The Death of Speedy

The Death of Speedy

This book is the first of these volumes to contain work from only one brother. Jaime's work here ends up on all kinds of "best of comics" lists. People love it, and it is easy to see why. A lot happens: Hopey goes on tour with her band La Llorana. Izzy's little brother Speedy and his boys are running in some tough circles. Maggie is left to her own devices and begins a relationship with Ray, an artist who is a decent guy and in many ways a stand-on for Jaime Hernandez. Hopey keeps missing opportunities to contact and reconnect with Maggie. After some band drama, she ends up spending two weeks in a huge mansion with Penny Century having casual sex with a large musician named Texas. Aunt Vicki gives Maggie a job and keeps sweeping her off on wrestling road trips.

Not only does much happen, there is also a gamut of emotions. The drama of macho posturing and the random danger that comes from armed young men revenging perceived disrespect. The pettiness of young couples trying to get back at one another for small slights. The pathos when Speedy tells Maggie he loves her and only her and she just cannot deal. The sad release of Speedy telling Izzy not to worry about him any more. The alternate monotony and random mayhem that happens during life on the road. The giddiness of the first days of a love affair.

For a person like me who did not take Jaime's work as seriously or with as much regard as his brother's, reading this book is a revelation. All the details and small goings-on from prior stories in these characters' lives suddenly cohere in this monumental work. Speedy, who up until this book was a relatively two-dimensional background character, steps into more prominence, and we see realize he is of more substance. Jaime's artfulness and incredibly subtle craftsmanship appears in full relief here, coalescing into a popular culture masterpiece that elevates the mundane, elucidates people's everyday lives, and portrays a complex array of emotions and relationships.

This book will make you laugh, cry, and want to go to a loud spectacle. It will also make you fall in love with all these people, which makes it hard to let some of them go.

My Rating: All the little pieces add up to a great, big, beautiful stained glass window of stories.

Tears from Heaven

Tears from Heaven

This fourth volume of the Complete Love and Rockets contains a number of interesting stories, continuing the pattern of the brothers building their fictional worlds. It is fascinating for me to re-read this volume and see how much gets telegraphed from this book.

Most of Jaime's Locas stories are rather plain, slice of life entries here. "Locas" and "Locos" do little more than show us scenes from the lives of various characters, and although they are well done in the vein of showing us mundane scenes, they do not pack much dramatic punch. Still the brief mentions of goings-on of Izzy do contain the germs of the heart-rending story that will headline volume 9's "Flies on the Ceiling." I also enjoyed the two stories that shed further light on Penny Century and her romance with gazillionaire H.R. Costigan, but they are lighter pieces of comedy.

I feel the strongest Jaime stories here are the ones about Rocky and her robot Fumble. Seemingly a one-off character from earlier volumes, here we see more about her childhood, family, and aspirations. She also meets Cheetah Torpeda, a robotic space-heroine, and the two go on adventures in another dimension. In some ways this story is a crazy sci-fi romp, but there is a tinge of sadness, too. This story is an elegy of sorts, as when it ends on a seeming cliffhanger, it is one that will not be resolved. It seems a goodbye note to these types of tales as from here on out Jaime will focus almost exclusively on his Locas cast of characters.

On the Gilbert side of things, he also returns to an earlier character, Errata Stigmata, telling the tale of her origins with input from his brother Mario. Her life is a series of surreal, tragic, and fantastic events, including love affairs, adultery, murder, religious fanaticism, art, and schooling. It is quite dizzying to see how much gets packed into such a small space. This is some of the best compressed story-telling in comics, and although I won't say it is the most affecting story, it is full of emotion.

Similar punches of emotion and power ring throughout Gilbert's Palomar stories in this volume. Not only do the brash personalities of Guadalupe and Tonantzin come through in their separate tales, the rest of the cast is more firmly established as well. Gilbert's work ranges from the soap operatic, "it goes-to-11" tone of "Ecce Homo" to the more subdued, yet no less impactful "The Reticent Heart," which tells of an unlikely and consequential love affair.

