#7. Love & Rockets Vol. 20: Dicks & Deedees, by Jaime Hernandez
Dicks and Deedees: Vol. 20 of The Complete Love & Rockets, Jaime Hernandez
2003, Fantagraphics Books (Material originally published 1999-2002)
Where can I even begin about Love & Rockets?
Love & Rockets is... this art form that we don't have very much of in the United States, and maybe not anywhere else. And it's difficult to come up with analogies to explain it. What Love & Rockets is, is a creator-owned comic that has been written and drawn by the same two guys -- Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, a pair of brothers from Oxnard, CA (outside Los Angeles) -- ever since it first began publication in 1982. So it's kind of like a soap opera, except it's on paper. And it's a little like a superhero comic, except it is not about superheroes. And the most, the most important thing about it, in terms of distinguishing it from these other forms and media, is that it has never, never been a product created by committee. It is a story -- or, rather, a set of interrelated stories -- created by two authors, each one drawing and writing the histories and vignettes of his own characters, against the backdrop of the world and setting he created, moving forward and backward in time, deepening, developing, experimenting, extrapolating. So each half of this story, what it is, is most like a book -- a drawn one -- that has been being written for over twenty years.
(So, as a reviewer put it once, and I thought at the time he was being flip, but I think I see now his authentic meaning: what it is actually most like is life.)
Like a particular sort of life, of course, and its realistic-ness may be a matter of personal judgement. Most readers of Love & Rockets (L&R, we can call it for short) prefer one brother's work to the other's; which is probably only natural, given how different they are in tone and style and, as they've developed over the years, in content and theme as well. Let me tell you, for example, what I think about Gilbert Hernandez (who often signs as "Beto"). Gilbert Hernandez's stories started out in what some people were pleased to call a magic realist mode, set in a tiny town called Palomar ("Pigeon-Coop") somewhere in Central America. There were bañadoras, alcaldesas, curanderas and brujas, curses and eclipses, strange love and afflictions, earthquakes and inexplicable monkey infestations, philosophical debates, Indians, atheists, and devout Catholics, class differences and amalgamations, true love and unwanted pregnancies, schoolteachers and film projectionists, entrepreneurs and tortured artists, abandoned babies and abused children, earth goddesses and nihilistic theoreticians and serial murderers... and every so often a clueless white surfer would drift down on the waves from California, and hang out a little while.
I like Gilbert Hernandez's early stories a lot. In later years, many of his characters drifted up to Los Angeles and established lives in the United States, and his story nets began to grow wider, drawing in long-lost relatives and embarking on experiments in genre and mode, including frequent detours into what I can best call melodrama in a surrealist or Lynchian style. (Or maybe a Dan Clowes-ian style, although los bros. Hernandez predate him by a good decade.) I'm talking about mobsters, drug cartels, increasingly kinky and mind-twist-y sexual affairs, everyone's a lesbian until suddenly they're not, off-screen cancer and car crashes, Auntie Fritz becomes a cult fetish star... All this, plus an increasingly tangible fascination with the often unusually voluptuous or otherwise sexualized bodies of the female protagonists (Pipo loves wearing corsets! Ten-year-old Venus suddenly has baby-making hips!), coupled with a distinct trend toward emotional fragility and mental instability in those characters, has led to my decreasing sympathy toward and interest in Gilbert's work. I'm sure he's enjoying it, I'm sure somewhere out there some fans are appreciating it more than ever, but I'm not really enjoying it any more and I kind of wanted to stop reading before I had to come to the concrete conclusion that it is now creepy.
ANYway, all of that isn't even about the work of Jaime Hernandez, whose work I continue to love, in similar but ever-maturing ways to the way I loved it when I was thirteen, and who is the author of the book I actually came here to talk about right now.
Jaime Hernandez, like Gilbert, has been writing stories about the same central cast of characters since 1982. But Jaime's cast is smaller, and his work moves on a different scale: it's epic, but it's slower; it pays a whole lot of attention to details, and the characters' inner lives, their thinking and their attachments to one another, are the central theme of the work. Which, you know, is still fascinating after 25 years, and that is because Jaime is brilliant, and his characters are strangely, wonderfully, and very ordinarily alive. The central character is Maggie Chascarrillo, who was a "teeny tiny punky funky bottle throwing chingona" of about 18 when the series debuted. She lived, on and off, with her best friend and sometime lover, Hopey Glass, and the stories revolved around their lives, and those of their friends and family in the L.A. punk scene and in their mostly Mexican American neighborhood. The characters -- Daffy, Terry, Izzy, Penny, Ray, Doyle, Joey, Letty, Rena, Esther, Speedy, et alia -- compose a series of stories that were, for some time, referred to as "Locas" ("those crazy girls," in Spanish), and can be found compiled in big compendia from Fantagraphics with titles like "Locas in Love."
