Life Drawing by Jaime Hernandez

Serious comics sometimes combine the complications of literary fiction with those of their less reputable drawn counterparts. Take Jaime Hernandez, for example: he has a novelistic sweep and depth of characterization, with a large cast seen over decades in hundreds of pages of comics - told in usually two-to-ten page installments, half short stories and half chapters, published in a variety of formats under the title Love & Rockets, alongside unrelated work by his brother Gilbert, and then collected into books that mostly don't overlap.

Life Drawing is the new Jaime book this year, collecting stories from Love & Rockets. It's a book about both Maggie, his longtime heroine, and Tonta, a newer character a generation younger. It's most directly a sequel to 2021's Tonta, which gathered the initial cluster of Tonta stories, and 2020's Is This How You See Me?, which saw Maggie firmly in middle age and more settled than we ever thought she would be.

There's at least one page here - the story "99° 36°" - that I remember seeing before; I think in See Me. I'm less sure about the Tonta material, but some of it could have been reprinted in the earlier book. That's the way Hernandez works: lots of short bits, circling characters and themes and events. I know he sometimes edits or updates stories between periodical publication and book publication; that may have happened here, too.

The table of contents of Life Drawing lists thirty stories - the first one is dated 2014 and the last 2024. Tonta - a young woman at the end of her high-school years - is our main character; Maggie plays a more supporting role here, maybe because she's older and more settled. Tonta can be the young hothead making bad decisions, running around frantically in search of love or friendship, burdened with a big complicated messy family full of people who don't seem to like her.

Tonta's life here is a continuation of what we saw in Tonta: she bounces between living with two of her older half-sisters, Vivian and Violet, both of whom are horrible people in different ways. This book is less about that family drama, though it does come up a few times. Here, Tonta is growing up and hitting the point where she and her friends need to figure out their next steps - the coach she idolized, Angel, is caught in a scandal and had to quit teaching high school students; Tonta's best friend Gomez is going away to college on the east coast.

Tonta has a bit of a crush on her art teacher, who is Ray Dominguez - Maggie's long-time live-in boyfriend. She also has a random run-in with Maggie, as some random older woman in the neighborhood, along with a friend. Tonta's friends, Gomez and Judy Fair and Brown Alice, are major supporting characters - the people in Maggie's life, aside from Ray, are more secondary. We do see Hopey twice, grumbling her way through middle age, just as angry and unsatisfiable as she ever was.

Hernandez works like a literary writer, building up events and character through individual moments. So we see these characters, and many more, bouncing off each other over the course of what seems to be several months, probably the late spring into the summer in this stretch of Southern California. Tonta and Maggie meet several times on the beach; the beach is more important here than I can remember it ever being in Hernandez's work before - I'd always gotten a sense that his work took place further inland, in the sunbaked minor cities of the Inland Empire.

Hernandez doesn't always avoid the big scenes and moments - there are two weddings in this book - but it's striking that this stretch of time probably included the graduations of Tonta and many (most? all?) of her friends, which is not even mentioned. What he does is only include the moments important for the particular story he's telling here - not all of the things going on in any of his character's lives, not even the things they might consider the most important.

Life Drawing is the story of how Tonta grows up, at least a bit. How she comes to get a bit better at talking to other people, relating to other people, navigating relationships, understanding what she wants. She's a Jaime Hernandez character, so she's not going to get that good at any of those things - Maggie, thirty-some years older, has maybe hit a point where those things are pretty solid, after only forty-five years of comics with her as the main character.

This is not as flashy or dramatic as Hernandez's most famous stories - there's nothing like The Death of Speedy or The Love Bunglers. He does have Tonta to give it that young energy, that screwing-up-everything phase of their lives that all his characters have, but we think Tonta, despite all her goofiness, all her mistakes, all the things she avoids or tries not to think about, will be OK in the end.