Maggie and Hopey and Me

This is How You Lose Her
By Junot Diaz

Love and Rockets New Stories Vol. 1
By Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez

The Education of Hopey Glass
By Jaime Hernandez

The Love Bunglers
By Jaime Hernandez

Last year, I went to see a retrospective on the career of cartoonist Jaime Hernandez at the Minnesota College of Art and Design and it was like meeting up with old friends. When I was young, I loved the "Love and Rockets" comics created by Jaime and his brother Gilbert Hernandez,  and I especially loved Jaime's characters Maggie and Hopey.

I had been an X-Men-reading  comic book kid, but I lost interest in superheroes as I got older. I think I started reading "Love and Rockets" in high school, kept reading all through college and for some years after. By the mid-'90s, "Love and Rockets" and Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman" were the only comics I still read. After both series ceased publication in 1996, I went for years without setting foot in a comics store.

As I learned at MCAD, the Hernandez brothers began publishing new "Love and Rockets" comics some years back, and when Jaime returned to Maggie and Hopey and their friends, he had them age. They're now in their 40s. Hernandez's artwork is usually in a minimalistic, high-contrast black and white, but you can see that the characters' hair is getting grayer, their faces a little more wrinkled, a little wider.

This intrigued me. It's one thing to look at photos of your friends when they were young, it's another to catch up with your old friends when you haven't seen them for years, see how all of you have changed.

New Stories Vol. 1

I wanted to see how Maggie and Hopey were doing, so I started with "Love and Rockets New Stories Vol. 1." I'm sorry to say I wasn't into it. I liked Gilbert's stories in the past, but these new ones didn't do anything for me. As for Jaime's stories, they were well done, but not what I wanted. Maggie shows up, but the stories are mostly about a new character, Maggie's athletic young roommate, Angel, and her adventures with some female superheroes. Jaime brought some interesting new perspectives to the superhero genre, but I wanted realism.

This Is How You Lose Her

The next Jaime Hernandez book I tried was actually "This Is How You Lose Her," a book of connected short stories by Junot Diaz. I liked Diaz's "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," and was excited about when I found out that Jaime had provided illustrations for a special edition of the book. As it turned out, I wasn't really into it either.

The stories mostly concern Yunior, who was also a character in "Oscar Wao." In that novel, he was a young Dominican immigrant ladies' man who is secretly a nerd like Oscar. Between the two of them, Diaz gave a balanced view of different aspects of young masculinity. In this book, there's no break from Yunior and his obsessive lusting after women. By the end of the book, Yunior seems like a broken man. His sex addiction or whatever it is has left him feeling unlovable. Diaz paints a convincing character portrait here, but the stories struck me as repetitive.

The book does look great. Each story in the book tends to concentrate on one woman from Yunior's life, and in this edition each of these stories begins with Hernandez's illustration of that woman. The illustrations are all in Jaime's familiar style, and they stick pretty close to Diaz's descriptions. Of course, since Yunior is always talking in graphic detail about curvy women's bodies, this means you might look at Jaime's illustrations and think they're just cartoon pin-ups. I'm a straight man; I'm not going to complain about this, but it did worry me a little. I wondered, Was I a "Love and Rockets" fan when I was young only because I liked to ogle the pin-up art? Was I like Yunior?

The Education of Hopey Glass

That kind of question was at the heart of one of the stories in the next Jaime book I read, "The Education of Hopey Glass."

Hopey was Maggie's on-and-off best friend and on-and-off lover throughout the first run of "Love and Rockets." In its earliest issues, the pair of them were skinny teenage punk rockers in a surreal world (Maggie was a rocket mechanic) but Jaime's stories soon left the sci-fi and fantasy behind.

As Jaime's stories got more realistic, Maggie started to gain weight. ... Bear with me here. I know how touchy we all are about the portrayal of women in our entertainment, but this development was important. Comics are full of male fantasies of busty women in skimpy outfits, almost always created by males for a mostly male audience. It was a big deal for Jaime to make his central character deviate from the pin-up look.

Hopey, however, stayed the skinny punk rock girl. "The Education of Hopey Glass" finds her still thin, but her punk rock persona is working against her now that she's in her 40s. Tired of working at a bar and a boring office job, she takes a new job as a teacher's assistant for young kids. Here, she is terrified that the parents will flip out if they ever find out about her past.

The other main storyline in this book concerns Ray, who was Maggie's boyfriend in some of my favorite issues of the old comics. Here, they've been broken up for years, but Ray still longs for Maggie. At the same time, he's in lust with Vivian, a bombshell who could be the very definition of "hot mess." Ray's not as bad as Yunior, but here Jaime expertly shows off how stupid and obsessive men can be about relationships and sex, even when they're old enough to know better. At the same time, Jaime gets a chance to draw Vivian naked a lot, which is somehow simultaneously gratuitous and totally germane to the story.

The Love Bunglers

The latest collection, "The Love Bunglers" may be Jaime's masterpiece. Ray's story picks up where "The Education" left off. He's still palling around with Vivian and still longing for Maggie. Vivian, it turns out, is longing for Maggie too. (They may or may not have had a thing between them. Who knows what to believe when Vivian "Frogmouth" Solis is talking?) And then there's Reno, another guy who's pining after Maggie while also screwing Vivian. At one point Reno and Vivian even talk about Maggie while in the process of screwing each other!

All this obsessing over Maggie starts to seem a little silly after a while. You might ask, What is it that they all see in her? She's just a chubby 40-something ex-mechanic who manages an apartment building. But then again, if you've been reading all these stories about Maggie all these years (and a lot of people have been) maybe you're a little obsessed with her, too. So, the question is, what do you see in her?

Jaime's minimalistic storytelling style encourages this kind of devotion. He includes a lot of allusions to old characters and stories without explaining them, which is the kind of thing that can alienate new readers but rewards longtime readers with a feeling of intimacy with the characters. That said, even longtime readers may want to consult an online cheat sheet if, for instance, they can't remember who Julie Wree is. This intimacy is connected to the Latino-American setting in which most of the characters live.

Most of Jaime's characters are supposed to be second-generation Mexican Americans. While their ethnic heritage doesn't take center stage in the stories of their lives as adults, they all have Spanish surnames and occasionally throw Spanish words into conversation. That's a reminder to each other of the heritage they share. I'm an Anglo, but this works for me as another layer of intimacy between myself and the characters. I can only imagine what it does for readers who are themselves Latino.

But back to "The Love Bunglers": In addition to all Maggie's admirers, there's a creepy homeless guy hanging around Maggie's apartment building. Eventually, we find out it's actually Maggie's youngest brother, Calvin. Jaime goes into flashbacks to show their childhood together, when another neighborhood boy repeatedly raped Calvin.

As a father of two boys, I had a hard time getting through this brutal, sad story about a sexually abused child, but I also thought it was amazing to see how Jaime does it. Like the individual panels of his artwork, his storytelling style has grown so minimalistic over the years that he can jump back and forth years at a time from panel to panel just by showing little signifiers of the characters: Maggie gets taller, punkier, then chubbier and starts dressing somewhat more conservatively.With Calvin, Jaime shows one panel in which we see a closeup of his young face as he's being raped by the neighborhood boy; the next panel shows him in the same position, but his hair is longer and his expression has gone from blank fear and submissiveness to show the first sign of burning rage. We see how this abused young boy turned into the creepy homeless guy. His story also shows us how Calvin still sees his sister as a beacon of tenderness in his brutal life. In a more vague sense, it also shows us how the lingering effects of childhood trauma can get in the way of happiness even for people who didn't suffer as much as Calvin did.

Not all of "The Love Bunglers" is dark. Most of the story is about Ray and Maggie's fitful attempts to reconnect. There's a big twist toward the end, and I don't want to spoil it, so I'll just say that I didn't know until the final pages that I was going to love this book as much as I did.

But I should have known. After all, these characters are my old friends.