In those early days, the stories also featured a lot more of what you might call conventional adventure and SF elements. Maggie worked as a mechanic for a special company that got called away to fix rocket ships and things, and periodically she'd wind up a superheroine or in another universe or something, or called away on big international adventures. In time, though, there got to be fewer rockets. But there's still a lot of punk. And, somehow, there is still a ton of love.
How can I explain what the series is, now? Maggie is a woman in her mid-thirties. (Using the dispensation of comics, the characters age in about half real time. But they do age, and visibly.) She has gained a bunch of weight. She has been married and divorced. Her hair is dyed an unconvincing, and unflattering, blonde. Her clothing and hairstyle recently caused her to be mistaken by her own younger self (complex symbolism, you have to read it) for "somebody's mom." At last check, Maggie worked as the supervisor of a low-ish-rent apartment complex in Los Angeles, and her proudest accomplishment was getting the pool fixed.
How is any of this exciting?
As Maggie tries to explain to a new acquaintance in this volume, punk is something you never give up. "It's something that stays with you forever. It's like in everything you do. Like, I dunno, when you drink coffee in the morning..." "What," asks the jovial superWASP new acquaintance, "like stirring it with a switchblade?" "I can't explain it," says Maggie, shrugging and twiddling her thumbs.
I cannot explain why this series is so awesome. If I were a better textual analyst, if I were better with words, I might be able to. When I summarize the events of one of the early "Locas" books, it is easy to see why they are appealing: the sexy, innocent young punk girls sneak into a rock show! Get drunk at a party! Have a jealous fight! Spend a week in a thousand-room mansion and have an affair with a dethroned prince!
But here is what happens in Dicks & Deedees (spoilers ahead, actually, for those who may be following along and for whom this isn't just an example to make a point):
- Hopey works the polls.
- Maggie, Hopey, and Hopey's admirer Guy Goforth go for doughnuts.
- We learn that Penny's wealthy husband H.R. Costigan has died, that Hopey went to the funeral at Penny's instigation, that it was surreal, and that Hopey is mad. Hopey and Maggie argue and make up.
- (On TV: Norma, Costigan's ex-wife, sort-of-kidnaps her own daughter Negra to keep her away from Costigan's people. They go on a fun desert vacation, but eventually the police track them down.)
- Maggie has a dream, about sex and a race.
- We eventually get the whole backstory of Maggie's mysterious marriage to Tony Chase -- including extended flashbacks to the punk days -- in the setting of the divorce party, which is held at the hole in the wall where Hopey tends bar. (Hopey seems to be living with Rosie, "that girl from her work.")
- A flashback story about how Penny -- Beatríz, in those days -- met H.R. Costigan, her future husband.
- Ray D. (who seems to be Jaime's stand-in here) gets into an argument with some twenty-something kids about punk and rap.
- Doyle is back in town -- Ray D. runs into him "at the rack on Cahuenga checking out the big girl porn" -- and Doyle and Ray D. hang out, and Ray's obsession with a stripper named Velvet, or Vivian, whom Doyle has, naturally, previously had sex with, progresses a little further. And we learn some new things about Doyle.
That is it! Don't these people's lives sound so exciting? But they are, they are. And the most exciting parts aren't even the parts where the rich people come in around the edges, or Space Queen and Cheetah Torpeda and Penny put on their superhero latex for a page. They're -- what can I say? The most exciting parts are the panels where nobody talks. Or there is some architecture. Or someone stands way too still, without moving, for two panels or more. Or where, out of nowhere, all of a sudden, there it is: some love.
Love & Rockets, baby. It has been with me for twenty years. It is the greatest thing since Proust. It's my madeleine. It taught me everything I knew for many many years about punk, and the horizon line of Los Angeles, and little pieces of Spanish, and certain possibilities for a female character: the shapes of her body and the shape of her internal life, which it is possible, somehow, to render in ways that are alternately or even simultaneously unflattering, and also beautiful, because they are true. Everyone should read it! And I'm out.
