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.

Children of Palomar & Other Tales by Gilbert & Mario Hernandez

Today is not Monday: my tag is a lie. But I'm doing something else on Mondays these days, so everything else has to shift over, like the crowd in the backseat of an big '70s car as they pick up one more person on the way to some big event.

Children of Palomar & Other Tales is also not one thing, if that matters: it's the fifteenth in the omnibus series collecting "all" of Love & Rockets, under the general title The Love & Rockets Library. It's a mostly-Gilbert Hernandez book - there are a couple of pieces Gilbert drew, but were written by his brother Mario, the Halley's Comet of the Hernandez comics family. And it gathers three long stories and one short one: two of the long stories were previous collected as books on their own, while the other is a quirky thing that I suspect wasn't seen as commercial enough for that.

So what we have here is Julio's Day - the story of one man's life, somewhere in America (southwestern US, maybe, or perhaps nearby Mexico, since they seem to go off to WW I at the same time as American forces), over the course of a century, and what changes around him - and then the flashback stories of The Children of Palomar (originally a comics series called New Tales of Old Palomar), set in the timeframe, or slightly earlier, of Gilbert's first burst of Palomar stories in the 1980s.

Since I already covered those stories in detail, and don't have anything new to say about them, I'll leave it at that: dive back into the links for more if you want.

Then we have the Mario-written pieces. He's a much more clotted writer than his brothers, maybe more of a traditional old-fashioned comics writer, with lots of captions and random action and density of activity and words on his pages - deconstruction has no home in a Mario story. They read very differently than the all-Gilbert pieces, which have more space and grace to them, doing a lot more of the storytelling through art and visuals.

The short story is "Chiro El Indio," from the first issue of the book-format Love and Rockets series, in which a couple (literally, a couple) of rural goofballs are tricked by smarter, nastier people into religious mania (different for the two of them) in order to steal their land, but then the ending has an actual god zapping people, so...I think the plot didn't work?

The long Mario story, "Me for the Unknown" - reprinted from a stretch of the second Love & Rockets series, around twenty years ago - leads off the volume, and it's a pretty typical Mario thing: corporate skullduggery and violent criminal shenanigans in fictional Latin America, involving the complex family of an exploitative company. It's a nine-part story, and each part sees new complications which are mostly forgotten or changed by the next section - again, this is all heavily narrated and deeply wordy, explaining all of these things that then shift entirely a few pages later.

I will admit I'm not a fan of Mario's comics, and leave it at that.

If you are a fan of Mario, this is the first new collection of his stuff in a while, so that's good news. Otherwise, it's a great book if you like having the uniform series, and less good if you already have Julio's Day and Children of Palomar.

Hypnotwist / Scarlet by Starlight by Gilbert Hernandez

I feel like we're all just supposed to know how to read Gilbert Hernandez's "movie books," even though they've never been clear, and their publisher (Fantagraphics) has stopped even mentioning the movie connection. These days, it seems to be just the distinctive end-papers that give us a clue, and then we're on our own.

You see, Hernandez has been writing stories, in the various comics mostly named Love and Rockets, about a group of people, originally centered on the residents of a small South American town of Palomar though in recent decades shifting to the extended Southern California family of a woman named Luba who lived in Palomar for a long time. Luba's younger half-sister, Fritz, had a career as a film actress: not a great career, and not a lasting one, but she made a bunch of movies. And Hernandez has not just told stories about Luba and Fritz and others - stories in their world, meant to be "true" as much as any fiction is - but also told stories retelling those movies, telling stories that are meant to be seen as fictional from a fictional world.

It's complicated and knotty, and not explaining it in the books themselves makes it even weirder and complicated. The most recent, and most major, Maria M., was the height of convolution, telling the movie version of Fritz's mother's life (with Fritz in that "role"), which readers of Love and Rockets had already seen the "real" version of, years before. Prior movie books were from "earlier in Fritz's career," when she did pulpier, less ambitious....OK, let's say bluntly bad and derivative and exploitative movies: Chance in Hell and The Troublemakers and Love from the Shadows. (And I can't explain explain clearly how Speak of the Devil fits into this schema, either -- I think it's the "real" version of a story not about Fritz and Luba and company that was also made into a movie with Fritz, and maybe we saw some parts of that movie made in the main series.)

Hernandez was most active with these stories just over a decade ago - the first burst came out roughly every year, 2007 and '08 and '09 and '11. Maria M. took longer to gestate. And, along the way, Hernandez also made two shorter movie stories, which have now been collected together in flip-book format.

That is Hypnotwist / Scarlet by Starlight, both of which "star" Fritz as a major role, though (and maybe this is meaningful?) she doesn't speak in either story. One is a pretentious movie that I don't think Hernandez expects us to take entirely seriously. The other is a pulpy genre exercise.

And I still don't get the point of either book, or of this entire sequence. Is it meant to be some kind of parallax view of specific events in the "real" story? Are they just goofy, clear-the-decks stories that Hernandez wants to get out of his head, and this is a way to tie them in? Or what?

Hypnotwist is the longer story, 59 pages long: it's some kind of art film with no narration or dialog that follows a woman who may be dreaming, or sleepwalking, or hallucinating, or something. A sequence of surreal things happen, some of them sexual and/or violent, with some other characters reappearing and a central image of a creepily smiling face. Oh, wait! I forgot the magic shoes! She gets magic shoes at the beginning, and that might explain it all. If anything can explain anything here.

(You might have gathered that I don't get this at all. Hernandez has done a bunch of dream-logic stories in his career, and I like looking at them and appreciate the visual inventiveness but never get anything specific out of any of them.)

Scarlet by Starlight is tighter, a '50s-style space opera movie in 37 pages of comics - though, in the world of L&R, I guess it was made in the late '90s. Three Americans are on an alien planet, researching something or other, two men and a woman. There are two seemingly-sapient races here, though neither can speak: the human-height and furred Forest People and the dwarfish pinkies. The humans have befriended the Forest People - well, at least the couple Scarlet (female, Fritz's character) and Crimson and their children. The pinkies, though they seem to be more organized - they have a village with buildings, and a much deeper curiosity about the human's technology - are considered basically vermin.

But then Scarlet comes into heat, I guess, and tries to have sex with one of the Americans, and it all goes to hell. There's a lot of Hernandezian violence until the survivors are able to regroup with a Hollywoodesque happy ending. Again, Hernandez is not trying to present this as a good movie: rather the reverse.

I get the sense that Hernandez makes these stories either to scratch an itch to tell junky stories or to comment on junky stories, but I have no idea which, or if it's both, or if those are the only two possibilities. I enjoy the way he moves characters around and evokes junky movies without ever getting a clear sense of why he thought spending months of his time to do this would be worthwhile.

It's weird, man. The "movie books" are just an odd sequence of stories, and these two are the very weirdest of that sequence. People who like weird should dive in here; this book is about as bizarre and random as Hernandez gets.

Tonta by Jaime Hernandez

Jaime Hernandez spent thirty-five years mostly making comics stories about pretty girls (to be extremely reductive about it). Some were chubby, some were skinny -- and they got older over time, though he tended to introduce new younger characters as well. But even latter-day Hopey, as sour and grumpy as she can be, is still pretty darn cute...maybe because we remember who she was back in the day.

