The Education of Hopey Glass" after reading it, and you'll notice that a lot of his superheroines appear there in one guise or another, too. The shift in "New Stories" toward the fantastic is a counterintuitive move at a moment when there often seems to be a gulf between the "serious" graphic novel and genreentertainment comics. But the Hernandez Brothers have rarely bothered with conventional wisdom - in the early '80s, a black-and-white comic about Angeleno mechanics and Central American villagers seemed impossibly outré - and they've always had a fondness for neon-lighted scifi. "Amor y Cohetes," the final volume of seven collecting the first (1982-1996) "Love and Rockets" series, is a gallimaufry of 42 short pieces that don't quite belong to either Jaime's Maggie-and-Hopey continuity or Gilbert's tales of the inhabitants of Palomar, aside from a pair of tales in which the brothers tackle each other's characters. (There are also a few stories by Mario Hernandez, the Zeppo of the family.) A lot of this book, in fact, consists of twisted riffs on monsters-and-spaceships pulp. The most assured material here is Jaime's "Rocky and Fumble" sequence of stories about a girl and her pet robot, which can be read either as a frothy sci-fi romp that abruptly curdles midway through or as a portrait of a woman whose fantasy life ultimately devours her whole. The most assured Hernandez comics, though, aren't necessarily the best - Gilbert, in particular, thrives without a rule book. His "BEM," the longest and earliest story here, is a 40-page spray of molten inchoate energy, full of naked warriors and conga players and giant locust creatures. The same vigor comes through in the later, more focused experimental pieces in "Amor y Cohetes" - a self-lacerating mashup of pulp-comics styles and psychosexual loathing, a brisk little biography of Frida Kahlo, a silent three-pager of boxers beating each other bloody called "Marilyn Monroe" - and in the push into uncomfortable territory both he and Jaime have embraced for "New Stories." At an age when artists tend to have settled into refining a successful approach, the Hernandez Brothers are challenging themselves as much as they did a quarter-century ago, and it's a joy to see them freaking out. Douglas Wolk is the author of "Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean." He writes regularly about comics for the Book Review.