ETA: I still have no idea what this volume's title means. Can anyone help me out?
2003, Fantagraphics Books (Material originally published 1999-2002)
Where can I even begin about Love & Rockets?
Love & Rockets is... this art form that we don't have very much of in the United States, and maybe not anywhere else. And it's difficult to come up with analogies to explain it. What Love & Rockets is, is a creator-owned comic that has been written and drawn by the same two guys -- Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, a pair of brothers from Oxnard, CA (outside Los Angeles) -- ever since it first began publication in 1982. So it's kind of like a soap opera, except it's on paper. And it's a little like a superhero comic, except it is not about superheroes. And the most, the most important thing about it, in terms of distinguishing it from these other forms and media, is that it has never, never been a product created by committee. It is a story -- or, rather, a set of interrelated stories -- created by two authors, each one drawing and writing the histories and vignettes of his own characters, against the backdrop of the world and setting he created, moving forward and backward in time, deepening, developing, experimenting, extrapolating. So each half of this story, what it is, is most like a book -- a drawn one -- that has been being written for over twenty years.
(So, as a reviewer put it once, and I thought at the time he was being flip, but I think I see now his authentic meaning: what it is actually most like is life.)
Like a particular sort of life, of course, and its realistic-ness may be a matter of personal judgement. Most readers of Love & Rockets (L&R, we can call it for short) prefer one brother's work to the other's; which is probably only natural, given how different they are in tone and style and, as they've developed over the years, in content and theme as well. Let me tell you, for example, what I think about Gilbert Hernandez (who often signs as "Beto"). Gilbert Hernandez's stories started out in what some people were pleased to call a magic realist mode, set in a tiny town called Palomar ("Pigeon-Coop") somewhere in Central America. There were bañadoras, alcaldesas, curanderas and brujas, curses and eclipses, strange love and afflictions, earthquakes and inexplicable monkey infestations, philosophical debates, Indians, atheists, and devout Catholics, class differences and amalgamations, true love and unwanted pregnancies, schoolteachers and film projectionists, entrepreneurs and tortured artists, abandoned babies and abused children, earth goddesses and nihilistic theoreticians and serial murderers... and every so often a clueless white surfer would drift down on the waves from California, and hang out a little while.
I like Gilbert Hernandez's early stories a lot. In later years, many of his characters drifted up to Los Angeles and established lives in the United States, and his story nets began to grow wider, drawing in long-lost relatives and embarking on experiments in genre and mode, including frequent detours into what I can best call melodrama in a surrealist or Lynchian style. (Or maybe a Dan Clowes-ian style, although los bros. Hernandez predate him by a good decade.) I'm talking about mobsters, drug cartels, increasingly kinky and mind-twist-y sexual affairs, everyone's a lesbian until suddenly they're not, off-screen cancer and car crashes, Auntie Fritz becomes a cult fetish star... All this, plus an increasingly tangible fascination with the often unusually voluptuous or otherwise sexualized bodies of the female protagonists (Pipo loves wearing corsets! Ten-year-old Venus suddenly has baby-making hips!), coupled with a distinct trend toward emotional fragility and mental instability in those characters, has led to my decreasing sympathy toward and interest in Gilbert's work. I'm sure he's enjoying it, I'm sure somewhere out there some fans are appreciating it more than ever, but I'm not really enjoying it any more and I kind of wanted to stop reading before I had to come to the concrete conclusion that it is now creepy.
ANYway, all of that isn't even about the work of Jaime Hernandez, whose work I continue to love, in similar but ever-maturing ways to the way I loved it when I was thirteen, and who is the author of the book I actually came here to talk about right now.
Jaime Hernandez, like Gilbert, has been writing stories about the same central cast of characters since 1982. But Jaime's cast is smaller, and his work moves on a different scale: it's epic, but it's slower; it pays a whole lot of attention to details, and the characters' inner lives, their thinking and their attachments to one another, are the central theme of the work. Which, you know, is still fascinating after 25 years, and that is because Jaime is brilliant, and his characters are strangely, wonderfully, and very ordinarily alive. The central character is Maggie Chascarrillo, who was a "teeny tiny punky funky bottle throwing chingona" of about 18 when the series debuted. She lived, on and off, with her best friend and sometime lover, Hopey Glass, and the stories revolved around their lives, and those of their friends and family in the L.A. punk scene and in their mostly Mexican American neighborhood. The characters -- Daffy, Terry, Izzy, Penny, Ray, Doyle, Joey, Letty, Rena, Esther, Speedy, et alia -- compose a series of stories that were, for some time, referred to as "Locas" ("those crazy girls," in Spanish), and can be found compiled in big compendia from Fantagraphics with titles like "Locas in Love."