Those characters were often confused or wrong or lost or heading at high speed in entirely the wrong direction. Frankly, I could even argue that they were almost always at least one of those things.

Tonta, though, was Jaime's first non-cute protagonist. He draws her round-faced and gap-toothed, cross-eyed and eternally gawping, with a face that he previously reserved for old ladies. She's just as confused and wrong-headed as any of the other women in his stories, maybe even more so. But people take her less seriously, though there's still at least one boy lurking around, trying to get with her. (There always is, for everyone. In some rare cases, it's even mutual.)

Adding to the goofiness, Tonta is not consistently the main character of the stories in Tonta. Her older half-sister Vivian (aka "The Frogmouth," who is too pretty and too pushy for her own good) drives a lot of the stories here, and the rest of Tonta's complicated family is the engine of the underlying central plot. Tonta is the second youngest of a gaggle of half-siblings, who seem to be spread over something like twenty years, with the youngest in the mid-teens. They all have the same mother; most of their fathers are different. Most of their fathers are dead, frankly, and more than one has died in suspicious circumstances that seem to lead back to that mother.

That all comes out as the stories go on: when we first meet Tonta we know she's related to Vivian, but several other siblings show up in subtly different roles first and then seem to be retconned into the family story, as if Jaime thought of it after a few of the stories were already published. (Or maybe he was just being more subtle than I paid attention to; that's always possible.)

Tonta, the character, is somewhere in her high school years: she knows how to drive, but probably isn't supposed to be doing it. She's loud and goofily exuberant and crazy about punk and a boy or two. She wants to have fun and isn't all that clear about what's actually going on within her family -- again, she's a pretty typical Jaime protagonist, except his previous versions of that character tended to be drawn as femme fatales. Tonta is very much not that, though she's like to be, intermittently (at least for the right punky guy).

I'm not sure if the tone shifts entirely work in the Tonta stories: there's serious drama, with lots of family secrets, and then there's Tonta being super-goofy, making faces and being deeply confused. They're mostly not in the same stories, but Jaime works with lots of short stories building up to something bigger, so the goofy is right next to the serious, over and over again.

I don't think this is the end of Tonta's story; I think we'll see more of her and her family, and that she will continue to be the way into that story for readers. So, for now, I'll say that she's an interesting departure for Jaime, and that it's good to see him stretch in that direction...but that I'm not sure if the mixture is fully baked yet.

Is This How You See Me? by Jaime Hernandez

Two years later, here's a one-shot I Love (And Rockets) Monday -- because the Brothers Hernandez have kept making comics, and those comics do make their way into books eventually, and even more eventually I will read them.

Is This How You See Me? collects a Jaime story that ran from the end of the book-size annual New Stories into the beginning of the current magazine-sized Vol. IV comic. And I covered it, more or less, in the last post of the main run of I Love (And Rockets) Mondays.

The story? Maggie and Hopey, now pushing fifty (possibly from the other side) head back to Hoppers together for a punk reunion that neither one of them is all that enthusiastic about.

Well, Hopey is never enthusiastic in a positive way about anything: she was a ball of chaos in her youth, and has settled into a cynical sour middle age. Maggie is more mercurial, as usual, wanting to believe that things will be wonderful but continually remembering all of the other times she believed that things would be wonderful and they weren't.

So they both know that you can't go home again. And they don't live that far from home to begin with: they didn't get that far or do that much, all of their dreams of rock 'n' roll or prosolar mechanicdom to the contrary. We don't know what their old friends do for a living, exactly, but we suspect they're more successful: Terry has been making music all this time, at least successfully enough to have a career as a leader of various bands. And Daffy was never as punky as the rest, a girl from the nicer side of town who went off to college and seems to be solidly in the professional/managerial class. (Remembering that Maggie manages an apartment building and Hopey is a teacher's aide -- both jobs they fell into in mid-life when other things fell apart.)

None of that is text, but it's definitely subtext. Punk was one of the regular youth-fueled screams of rage and rebellion, giving voice to people who felt like their lives had no good options. And they were not wrong.

But we all have to live our lives, not just protest them. Punk bravado burns out, or starts looking silly. Maggie and Hopey are long past the point where punk attitude was relevant to their lives, so this is like any other reunion: wondering who will be there, whether any of it will be worth it, whether it can provide any of those moments of clarity we live for.

This reunion is scripted by Jaime Hernandez. So there will be moment of clarity, for us as readers if not for his characters. I'm afraid Jaime's central characters are cursed to never have clarity: that may the most central thing about Maggie and Hopey. They will never really understand themselves, or each other.

Well, I may be wrong. They're getting older, and they're getting better at seeing clearly.

This is the story of one weekend in about 2016, with flashbacks to 1979, when the two girls were young and fearless and something that passed for innocent and damaged in different ways than their middle-aged selves. I can't say if it will be as heartbreaking for people who can't remember 1979 -- who haven't lived fifty or so years themselves. I think so: I think Jaime is that good. But it has more punch the more of this connects with you personally, like any good art.

The more any of us live, the more regrets and what-ifs we accumulate. They can overwhelm us, I guess, if we let them. Is This How You See Me? is about wandering through those piles of regrets and what-ifs without actually talking about them, about seeing where you are this year and looking back in wonder and surprise and awe at who you were forty years ago.

It does not have the electric shock of The Love Bunglers. It's a quieter book, a middle-aged book. But it's just as strong, just as true, just as real. And Jaime Hernandez is still one of our best storytellers, working fearlessly in a form he's made his own.

Book-A-Day 2018 #365: Love and Rockets, Vol. 4: Issues 1-6 by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez

This is not a book; this post breaks one of my silly self-imposed rules. (I'm just noting that up front. I'm not going to do anything about it.)

The fourth run of Love and Rockets returned to a magazine size and a periodical publication: there have been six issues since it was launched in 2016. So, to close out I Love (And Rockets) Mondays for the year, I thought I should look at the most recent material, to see what the Locas and Luba's family are doing with themselves right now.

Each issue has 32 pages of comics (plus four pages of ads or other editorial matter; there's usually a letters page), so, as of about a month ago, there are 192 pages of new Hernandez Brothers comics, roughly the size of one of the individual graphic novels.

Like New Stories, or like any serialization, this is work in progress, mostly middles of stories. The only major break from New Stories is the new logo (seen to the left; it changed slightly for issue two and later) and the altered credit line -- Gilbert and Jaime finally get their first names on the cover after thirty-five years. (And it has been consistently alphabetical, or maybe age order, for all six issues to date.)

As with New Stories, they alternate covers. Like the classic magazine series, the other brother contributes a back-cover. For the new century, though, there are also variant covers -- several for the first issue, and a Fantagraphics-exclusive for all of them to date. (If I were a retailer, I would not be happy at all if a publisher had a cover only available for purchase directly from them, and so I'm happy I'm not a retailer.)