Rereading these volumes, it occurs to me more why I historically gravitated towards Gilbert's work over Jaime's. It seemed to me more mature and moving, and looking back over these books now I see that maybe it came to a point much earlier than Jaime's. Or perhaps he defined his characters and events more clearly early on. This is not to say that his stories are inferior or unworthy, they are just less thought out it seems to me.

Still now I see how much Jaime was more subtly creating his world and fleshing it out his characters. I feel like I am watching him feel his way through the creative process, and in the later books I'd say he catches up to his brother in spades. Jaime's work to me seems like skilled boxing, with stretches of artifice that lull people until he delivers swift, powerful emotional blows to the face. Today I would never say his work is inferior to his brother's. I just think he took a little longer to tell his stories the way he wanted. Plus, his artwork has always been consistently top notch.

My Rating: This book is a mixed bag of stories ranging from good to excellent.

Las Mujeres Perdidas

Las Mujeres Perdidas

If the last volume was notable for Gilbert's extended story "Heartbreak Soup," this one's hallmark is Jaime's "Las Mujeres Perdidas," which follows Maggie as she goes out on another international mechanics mission with her crush/boss/superstar mechanic Rand Race. She deals with jealousy as Rand is also being pursued by a Lois Lane-type journalist and, more significantly, she and Rena Titañon are feared dead after a terrorist bombing. These events send shockwaves in the news and to her friends back home, who fear the worst about her. The story takes a quite rough turn as the duo strive to survive, escape, and find their way back to safety and civilization.

Interspersed in the adventure story are the glimpses of life back home, hinting at the prolonged attention Jaime will pay to the punk rock world of these women in the future. There is an economic and soap operatic flavor to the adventures here, and it feels like Jaime is in some ways working his way through these stories so that he can get to ones he really feels compelled to tell, like the the short tale that closes this volume. With "A Date with Hopey," about one of Hopey's admirers and his misguided attempt at a love connection, we get a glimpse of this endeavor.

Gilbert gets into the punk rock scene himself in this volume, with the brief "Fan Letter," but most of his work in this book builds more into the mythology and universe of Palomar. "Act of Contrition" follows Luba's hesitant relationship with Archie, a local who is smitten by her and is embarrassed to tell her his profession. As the couple go out on the town, the town buzzes with gossip and everybody has an opinion and seems to be somewhat affected. Archie seems like a sweet and likeable guy, and it is difficult not to root for him, though Luba seems more a force of nature and it becomes clear that he might be able to handle or keep up with her.

The other stories "The Whispering Tree" and "The Laughing Sun" establish more local features and background. The first is a short, funny, and haunting account of the local children skulking around a supposedly haunted tree. The second shows us the adolescent gang from volume 2 now all grown up and reunited from their different life trajectories to find their friend Jesus, who blames himself for killing his child and who has disappeared into the mountains outside of town wielding a knife. The goofiness of the old friends reminiscing juxtaposes well with the seriousness, frustration, and concern they feel about their lost comrade and their search for him in the arid and treacherous landscape. The story is at once harrowing, human, and humorous, no small feat to pull off in the space of 20 pages.

My rating: Some great comics from creators who are finding their way through their work.

Chelo's Burden

Chelo's Burden

This volume contains a variety of stories, including some one-page shorts from Gilbert and another of his Errata Stigmata tales, as well as Jaime's "Out of Space," which features a young woman named Rocky and her robot Fumble in a sort of "girl and her dog" tale done sci-fi style. Gilbert's stories are somewhat surreal and impactful, setting forth a style that he would rely on for much of his later work. It also has another installment of Mario's "Somewhere in California..." this time featuring a tale of film-making and foul play.

