Jaime Hernandez, LOCAS (Fantagraphics/Raincoast, 2004)
I first came upon the art of Jaime Hernandez (and his brothers Gilbert and Mario) about 20 years ago. I was in one of my comic book periods. Frank Miller had revolutionized the superhero genre with the Dark Knight series and Elektra/Daredevil books, and Los Bros (the handy short form for the Hernandez brothers) were working on a mysterious creation called Mister X. I did a little research and found more work of theirs . . . a set entitled Mechanics which featured a young Hispanic girl called Maggie who was working in some surrealistic Central American country as a "mechanic" fixing broken down rocket ships, dodging dinosaurs, and lusting after a guy named Rance. I loved this story, and tracked down the book that Los Bros did together Love & Rockets. Before I knew it I was hooked. Sure . . . it wasn't long before there was a lot more Love and a lot fewer Rockets but it was the characters that hooked me. These people seemed real.
This HUGE treasure trove of Jaime comics that makes up LOCAS compiles all the Maggie and Hopey stories from the beginning. That makes it the 4th version of the Mechanics story I have: the original black and white version from L&R, the coloured version in the Mechanics set, the black and white reprint softcover L&R issue and this one. Glorious black and white on fine paper, bound beautifully into a Bible-sized hardcover edition. Last year Fantagraphics published a similar volume of Gilbert's Palomar stories. Together they make an indispensible collection of some of the best comic book work available.
One issue of L&R asked for readers to send in a mixed tape of their favourite music for Los Bros to listen to. I remember including some Canadian rock, and a song of my own. They sent me two signed drawings in return. Those were the days. But their generosity is not what keeps me coming back to these stories. The LOCAS stories follow Maggie and her girlfriend (sometime lover) Hopey through their life. Relationships have been good and bad, jobs have come and gone, Maggie has gained weight, lost it, and regained it. She never got back to the slim and trim shape she had when she worked as a mechanic, but she is a beautiful and real character. Hopey is a firebrand, spiky-haired, punk-rocker, who makes this claim when asked why all the girls like her so much, "Because I have a tongue as fast as Muhammad Ali and as sweet as Dolly Parton." Hmmm.
How could you not care about a character like that?
The girls age through the stories. They were teenagers at the start, and now are approaching 40. You have to give Jaime Hernandez credit for that. After all, Superman and Batman have been essentially the same age for over 50 years! Not in the world of LOCAS.
Do you miss the rockets, and dinosaurs? Not me! And not Jaime! He says, ". . .I prefer the characters. I was itching to show their real lives. The sci-fi stuff was just for fun. It started getting in the way. You can't really take Maggie seriously when she's bummed out if there's a rocket ship in the background. But if I put her in a realistic setting, you can get deeper into it, because you can relate, you can feel it."
That's the key. Of course, the rockets and dinosaurs were fun, and they work in a sort of magic realism that the reader accepts as part of the whole concept. It doesn't matter if Maggie once worked in this mysterious country, now she's in THIS mysterious country. And if you don't think 21st century California is mysterious. . . well.
The size of LOCAS makes it too heavy to read in bed. Hoist it up over your head, and you'll do yourself some serious damage. But the weight gives the book some -- well -- weight. It SEEMS serious in this form. No longer are these stories in magazine form readily perused and disposed off by a mother or wife who can't understand why you read them. This big book (780 pages!) IS serious. It pays tribute to the writing, and to the drawing that is contained on those pages.
I think it was Aubrey Beardsley who spoke eloquently about the importance of balancing blacks and whites on a page, and Jaime Hernandez is a master of this. His pages are exquisite, his lines strong and confident, his people are solid and take up space. But more than that he is a master of story-telling. And that's what comics need. They need to balance, not just black and white, but story and art. In a day when a 64 page book is called a graphic novel, LOCAS sets the standard, just as Love & Rockets has for 25 years. This is a definitive work!