The stories continue from New Stories as well: Jaime finishes up the Maggie-and-Hopey-go-to-a-punk-reunion in the sixth issue, has a little more with Tonta and her gang, and continues the baffling and now apparently standalone adventures of Princess Anima in space. Gilbert milks the lots-of-Fritz-clones story for the first couple of issues, and then drops it to focus on Fritz's long-unknown twin daughters. (Unknown to the reader, unknown to each other, but one was, retroactively, not unknown to her mother.)

I'm finding the Jaime material of this era generally more successful -- the Maggie and Hopey story is another strong one, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it comes together in a single book. Tonta and her friends are still goofballs, though, and their stories are, I guess, more slice-of-life than anything else: they don't seem to be going anywhere. And I think the Princess Anima stuff needs to have an ending before I have any clue what it's going to be: it feels to me like Jaime is doing a Gilbert-style id-fueled SFnal story, without long-term plots and driven by immediate momentum. There are interesting bits, and he as always draws wonderfully, but I'm not sure if there's a there there.

Gilbert, on the other hand, is doing a lot of quirky things with his drawing, not all of which are immediately working: using heavier borders for flashbacks, for example, which he felt he needed to explain in the stories. I also noticed some deliberately stiff layouts and "camera" movements: there's one sequence where Killer and Jimmy stand stock still for several panels while the viewpoint rotates around them one quadrant at a time, and a number of places where he lines up faces repeatedly. As in the late New Stories era, he's also spending a lot of time in these stories having his characters face each other and talk through the same things over and over again -- Killer is now a singer, let's run through the top 10 Fritz impersonators for this issue, Baby/Rosario and Rosalba are twins and here's how they were separated, Fritz has never done porn but there are rumors she has, and so on and on and on.

I suspect he's been getting letters about some aspects of this -- or maybe somewhat different complaints -- because he has stories titled things like "Fritz Haters Will Just Have to Be Patient" and "More for the Haters." He's also drawing "must be 18" censor-boxes over the naked chests of his female characters a lot, sometimes in art on the walls -- which I thought was a quirky, fun choice; maybe a comment on the art-world -- but also sometimes in characters actually in the stories, which is more metafictional. Jaime has drawn nipples in the same issue, so it's not an obvious issue of censorship -- just another artistic choice that isn't quite clear yet.

But Gilbert wrote his way out of the swamp of Too Many Fritzes, and the last couple of issues sees more lightness to his work, as it opens out to more of the cast and shows changes in their lives. He's still doing the people-standing-still-and-talking-at-each-other thing, but it wouldn't be Gilbert without some odd artistic choices.

Love and Rockets the periodical was always like that, though. The books organize and coral the material, putting all of the wild-hair ideas into separate volumes and allowing the larger stories to stand alone. But the ongoing comic, in whatever format, is full of pieces of story in any era -- Tonta or Rocky, Errata Stigmata or Mila -- and those don't always turn into anything nicely book-shaped. We read Love and Rockets because both Gilbert and Jaime are great cartoonists, with a few touchpoints in common, and because even if we think what one of them is doing this year isn't all that great (Too Many Fritzes, Adventures of the Ti-Girls), it's always going to be at least an interesting, unique failure.

It's been going thirty-five years so far, in various formats. I can hope for thirty-five more, can't I? To see what ninety-something Jaime and Gilbert will be doing?

Note: this is day 365, but it's not the end of Book-A-Day. Look for a post-mortem tomorrow listing the whole series...and about fourteen more daily Book-A-Day posts running through mid-January, since there's stuff I read in 2018 that I haven't gotten into that format yet.

Book-A-Day 2018 #358: Birdland by Gilbert Hernandez

This is not a Love and Rockets book; I've run out of those. But it's a first cousin to Love and Rockets, featuring characters who first appeared there and a group of characters who later appeared there in a slightly different arrangement.

It's also chock-full of sex, which might be why it's not in print these days: sex has migrated almost entirely to the electronic realms for the 21st century, since print can't keep up and is pirated within seconds. (Other possible reasons: Hernandez or his publishers think it wouldn't be good for his current career, normal book/comics outlets have gotten more prudish over the past couple of decades, or the stars are not quite right.)

Anyway, this is Birdland. It's an unabashedly pornographic comic by Gilbert Hernandez, originally published as a three-issue miniseries by Fantagraphic's spin-off smut-publishing line Eros in 1990, with a loosely-related mostly-silent one-shot in 1994. I read the 1999 printing of the trade paperback collection, which has what I think are all of the Birdland pieces together.

It's set in a porno next-universe-over version of his Palomar/Luba world, circa 1990: Inez and Bang Bang are strippers at Polka Parade, a young Fritzi is a therapist and her sister Petra is her receptionist. The central male character is Fritzi's husband -- at this point, her only one, but that would change in the regular continuity -- Mark Herrera, though his brother Simon is also important. There's also La Valda, another stripper for the competing club Stinky's who "steals Bang Bang's act" (said act, in toto: looking like she does, dancing naked, band-aids over her nipples) and Stinky's doorman Pee Wee, so there can be another man for the sex scenes.

The plot is loose and semi-random, but it's more than just an excuse for the sex scenes: Birdland feels like Hernandez turned up the sex knob on his work to eleven, then broke it off and jammed it even further up with pliers. It's more explicit -- very explicit, with lots of spurting bodily fluids and engorged appendages being rhythmically inserted hither and yon -- but it's all embedded in one of those Beto obsessed-with-the-wrong-person plots.

Since the knobs are jammed up past eleven, everyone is obsessed with sex with the wrong people: Fritzi has frozen out Mark for unexplained reasons, but he's having affairs with both Inez and Bang Bang while pining for his wife. Simon is obsessed with Fritzi, and sleeping with Petra as the next best thing, which is fine because she's obsessed with Mark in turn. Fritzi's practice consists entirely of hypnotizing her (all male) patients and having sex with them while they're under -- before long, Petra learns the truth and gets into the action, too. And then there are the aliens, who wander around the edges of the beginning of the story before abducting everyone for the literally climactic ending of the original mini-series, as everybody gets it on with everybody for a cathartic release before returning to earth to ring more changes on the same relationship problems.

Hey, it's a sex comic: you have to expect that it's going to be full of sex. Birdland's sex isn't the zipless fucks of the usual stroke book: Hernandez's characters are obsessives, and endlessly talk about who they love and want and can't have even while bopping with the wrong person.

In a lot of ways, Birdland feels like unfiltered Gilbert Hernandez: all of the sex, all of the surrealism, all of the random connections, all of the quirky spirituality. Whether it really came out that way or if he carefully crafted it to look that way doesn't matter as much -- either way, this is close to peak Beto, right in the middle of his career. If you're interested in his work, and aren't turned off by the pervasive sex, Birdland is a book you need to pay attention to. (Assuming you can find it.)

Book-A-Day 2018 #351: The Love and Rockets Companion edited by Marc Sobel and Kristy Valenti

Any fictional world that runs long enough and has enough fans will eventually develop ancillary materials. It may be fan-made maps of a long-running fantasy series, or scholarly treatises on the families of Yoknapatawpha County, or K/S stories in some obscure internet archive. But the urge to understand, to systematize, and to make the loved thing exactly the way you want it will come out in the end.