However, what is most monumental in this book is Gilbert's "Heartbreak Soup," a long tale that is part telenovela, part magical realism. In his first extensive look at the lives and events in Palomar, I was puzzled, amazed, shocked, horrified, bemused, and enchanted by the goings on in town. Luba, a newcomer who has opened up a bathhouse, has people intrigued, gossiping, and in arms about her business, attitude, and many children. Her rival is Chelo, who has her own established bathhouse and who also has an intimate relationship with the sheriff, which gives her some leverage in local dealings. Also the story follows Heraclio, Israel, and the rest of a gang of adolescents as they swagger, brag, and grope to gain understanding and experiences, casting a different perspective on the town. Readers are also privy to a cavalcade of other characters, including Toco, a young, troubled lad, the strong-willed sisters Pipo and Carmen, and the local Casanova Manuel and his many conquests, which lead to many a conflict and eventual heartbreak and tragedy.

What is amazing to me about this story is how quickly and seemingly effortlessly Gilbert draws the reader into a fully realized world. It is so easy to feel familiar with the characters, not to say that they are all cardboard stereotypes. Palomar is a magical, strange, fascinating place to visit, and its inhabitants are endearing, maddening, and frighteningly real. Also amazingly, this story plants many seeds that would produce fruit even decades later.

Jaime's stories in this volume include the slightly superhero-themed "Maggie vs. Maniakk" and "100 Rooms" where we see and learn more about the Locas crew, focusing mainly on Penny Century and her relationship with gazillionaire H.R. Costigan. There are extravagant parties, super-villainous bodyguards, and romantic intrigue as Maggie hides out in a vast mansion and shacks up with a mysterious stranger, but what strikes me most are two things: how fleshed out the characters are and how relatable these happenings are despite the fantastical setting. Like his brother Gilbert, Jaime here demonstrates that he is expert at cutting to the chase, making his characters instantly accessible, and telling  complex and compelling tales in deceivingly short order. And this is not even mentioning another Jaime tale, "Toyo's Request," a touching, gritty story where we learn more of the mythology behind Maggie's family friend, the world champion wrestler/international activist Rena Titañon. With this book, the hits just keep on coming.

My rating: Comics world-building at its best. An absolute classic:

Music for Mechanics

Music for Mechanics

This volume reprints the first two issues of the original Fantagraphics series. It contains many short stories and has more of a science fiction bent than later stories in the series. It is also noteworthy for two longer works, Gilbert's "BEM" and Jaime's "Mechanics."

"BEM" introduces us to Luba, though not in the way she would come to be seen in the Palomar stories. Here, she is more a super-powered sorceress and revolutionary who summons a great beast to destroy her enemies. The plot is meandering and difficult to pin down, but it tends to be an action tale with some superheroic tendencies. The art tends to appear more Kirby-superhero influenced here than Gilbert's later style.

"Mechanics" is an epic tale of Maggie doing a job in the fictional country of Zimbodia with Rand Race. Here we get introduced to many of the major players and relationships in Jaime's universe. We meet the main cast of characters, including Hopey, Izzy, and Penny Century, who are back home in the states, reading letters from Maggie. Reading this story, and the series of shorter Mechanics tales interspersed in this volume, I was struck by how much is packed  into this sci-fi adventure story. Many of the themes and plots here are still being developed and referenced more thirty years later, though not quite in the same genre.

There is also a Mario Hernandez story, "Somewhere in California..." which is a sci-fi detective tale somewhat in the vein of Blade Runner. He is the brother who most pushed the others to publish their work, and while his style might be called the most rough, it is also full of energy and action.

Among the smaller works from Beto in this volume are "Radio Zero," which introduces us to Errata Stigmata, a character who turns up in several of his memorable stories, and "Music for Monsters," a riff on Kirby monster stories and Jaime's work. The volume ends with "A Little Story," which gives us a brief glimpse into the world of Palomar, the fictional Latin American village where Gilbert would set much of his later work in the first series of Love and Rockets.

Though it seems a bit rough and primordial, this volume shows off the Hernandez Bros. chops well and also introduces us to the sturdiness and longevity of their characters and stories. It is amazing to look back at how many themes, events, and people were conceived here, some seemingly in offhand manner, but that would reappear and loom large in their later works. This volume is almost a comic book Big Bang, a brief, brilliant burst that contains everything that would follow.

My Rating: This volume is a fascinating, dense, and dizzying introduction: