New collection honors 40 years of series that redefined comics
In 1981, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez were living in Oxnard, California, working as janitors to fund the trips they took down the 101 to see punk bands such as Black Flag in Los Angeles, and their work on a comic book series they called “Love and Rockets.”
Once they self-published the first issue of the series, the brothers mailed a review copy to the Comics Journal, a Seattle-based magazine that took an almost perverse glee in skewering many of the top superhero titles coming out of Marvel and DC Comics. “It was a very adversarial magazine,” said Gary Groth, who was, and remains, the journal’s editor-in-chief. “There were so few comics coming out that even approached what I imagined the medium was capable of.”
From the first issue of “Rockets,” Groth said, he “was blown away.”
“It was truly unlike anything I’d seen in comics,” he said. “There were glimmers of what I thought comics could be.”
There were Chicana punk rockers and Southern California skinheads; entire panels of untranslated Spanish; hornheaded gajillionaires and female ex-gang members; and a dialogue-free, noirish fever dream about writer’s block. There were dozens of characters who looked a lot like the people the brothers grew up around, eating, sleeping, partying and grousing about work. Much of “Rockets” was set in Huerta, nicknamed Hoppers, a majority Latino town not unlike Oxnard.
This year, the series celebrates its 40th anniversary, a noteworthy accomplishment for any
print publication, let alone an indie comic created far afield of the superhero mainstream. To mark the occasion, Fantagraphics is publishing “Love and Rockets: The First Fifty,” a collection of the comic book’s original run, which ran from 1982 to 1996.
From the beginning, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez have split the book in two, with each writing and drawing their own stories. Their older brother, Mario, has contributed sporadically to the series. The collection contains every issue in its entirety, including ads and letter pages, and features tales on everything from the female pro wrestling circuit (“House of Raging Women”) to clueless first-world do-gooders abroad (“An American in Palomar”).
Superhero comics, indie books and the Southern California punk scene had a big influence on their earliest works. In the first issue, readers meet Maggie, nee Margarita Luisa Chascarrillo, a teenage Mexican American rocket mechanic who tools around on hover cycles and battles robots when she isn’t going to punk shows with Hopey Glass, her best friend and sometimes lover. “Hopey came along in my punk days, because I liked the look of the girls with the spiky hair,” Jaime Hernandez said.
Many of his most popular tales center on the star-crossed relationship between Maggie and Hopey. Before the comic launched, Hernandez came to a realization that would forever define the book. “At some point, I was like, ‘Maggie’s Mexican,’ ” he said. “In comics, it was just natural to think of characters as white people, but I remember going, ‘Why aren’t my characters like me, or the people I see around me?’ ”
Unlike the superheroes the brothers grew up reading about, the characters in “Love and Rockets” come in all sizes and body types. Another element that set the book apart was that all of its characters aged. Maggie, who has become perhaps the book’s most beloved character, began the series as a teen. Today, she is nearing 60, Hernandez said, with a laugh.
Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, also in their 60s, hope to keep going for another 10 years or so, to finish 50 issues of their latest “Love and Rockets” run. Gilbert Hernandez holds up his fingers, stiff with arthritis. “Look, this one I’ve got to keep bending,” he said. “See? It won’t go any more.”
Jaime Hernandez added, “I remember early on, we said, ‘Let’s do this for 20 years! And then 20 years in, we go, ‘We’re just starting.’ So now, we’re thinking, ‘OK, I’ll be in my 70s in 10 years.’ The biggest worry is that, well, if I do this when I’m older, will it suck? I think about that a lot.”
“But right now, when I’m at my board,” he said, “it’s just me and my story. I’m going to finish it, and then it’s yours. I’m not going to worry about the future. It’s just me making this story for you.”