Publishers know this, of course, and harness that force when they can. Those books of maps of fantasy worlds, or encyclopedias of Middle-Earth, or sharecropped novels by "the Killer Bs" were all official, all really licensed, all putting coin back in the pockets of the original copyright holder. And big anniversaries provide almost irresistible opportunities for those kind of ancillaries...even in these latter days, when the best guide to an on-going fictional world is a website or wiki that will get updated when the next set of stories comes out.

That brings me to The Love and Rockets Companion, published in 2012 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the first Fantagraphics issue of Love and Rockets. (Which was a year after the first self-published issue, but anniversaries can be of any thing you want, to make them work.) It was edited by Marc Sobel and Kristy Valenti, two critics and writers-about-comics, and it's pretty miscellaneous. It also, since Love and Rockets keeps being published, becomes a little more outdated every time there's a new issue -- and there have been three or four of the New Stories volumes plus six issues of the latest series since this book came out.

There's no attempt at criticism in this Companion: it starts off by reprinting two long interviews with the Hernandez Brothers from The Comics Journal (owned by Fantagraphics, publisher of Love and Rockets and this book, and so probably free) from 1989 and 1995, and then adds a new interview by Sobel done for this book. That takes up nearly two-thirds of the book, and the rest is the kind of thing that a wiki would definitely do better: timelines of both Locas and Palomar, character guides for both worlds, and a checklist of all Love and Rockets stories by all three brothers, followed by what I think is meant to be a comprehensive list of their non-L&R work as well. (In the middle there is a small section titled "Letter Column Highlights/Bros.' Favorite Comics," which is cute but pretty fanzine-ish.)

The book is paperback, roughly the trim size of the older Love and Rockets collections, with a heavy dust jacket that folds out. On the outside is a jam piece by both Gilbert and Jaime (or maybe something assembled by others from their artwork from various places) with what looks like all of their major characters. On the inside are charts of the relationships of both worlds, family and friends and more complicated connections.

This is obviously a book only for huge Love and Rockets fans, preferably in 2012, so they can get it when it's new and shiny and up to date. It would have been a useful thing for me to have when I started "I Love (And Rockets) Mondays," but I only got it towards the end, and I'm not planning to double-check the list of stories against the published books and see if I can ferret out anything missing. I found it faintly disappointing: I'd like some kind of critical assessment, or even just a more journalistic listing and examination of the storylines over the years. As it is, this Companion is much more like something from the publisher of Amazing Heroes than the publisher of The Comics Journal.

Book-A-Day 2018 #344: Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 8 by The Hernandez Brothers

We're deep into the metafiction era of Love and Rockets in this 2016 entry, the last of the book-format annuals before L&R once again reverted to a more regular publication schedule in stapled form, as it did twice before.

(Even this quintessential alternative icon can't escape the black hole of American periodical comics and the undertow of the Wednesday Crowd. Nothing can: there is no escape for any of us.)

So this is the state of play in Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 8:

In Gilbert's pages, we're diving deeper into the multiple-Fritzes story, one turn sillier and more self-indulgent than even the Killer stories, escalating the Gilbert nuttiness as we move deeper into the sordid world of strip clubs and fetish porn and crazy scientists modifying bodies for those activities. Oh, and drug smuggling, too, because where you have mad scientists you have crazy drugs.

I also should mention here that a throwaway line a book or two ago about Killer not being old enough to remake Fritz's movies "for seven years" was apparently meant as a trigger for a flashforward: all of these Killer-as-a-busty-teen-exploitation-star stories (and presumably the related everyone-wants-to-be-Fritz stories here) are all set in 2018 and later, according to the Love and Rockets Companion. I don't think that was clear at all, but Gilbert's stories were always more about feeling than particular facts.

It's all very sordid, including a drug-addled guy with two dicks, various background characters with freakish bodies created by a frankly mad scientist, and a confusing plot of double-crosses, murderous overdoses, and corrupt use of law enforcement. I have a hard time keeping the not-Fritzes separate, figuring out what scenes happened in which order, and (worst of all) caring about any of it. The writing gets stiff and mannered, too, even in the "real-world" scenes where it's not supposed to show that we're watching a bad movie. (Maybe that stiff writing is deliberate, to show us that these people live like they're in bad movies -- that would make sense. But it doesn't make it more pleasant to read.)

On the Jaime side, The Maggie-and-Hopey story started in the previous volume is back, with eighteen pages at the end of the book following Maggie as she goes to the reunion and does the usual Maggie thing: running back and forth as she tries to decide if she wants to be part of something or not. Hopey, also as usual, has flaked out on her without explanation -- this whole storyline feels like a summing-up of their whole thirty-year relationship, and how it never really changes. (At least, at this point it does.)

Also back from Jaime, earlier in the book, are the goofy Tonta and the bewildering Princess Animus, whose adventures here may be the the continuation of the movie that broke while Maggie and Hopey were watching it in the last volume or may be something quirkier like the Ti-Girls story of a few years before. I doubt that it will all turn out to be part of one overall story, the way "Browntown" and the other flashbacks were actually part of "The Love Bunglers" a few years before, but who knows?

The Tonta stories look like they may add up to a book eventually, but they're feeling more episodic -- what could have been the big climax, the plot by her older siblings against their mother, fizzled in the previous book, and Tonta wasn't directly part of that. Frankly, Tonta is an odd choice for a viewpoint character: she's misinformed or just confused a lot of the time, resistant to learning anything new, and no one seems to actually like her. (She's a bit like what The Frogmouth would be if she weren't sexy; maybe that's the point.)

Love and Rockets: New Stories ended as it began: with mostly quirky stories at right angles from what most of their audience wanted or expected from Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez. After thirty years, it may be time to admit that our wants and expectations don't match what the Hernandez brothers are going to do, and that we keep coming back because they confound our wants and expectations.

Note: Though this is the last-published physical book with the most recent Love and Rockets material, I do have a few more bits and pieces to fill out the last few weeks of the year. I Love (and Rockets) Mondays will continue through December 31st. Next week I'll hit The Love and Rockets Companion.

Book-A-Day 2018 #337: Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 7 by The Hernandez Brothers

In a long-running continuity, I obsess about characters' ages more than I should. What year does this story take place in? Are the characters a year older than the story that came out last year? Can you tell, and does it matter?

The Maggie on the cover of Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 7 might be on the edge of fifty: it came out in 2014, and she's canonically born in 1965. She's certainly not young, and hasn't been young for a while. (It's a little sad, but it happens to all of us.) That may be ironic for a character so originally defined by her youth -- the girl apprentice prosolar mechanic -- but, again, it's what happens to everyone; we all outrun our own wunderkindity.

Jaime Hernandez's story starting in this book is about that sense, I think: Maggie and Hopey are heading back to some kind of "punk reunion" in Hoppers/Huerta, to maybe spend time people that they haven't seen in years. And the two of them have been quieter friends for the previous decade or so, their old on-again, off-again passion finally settled down and supposedly gone. Maggie seems to be trying to rekindle it, or maybe just doing that reflexive Maggie stir-shit-up thing that she's done all her life. Maggie is the quintessential character who doesn't understand her own motivations: she's always doing things for reasons she doesn't understand, especially in the many cases where they turn out badly.

(Side note: Love and Rockets, as always, is equally divided between Jaime work and stories from his brother Gilbert -- I'll get into Gilbert's stuff next. I'm not neglecting him; the Jaime cover sparked a particular line of thought.)

So Maggie and Hopey take the train from LA back to Hoppers -- after all these years, I'm not super-clear on the geography of Jaime SoCal, but I'm still surprised to see than inter-city rail is a thing there. (Maybe it is in real SoCal? Up in my neck of the woods, I could take a train to Philadelphia or Boston, but I don't think Hoppers is supposed to be that far away.) This volume has the story of what happens before the reunion starts: our two got up to town a day early. Meanwhile, there's another story of goofy Tonta, doing her own thing somewhere else, and a lot of the Maggie-and-Hopey pages are taken up with the movie they're watching, Beto-style. (I don't think the female main character in the "movie," Princess Animus, is supposed to be played by a real Jaime character, but who knows? Maybe he's been infected with the same metafictional mania as his brother.)

It's not just scene-setting, but it is setting up. And we'll see what it's setting up for in No. 8 and (I expect) in the comics series after that.

Gilbert's half of the book is full of yet more Hollywood stories -- of Killer, the most boring big-breasted exploitation actress of all time, still moping around Palomar; a vignette with Killer's great-grandmother Maria and baby Fritz, interspersed with scenes from crappy movies Maria made with some fictional crappy Mexican comedian; and most of what seems to be a modern serial (!?) called The Magic Voyage of Aladdin, which stars Fritz. Plus there's "Fritz Jr.," a porn/fetish actress who claims to be Fritz's daughter, and is only the first of a flood of Fritz imitators (Fritzette! Fritzina! Baby Fritz!).

It feels disjointed at this point, but the multi-Fritz plotline is obviously going to lead somewhere, and I'd bet Fritz Jr. really is Fritz's daughter, since Gilbert likes those kinds of soap-opera plotlines. (I'd almost bet that she's Fritz's secret son, post-transition, since that would be even more shocking and less likely. But she's related somehow.)

No. 7 is thus all beginnings and middles, parts of things that will be clearer once they're organized and complete and collected. There isn't even a table of contents, so it's more difficult to say how many stories there are, or how this book breaks down Jaime/Gilbert. If you only want Love and Rockets once it's settled and final, you probably want to avoid New Stories and stick to the big Library collections -- of course, as far as I know, only the Maggie-and-Hopey parts of this 2015 book are even scheduled to be published next year in a collection, so you might be waiting longer than you'd like.

Life is full of choices.

Book-A-Day 2018 #330: The Children of Palomar by Gilbert Hernandez

Hey, remember what I said last week about Gilbert Hernandez's Julio's Day? Well, take that and reverse it, and it's the same issue with The Children of Palomar.

I waffled about counting Julio as part of Love and Rockets because it wasn't connected to any of Gilbert's regular fictional worlds or styles -- it was set in a Latin American country over the past century, but there was no connection to Palomar or any of his other works. But two excerpts from it did appear in Love and Rockets, so that was close enough for me.

The Children of Palomar, on the other hand, collects stories that appeared in a large-format three-issue miniseries called New Tales of Old Palomar. It appeared in between issues of the paperback Love and Rockets, so it's not really analogous to the late '90s Palomar/Luba's Family stories that appeared in other comics -- those were during a L&R hiatus; these could have been in L&R if Gilbert wanted them to be, and had space.

But they are stories of the Palomar characters, mostly in their younger days, so it would be crazy not to include it in a series all about L&R. And so here I am: once again ruefully shaking my head about the ways Gilbert Hernandez consistently confounds expectations and inevitably zigs when you expect him to zag.

The Palomar timeline has never been terribly clear: neither Hernandez brother has ever locked down any stories to particular years, and there's usually a vagueness about how long has passed between stories. But these stories are mostly at the same time as or somewhat earlier than that initial burst of Palomar stories in the mid-80s.

The first issue is about how two "demons" were discovered stealing food in Palomar: two tiny, dirty figures who could run at what seems like supernatural speed, and can only be captured when the young Pipo goes at her top speed to catch up to them. Those "demons" are the Villasenor sisters, Tonantzin and Diana, and they do get cleaned up, moderately civilized, and given to a foster family in Palomar to grow up (into the young women we've already seen them as).

The second issue takes place even earlier, with Gato (the older husband of first Pipo and then Guadalupe) as a kid of seven or eight, tormented by the local Black Shirt Gang as part of an initiation and in a surreal landscape we haven't previously seen anywhere near Palomar. There's a very symbolic "crack" -- a vertical gorge, shooting arrow-straight across the landscape, just a bit too wide to jump across -- for one example. The surroundings are more like Gilbert's surreal or odd-SF stories than like the more realistic (or magic-realistic) world of Palomar. There's also a group of "scientists" in some kind of environment suits, speaking an unknown language, who kidnap several folks from Palomar to experiment on them with a strange gas that gives kids perfect knowledge of their future deaths. This is all pretty weird, and I think it's supposed to connect with Gato's eventual death in a car crash, but it didn't really click for me: just more random Beto weirdness.

And then the third issue has two unrelated stories. It starts out with Tonantzin and Diana as teens, with a return of the Blooter Baby from one of the weirder Venus stories. Apparently, Blooters appear to childless women, and is an omen that they will never have children. Tonantzin goes to a previously unseen temple of some kind -- or maybe a magician's house? -- to learn how to contain the Blooter and make it go away. This kind of peters out, maybe supposedly ending with Tonantzin's coming to terms with her childlessness. And the last story is set in the modern day, or something close to it, with another violent encounter between Sheriff Chelo and the weird-talking scientists from the second issue.

I've mostly drawn a distinction between Beto's Palomar stories and his "weird" or surreal stories, but this collection combines all of those elements: these are stories with Palomar characters and the random violence, unexplained super-science, and supernatural transformations of his quirkier work. If you like all of the sides of Gilbert Hernandez, this will be a particular treat. If you preferred one or the other, it will be less to your taste -- but that's always the way it is, right?

Book-A-Day 2018 #323: Julio's Day by Gilbert Hernandez

I spend more time than is reasonable worrying if I'm doing things right. Even worse, often what I mean by "right" is "fitting the rules I made up myself, which I haven't bothered to clearly codify."

Obviously, a healthy person would not spend time on anything like that, but I am a blogger, and so clearly not that healthy.

So my first question after reading Gilbert Hernandez's standalone 2013 graphic novel Julio's Day was whether it really counts as Love and Rockets. Oh, sure, two excerpts from it appeared first in the New Stories paperback series, but most of this story didn't, and it has no connections with any of his other L&R work. (On the other side of the argument: a lot of his L&R work has no connection to the rest of his L&R work; he's been more likely to go off on tangents than his brother Jaime.)

Since I'm writing this here now, you've probably already assumed that I decided it counted. And I did. But I had to worry the issue for a while first.

The next big question is whether it's way too reductive to call Julio's Day the story of the hundred-year-life of a completely closeted Mexican gay man. And that's a nice label, but it doesn't reflect what the book is actually about. Julio himself isn't really all that central to his own story to begin with: he's pretty colorless for a Gilbert Hernandez protagonist, overshadowed his entire life by the more vibrant members of his family.

As usual for Hernandez, "vibrant" is not at all the same thing as "positive." Julio's uncle Juan is one of the most distinctive characters here, and he's a deeply damaged person, compelling to sneak away with baby boys and do unspecified things with them. The rest of Julio's family, and the few others they interact with, are quirky in similar Gilbert Hernandez ways, but Julio himself remains transparent, the void at the center of his own story.

Like Palomar, this town is somewhere in Latin America. Also like Palomar, Hernandez will not be any more specific than that. Julio's life matches pretty closely to the twentieth century, from small bits of internal evidence, but that's all background: Julio is not involved in any great issues, and barely any small issues. He just lives here, for a long time, while other things happen around him, mostly far away.

There's a hundred pages of incidents and no real overall plot: this is a story of episodes, moments over a hundred years when Julio was there to witness them. (Or was somewhere else: the two pieces published in L&R follow other members of his family on journeys, first his father and then his grand-nephew.)

In typical Hernandez fashion, there are bizarre, horrifying diseases and deaths, and many random, mostly unhappy events -- a long life in a Gilbert Hernandez story is a sequence of sad and shocking moments, ended only by death.

The title is ironic at best, as well: not only is this the story of a hundred years, not a single day, but Julio never really had a day, either literally or metaphorically. His grand-nephew poses that question to him near the end, and that's the source for the title -- but Julio was never in the right time or place to seize that day, and maybe was never the person who could have seized that day.

Does that make Julio's Day a cautionary tale? It's not focused enough for that, and I think Hernandez would deny that impulse -- he's never been one to make a single lesson with a story. Gilbert Hernandez stories aim for the complexity and confusion of real life: too many things happening to too many people to turn it into a single narrative, and all of the lessons possible in there somewhere.

And I suspect Julio's Day is the kind of book that rewards multiple readings, to trace the connections, personal and visual, over this long century, from the moment Julio opens his mouth to be born until the moment his mouth hangs open in death.

Book-A-Day 2018 #316: Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 6 by The Hernandez Brothers

The sixth annual installment of the squarebound Love and Rockets arrived in 2013 with a massive twenty-five stories in its standard hundred pages. Seventeen of those stories were from Jaime, totaling sixty of the pages here -- the first time, I think, that he had more pages in a Love and Rockets issue than his brother Gilbert.

Both brothers are continuing the storylines from the previous volume: Gilbert with Dora "Killer" Rivera, in and out of Palomar and ending her teen-scream-queen movie career, and Jaime with The Frogmouth's teenage half-sister Tonta and her complicated family problems.

So here's what you'll find in Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 6:

On the Jaime side, Tonta is the viewpoint character most of the time. Also pretty central is Ish, that bouncer/muscle guy from the Cobia Club, who turns out to be the twin of Tonta's sister Vivian (Frogmouth). Frankly, their family gets really complicated in this book, with another, even older sister Vi (Violet?), a step-father (Al Castor) who's just gotten shot by an intruder, and a plot among the older siblings to bring their mother to justice for the presumed murder of their father (Hernan Solis) years before. And whether the dead father from eight to ten years before is the father of all of them -- Tonta, her younger sister Muneca, Vivian, Vi, and Ish -- is not entirely clear.

Frankly, it feels a bit like Jaime was making some of this up as he went along: he had Vivian kicking around the fringes of his cast for a while, decided to focus more on her and give her a wacky kid sister, and then started embellishing. Tonta might be a bit dim and totally self-absorbed, but would she really not know that she has an older brother? That that guy who she keeps seeing in a particular place is the twin brother of the sister she goes there with? That's well beyond normal obliviousness and well into brain damage.

The Tonta-and-her-family here spins through a lot of short chapters, but it's mostly the same story: one strand of what Tonta is doing (hanging out in the wood with Gretchen, another odd character with a Jaime-hottie-in-a-bikini body and an old-lady face; chasing boys badly; semi-stalking her new PE teacher, Angel Rivera) and one strand of the older siblings badly plotting to send their mother to jail for something she probably did do but that we only learn about third-hand through incredibly unreliable narrators. It all fizzles instead of snaps, which I think is Jaime's intention: he wants to show that this family has a lot of useless activity and energy; the older ones might be more directed than Tonta, but they're no smarter or organized.

All the pieces are nice: this is good character stuff, and Jaime is as always great with rapid-fire screwball dialogue. But I'm not really sure there's a there there; this feels like something he's doing to keep Love and Rockets stories going until he finally gets back and crushes our dreams from the end of the last Maggie-and-Ray story. This is still serialized comics, though: we'll have to see what it turns into when it's collected.

Gilbert's side of this book feels like a re-run, from the cover shot of Killer cosplaying her own grandmother to a surreal ultra-violent untitled story to more comics about movies and about long-dead great-grandma Maria (and particularly about the semi-lost single movie starring dead great-grandma Maria). I don't find the teen-Killer stories all that compelling: she's having a less interesting and distinctive Hollywood career than her great-aunt Fritzi did, and even that storyline wasn't all that exciting.

So this was a bit of a doldrums issue, circling things that it didn't reach, puttering around until something more impressive happens. But you get that after thirty years; it's no big deal. There will be more Love and Rockets, and it will all add up to more than this.

Book-A-Day 2018 #309: The Adventures of Venus by Gilbert Hernandez

Gilbert Hernandez is a cartoonist of extremes. Just looking at his work related to the Palomar/Luba set of stories, he ranges all the way from the joyous porn of Birdland to the (equally joyous, in very different ways) kid-friendly stories from the turn of the century about Venus.

Venus also appeared in stories that aren't kid-friendly, which could make sharing a book like Luba and Her Family (which has the bulk of those Venus stories) with an eight-year-old somewhat problematic. But, luckily, there is a just-the-kid-stuff Venus collection: The Adventures of Venus.

As far as I can tell, this small book -- it has half-size comics pages, and less than a hundred of them -- entirely consists of stories also in Luba and Her Family, so most people will not want to buy both of them. (Some people, naming no names, might have bought both of them thinking they were different things.)

The long, weird story about the "blooter baby" was original to this book, which otherwise collected all-ages material by Hernandez from the late-90s comic Measles. (It was a multi-author anthology, so he had just one Venus story each issue.)

Venus is fun and spunky, but these are mostly the lesser stories about her -- concerned with normal kid-activities like soccer and with her social interactions. The other Venus stories, the ones not specifically aimed at kids, give her more depth and make her more interesting, though they probably are unsuitable for this age range -- she's exposed to knowledge of a whole lot of the illicit sexual pairings going on in Hernandez's work in that era. (Including her own mother.)

So this is a perfectly nice book for a young audience. The only place it leads, though, is somewhere its target audience can't follow, which could be a problem for a household that combines inquisitive young readers and copies of those other Hernandez books. And anyone older than that should just get Luba and Her Family, which has all of these stories and a lot more.