In those early days, the stories also featured a lot more of what you might call conventional adventure and SF elements. Maggie worked as a mechanic for a special company that got called away to fix rocket ships and things, and periodically she'd wind up a superheroine or in another universe or something, or called away on big international adventures. In time, though, there got to be fewer rockets. But there's still a lot of punk. And, somehow, there is still a ton of love.
How can I explain what the series is, now? Maggie is a woman in her mid-thirties. (Using the dispensation of comics, the characters age in about half real time. But they do age, and visibly.) She has gained a bunch of weight. She has been married and divorced. Her hair is dyed an unconvincing, and unflattering, blonde. Her clothing and hairstyle recently caused her to be mistaken by her own younger self (complex symbolism, you have to read it) for "somebody's mom." At last check, Maggie worked as the supervisor of a low-ish-rent apartment complex in Los Angeles, and her proudest accomplishment was getting the pool fixed.
How is any of this exciting?
As Maggie tries to explain to a new acquaintance in this volume, punk is something you never give up. "It's something that stays with you forever. It's like in everything you do. Like, I dunno, when you drink coffee in the morning..." "What," asks the jovial superWASP new acquaintance, "like stirring it with a switchblade?" "I can't explain it," says Maggie, shrugging and twiddling her thumbs.
I cannot explain why this series is so awesome. If I were a better textual analyst, if I were better with words, I might be able to. When I summarize the events of one of the early "Locas" books, it is easy to see why they are appealing: the sexy, innocent young punk girls sneak into a rock show! Get drunk at a party! Have a jealous fight! Spend a week in a thousand-room mansion and have an affair with a dethroned prince!
But here is what happens in Dicks & Deedees (spoilers ahead, actually, for those who may be following along and for whom this isn't just an example to make a point):
- Hopey works the polls.
- Maggie, Hopey, and Hopey's admirer Guy Goforth go for doughnuts.
- We learn that Penny's wealthy husband H.R. Costigan has died, that Hopey went to the funeral at Penny's instigation, that it was surreal, and that Hopey is mad. Hopey and Maggie argue and make up.
- (On TV: Norma, Costigan's ex-wife, sort-of-kidnaps her own daughter Negra to keep her away from Costigan's people. They go on a fun desert vacation, but eventually the police track them down.)
- Maggie has a dream, about sex and a race.
- We eventually get the whole backstory of Maggie's mysterious marriage to Tony Chase -- including extended flashbacks to the punk days -- in the setting of the divorce party, which is held at the hole in the wall where Hopey tends bar. (Hopey seems to be living with Rosie, "that girl from her work.")
- A flashback story about how Penny -- Beatríz, in those days -- met H.R. Costigan, her future husband.
- Ray D. (who seems to be Jaime's stand-in here) gets into an argument with some twenty-something kids about punk and rap.
- Doyle is back in town -- Ray D. runs into him "at the rack on Cahuenga checking out the big girl porn" -- and Doyle and Ray D. hang out, and Ray's obsession with a stripper named Velvet, or Vivian, whom Doyle has, naturally, previously had sex with, progresses a little further. And we learn some new things about Doyle.
That is it! Don't these people's lives sound so exciting? But they are, they are. And the most exciting parts aren't even the parts where the rich people come in around the edges, or Space Queen and Cheetah Torpeda and Penny put on their superhero latex for a page. They're -- what can I say? The most exciting parts are the panels where nobody talks. Or there is some architecture. Or someone stands way too still, without moving, for two panels or more. Or where, out of nowhere, all of a sudden, there it is: some love.
Love & Rockets, baby. It has been with me for twenty years. It is the greatest thing since Proust. It's my madeleine. It taught me everything I knew for many many years about punk, and the horizon line of Los Angeles, and little pieces of Spanish, and certain possibilities for a female character: the shapes of her body and the shape of her internal life, which it is possible, somehow, to render in ways that are alternately or even simultaneously unflattering, and also beautiful, because they are true. Everyone should read it! And I'm out.
ETA: I still have no idea what this volume's title means. Can anyone help me out?