Book-A-Day 2018 #302: Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 5 by The Hernandez Brothers

This book sat on my shelves for six years since it was published in 2012. Somewhere around the time of my 2011 flood, I decided it would be a good idea to re-read Love and Rockets from the beginning, and for some reason -- I can't explain my own thinking sometimes -- that meant that I would stop reading the current stuff until I could "catch up" from the beginning.

I'm not saying it was a good plan.

This year, with "I Love (And Rockets) Mondays," I finally did get to that big re-read, and almost twenty weeks into it, I've finally gotten back to 2012. That's a lot of delay for what turned out to be another quiet, transitional issue, but, finally, I'm here to tell you about Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 5.

There are eight stories in this volume, four each from Jaime and Gilbert -- both are working with material related to the stories in previous New Stories volumes, but at a bit of a distance. There's still exactly a hundred pages of comics this time, but 60 of those pages are from Gilbert and 40 from Jaime.

Gilbert's stories still mix fiction and metafiction and focus on Killer, who is visiting Palomar for the first two stories -- driven by family stories, and loving the atmosphere there -- and then back in LA for the two shorter stories at the end. The long second story, "Proof That the Devil Loves You," mixes a pretentious Fritz horror B-movie, full of long-winded speeches, with Killer's visit to Palomar what seems to be several years after that movie was made, with various odd parallels.

(I still don't quite get why Gilbert spends so much time making fake bad movies in comics form, but it's clearly an idiosyncratic art form he is passionate about.)

Jaime steps back from the events of "The Love Bunglers" in the last two issues and introduces a new viewpoint character, Tonta, who is the half-sister of human wrecking ball Vivian "the Frogmouth." We don't know that at first when we meet her in the story titled after her name, but then she and the Frogmouth get caught up with "Crime Raiders International Mobsters and Executioners" -- or, well, a local rich guy and minor gangster who owns the local country club. Mel Spropp is having an affair with Viv, or maybe is planning to -- what actually happens here is that his goons keep coming over, stash a gun at her place, and Spropp keeps calling her only to hang up. As usual, Vivian is the center of endless drama for no good reason, and Tonta, our goofball viewpoint character, is just along for the ride.

There's also a short story here, "Uh...Oh Yeah" which may be from Ray's point of view, and may be set after "The Love Bunglers," though it's not clear on either front. Otherwise, Jaime's half of New Stories 5 is all the Tonta and Viv show. Tonta is drawn in a slightly goofy style: I'm not sure if she's just supposed to be ugly (to go along with being naive and a bit stupid) or if her old-lady face means something else. She's just a weird character.

Again, these are mostly smaller stories, minus that weird metafictional mix in the Gilbert "Devil" story, that do a little more character work and move the timeline a little further forward. And whether that;'s a good thing or not I guess depends on how you see New Stories. If it's a periodical, just in a different format, than that's what you'd expect: not every issue will be major. But if you think it's something different and important because it's in book form, then it might be disappointing.

As with everything in life, it's all how you look at it.

Book-A-Day 2018 #295: Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 4 by The Hernandez Brothers

2011's installment of Love and Rockets was very much the continuation of the year before: Jaime finishes up "The Love Bunglers" here, in four devastating chapters, and Gilbert continues to circle Hollywood with his characters Fritzi and Killer in two stories, one of them "fictional" within the world of Love and Rockets and one of them "real."

That's a good question, though: what is real? I still have my questions about the end of "Love Bunglers," which has an element that I'm afraid is not exactly real.

(From poking through The Love and Rockets Companion, I'm guessing it is real, but I'm still withholding final judgment until I actual read later stories. It is so parallel to the end of L&R Vol. 1 that I don't trust it. It's also so much a wish-fulfillment for both characters and audience that it's deeply out of character for Jaime's work.)

So this is Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 4. The stories more or less alternate here, though it starts and ends with Jaime.

I've written about "Love Bunglers" twice recently in this series -- just last week and when I read the revised version in Angels and Magpies a few weeks before that. I don't have much new to say about it this time, though it lays out interestingly in this book: Part Three opens with a one-page vignette about two unnamed long-married characters -- I don't think we've ever seen them before, or are meant to recognize them -- with the woman's thought overlaid as captions. And that moment is strongly parallel with the end of the book, a scene with Maggie and Ray. That's not as obvious when the whole story is collected, and speaks to how Jaime planned the effect of the stories in a particular serial installment of L&R.

On the Gilbert side, "King Vampire" is another movie presented in comics form. Confusingly, it seems to star Killer as the young vampire wanna-be and Fritzi as an older vampire in a parallel plot, but the other Gilbert story in this volume, "And Then Reality Kicks In," is a discussion between Fritzi and an unnamed guy about "the vampire project," which won't happen until she gets out of her current seven-year contract. So "King Vampire" is a movie from the future of Gilbert's continuity, or something.

"King Vampire" is pulpy, violent, and full of sex, of course -- that's generally the point of Gilbert's "movie" stories.

"And Then Reality Kicks In" is quieter, showing one long conversation that's about more than it shows on the surface. If I remembered who that guy was, it would probably be a bit more meaningful to me, but I find the men of this era of Gilbert's work to be pretty colorless and interchangeable.

Next week I'll have a full book Love and Rockets stories from 2012 that I've never read before: this one was half-new, but from here forward it's all stuff I haven't read. It's weird how you can realize you haven't read one of your favorite comic series for close to a decade....

Book-A-Day 2018 #288: Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 3 by The Hernandez Brothers

Comics are not movies: obviously. The two forms do have some things in common, and can use similar visual language -- they're both storytelling mediums with limited space for dialogue and various ingenious ways to show time passing, among other parallels.

But, even at best, they're parallel: they can do similar things in different ways. So when a creator continuously evokes cinema in his comics, as matter and style, the reader starts to wonder what is up.

By 2010's Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 3, Gilbert Hernandez had been telling movie-inspired stories for about a decade. His major character Fritzi had become a B-movie star, in at least a minor way, and he'd not only told stories about her life and work, but he'd "released" several of her "movies" as separate graphic novels: Chance in Hell (2007), Speak of the Devil (2008), The Troublemakers (2009). And, in the previous year's No. 2, he'd launched another young buxom starlet on a Hollywood career, in Dora "Killer" Rivera, daughter of Guadalupe and grand-niece of Fritzi.

Killer is back in Gilbert's two stories in No.3: "Scarlet in Starlight" is the comics version of what in-continuity is a ten-year-old SF movie that Killer is being considered for a sequel/remake of, and "Killer * Sad Girl * Star" explains that. They're both intensely late-Gilbert stories, full of people talking about the things that they want to talk about, having endless meta-conversations about the things they're doing and feeling and saying to each other. I'm finding this is getting more airless and hermetic at this point, as if Gilbert is circling the same material ever closer -- the re-run of Fritzi's movie career in miniature with Killer is another example -- and I hope he broke out of that cycle between then and now.

Jaime's half of No. 3 is the first two pieces of "The Love Bunglers" (set in the modern day) and the flashback "Browntown," part of the same overall story. I've already read the second half -- both in the Angels and Magpies omnibus a few weeks ago and in No. 4 this morning before I got to typing this very post -- so I'm mostly going to save my thoughts about that overall story for the conclusion.

But I will repeat what I said before: "Love Bunglers" is Jaime's masterwork, even more so than the previous high points like "Flies on the Ceiling" and "The Death of Speedy." And if you think this first half is emotionally strong, you don't know what you're in for.

(And I note that I, like nearly everyone else, found "Browntown" the standout when I read No. 3 new in 2010: none of us realized it was part of the same story of "Love Bunglers" and that the latter was not nearly as light as it seemed.)

Book-A-Day 2018 #281: Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 2 by The Hernandez Brothers

I don't think I mentioned this last week, but it's interesting that the New Stories series credits its creators as "The Hernandez Brothers" rather than the old-style "Los Bros Hernandez."

I don't know if that comes out of a sense that the "Bros" is an affectation more suitable to Young Turks, or if I should be mumbling some bafflegab about assimilation and cultural identity. But it's a shift, and that should be noted.

This second installment of the then-new Love and Rockets came out in 2009, with another hundred pages of comics evenly split between the two brothers. And the title was, obviously, Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 2.

As with the first volume, it's a sandwich, with long Jaime chapters of "Ti-Girls" to open and close and Gilbert stories in the middle.

I've been saying not-entirely-nice things about the Ti-Girls story repeatedly -- last week with New Stories 1 and a few weeks back with the collected, revised edition of that story in Angels and Magpies -- so maybe I should let that horse die. This book does see the end of that story, and has a lot of pages of superhero action and long expository dialogue; Jaime Hernandez accurately replicates (or maybe satirizes?) all of the things I find most tedious and unrealistic in superhero comics.

Gilbert has two stories in the middle. First up is "Sad Girl," in which a now-teenaged Killer (Dora Rivera, Guadalupe's daughter) gets a small part in a movie and is obsessed with some guy she just broke up with, who we never see in the story. It's a story narrated heavily by Killer and the people around her, almost entirely about how everyone is trying to frame what is happening and how Killer feels about it -- that's interesting.

Less interesting to me is teenage Killer. She was a quirky, individual kid, but now she's just another big-breasted belly-dancing Gilbert hottie obsessed with boys and movie-making -- he already has enough characters like that, to my mind, but I guess, like Hollywood itself, he always needs new young ones in the pipeline.

The longer Gilbert story here is the silent "Hypnotwist," which is about as explicable and clear as any of Gilbert's silent stories. (Which is to say: not very much.) A blonde woman -- not any character we're supposed to recognize, I think -- puts on a coat and leaves her house, and then is presented with sparkly (magic?) shoes. She travels through a surreal world, confronting things that I think are supposed to be emblematic of her life and her choices (alternate future selves, men she might have relationships with, giant flying baby heads). There is sudden random violence, existential danger, and what looks like a happy ending, with the woman reunited with a blind man and working as a stage magician.

Your guess is as good as mine, frankly. It's visually interesting, and I can trace some of the themes, but if this story is supposed to say anything specific or to tell a coherent story, that escaped me.

So this book, all in all, was disappointing -- this time around, as part of my big re-read, as well as the first time I saw it in 2009. But that's the way the world works: your favorite creators will do new things, and try new styles that don't work for you -- and sometimes don't work at all. This is minor Love and Rockets, but it's still worth reading as a link in the chain between the great stuff before and the great stuff after.

Book-A-Day 2018 #274: Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 1 by The Hernandez Brothers

This week, I Love (And Rockets) Mondays leaves behind the lands of carefully tended and curated reprints and heads into the off-road weeds of messy serial comics. We'll be back to carefully-tended a couple of times before the end, but Love and Rockets was a serial comic to begin with, and that's how nearly all new L&R material has appeared for nearly forty years. So we were going to get there eventually.

The paperback Love and Rockets series, subtitled "New Stories," was the third series. The original magazine-sized L&R ran from 1981 to 1996, was followed by a bunch of individual comics by the two Hernandez brothers (Gilbert and Jaime), and then by a triumphant reunion with the comics-format second series in 2001. After twenty issues of that over six years, it was time for another change, and so New Stories was born: it would come out once a year, with exactly one hundred pages of comics, evenly divided between the two brothers. [1]

That didn't exactly happen -- I keep getting the sense that behind the scenes Gilbert was more prolific than Jaime, which may have caused some stress to the model -- but New Stories had eight big books from 2008 through 2016, and only skipped one year as the time between issues kept to twelve months most of the time.

So: this week's book is Love and Rockets: New Stories, No.1, which contains the first two installments of Jaime's Ti-Girls Adventures, which we've already seen in revised and collected form in Angels and Magpies, and a collection of not-obviously linked stories from Gilbert, at least one of which is familiar from Comics Dementia. Again, we're getting into the time-frame where everything hasn't been collected cleanly yet -- or, at least, where I haven't figured it all out yet.

It's structured as a sandwich: Jaime has two long (25-page) installments of a larger story, which open and close the book. In between are seven shorter Gilbert stories -- including one, "Chiro El Indio," scripted by his Halley's Comet of a brother Mario -- which feel a bit like palate-cleansers, without any obvious connections to Palomar or Maria's three daughters.

Ti-Girls is choppier and more comic-booky in this original presentation -- each of the two sections is one page shorter than the final version, and Jaime later moved the single "cover" image here and added a new one for the other installment. I have the sense that the dialogue might have also been changed between the two versions, but I'm not looking to do a panel-by-panel comparison. (I still think this is basically Jaime's least successful story of his mature career.) Given that Love and Rockets was largely selling through direct-market comic shops, and those were (and still are) heavily superhero-centric, I can't say this was a bad way to launch the new volume, and it might have pulled in new readers.

Gilbert's stories include the creepy "Papa," featuring that guy with holes in his forehead and long hair in back. I don't remember if he comes back directly, but Gilbert rarely hits an idea only once, so I'll be looking for him. Also a pleasure is "The New Adventures of Duke and Sammy," a Martin-and-Lewis comic in Gilbert gonzo-space-epic style: it is unique and nutty and coo-coo. The other stories tend to be shorter and more allusive: there's a full-on dream-logic piece titled "?;" "Never Say Never," which is almost a fable, in a twisted Gilbert way; "Victory Dance," which connects oddly to "Papa" and feels like it may be another brick in a much larger wall; and a single page of miscellaneous strips under the title "The Funny Papers" that are not as humorous as you would expect.

It was a decent relaunch for the series, showing what the two brothers could do, and bringing back Mario in a supporting role one more time. Interestingly, it was very much not the two brothers doing their usual kind of stories -- Jaime was wandering off into the lands of superhero self-indulgence and Gilbert was making individual unconnected short stories in between longer epics. Maybe after almost thirty years they decided they didn't have anything to prove this time. (And they didn't.)


[1] This may be a spoiler, but that paperback-format series itself ended, and there's now a fourth Love and Rockets series, back in comics format, which started in 2016. There is an unstoppable tropism to pamphlets in American comics; we stand against it at our peril.