Author: Andrew Wheeler

Everyone gets older, in any world that tries to be real. Most comic-book worlds don’t try — how old is Peter Parker now? And how old was he in 1966?

Jaime Hernandez’s comics world is real — or as real as it wants to be, with only minor occasional eruptions of superheroes and prosolar mechanics. And that world tends to move in forward in time in fits and starts: there will be a clump of stories with his characters at one point in their life, coming out over two or five or six years but covering maybe a month or two of their lives, and then the next clump will begin after that, with another few years passed almost without noticing.

That’s how we live in our own lives — at least how I do. Everything seems to be basically the same for a while, with years that are all pretty much the same rhythms, and then you look up and everything is suddenly different.

Esperanza  collects comics from the second Love and Rockets series, from roughly 2000 through 2007. I could say that this book sees the focus snap back to Maggie and Hopey — which is semi-true, since there’s a long story sequence for each of them here — after the stories in Penny Century, which spread further out into the cast. But Ray D. is just as prominent here as he was in Penny Century: there, he was mooning over Penny; here’s he’s in a complicated relationship with “the Frogmouth,” a stripped named Vivian who also seems to have an unrealized crush on Maggie. Penny herself doesn’t show up as often this time out, true: she drops in and out of the Locas world regularly over the years, as if only visiting it from her own, more glamorous and exciting universe.

And there’s two major new characters here, both younger than the aging Locas: Vivian “the Frogmouth” and Angel Rivera, whose name we’re not actually told directly at any point. So Maggie is still the center of this world — Vivian has something like a crush on her; Ray D. is still semi-obsessed with her; Angel lives in the apartment complex she manages; and we all know about Hopey — but it’s a large world, full of people with cross-connections.

Esperanza starts off with the ten-part story “Maggie,” only briefly interrupted by a Ray D. appearance. That’s more reductive than the book really is, though: all of the stories in Esperanza are telling the same overall story. Some are Maggie stories, some are Hopey stories, some are Ray D. stories, and some even more exotic, but these are all people in the same circle and the stories are all placed in time. It’s all one piece in the end: it all comes together.

Maggie is still managing that broken-down apartment complex in LA, blonde and chubby in what’s probably her early forties. She’s still sabotaging herself, still helping Izzy manage with her minor-author fame, still circling Hopey, who is tending bar nearby and working in some kind of office. (If there was ever any explanation of what Hopey did for close to ten years in that office with Guy Goforth, I missed it.)

Vivian — a bombshell of a woman of twenty-five or so who generates trouble just by being in the vicinity — is the motivating force for most of what happens in Esperanza. She dates Ray D.; she almost has an affair with Maggie; she’s caught up in various low-life gangsters and ex-boyfriends who don’t realize they’re ex. And she can spark a fight just by standing there.

The rest of the plot is set in motion by Hopey’s old enemy Julie Wree, whose mean-girl circle is still intact, still more successful than our heroines, and running a popular public-access TV show, where Izzy appears once and Vivian is the “ring girl,” coming through boxing-style in a bathing suit holding large cards.

Well, there’s a lot of incidents here that aren’t set in motion by anything in particular. Hernandez’s characters are restless and unsatisfied and rarely happy with themselves — and that drives them to do a lot of what they do, in this book and in all of his other work.

The back half of Esperanza semi-alternates stories about Vivian and Ray D.’s messy relationship with the “Day By Day With Hopey” series. Hopey is studying to be a teacher’s assistant — we don’t see her do much studying, but we see her leave the old office job and start the new job — and it looks like she’s finally growing up, finally leaving behind the reflexive shit-stirring that was so central to her early punk personality. (You can see Vivian as the same kind of person, only more so: Hopey fomented chaos deliberately, Vivian is an endless source of chaos in herself.) But she’s also having a slow break-up with her live-in girlfriend Rosie while flirting with saying “I love you” to Maggie, chasing the cute girl fitting her for glasses and having a friends-with-benefits thing going on with yet another woman, Grace.

This is a world: these people all know each other. Some of them like each other, some of them love each other, some of them want to fuck each other, some of them want to kill each other. Actually, “some” in the previous sentence might be understating it: the thing about Hernandez’s cast is that they all feel like that to all of the rest of them, more or less, at different times. (Except Julie Wree: everyone hates that bitch.) Epseranza has stories from the time when some of them are starting to think that they might be getting a little to old to be this crazy all the time.

Maybe they’re right. But I also notice that Hernandez has been bringing in newer, younger women all of the time — Gina and Danita previously, Vivian and Angel most prominently here — so that, if his old cast ever does grow up too much, he has more Locas to keep it all going.

I wouldn’t worry about that: nobody ever really grows up. We just get old, faster than we expected. And we’re all still crazy: that’s why we read Jaime Hernandez, to show us the ways we are, so we can laugh and recognize our own craziness.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

It can be hard to praise things for being small without sounding condescending.

Oh, what a quaint house!

Aren’t you a darling little man!

What an adorable book!

I’m going to try to avoid that pitfall today. But what I like best about this graphic novel by writer Jamie S. Rich and artist Megan Levens is that it’s not trying to do too much. Ares & Aphrodite  tells the story of one couple — well, one potential couple — and how they got together, if, eventually, they do get together enough for that to be a story.

In a world of comics that seem to want to be widescreen media-spanning epics, Ares & Aphrodite aspires to be a really good small movie, the kind made for a TV channel that churlish men avoid or that plays in that one theater two towns over. It’s about two people, their professional connection, and a low-stakes bet they make with each other.

Will Ares is the top divorce lawyer in town. Gigi Averelle runs Aphrodite’s, the most exclusive wedding-planning service in town. “Town,” in this case, is Los Angeles, which would normally mean both of these two are massively important, with egos to match — but they’re both awfully normal and down-to-earth. Both seem to be somewhere in their thirties: old enough to have succeeded, old enough to want something better, young enough to still have time ahead of them.

Evans Beatty is Ares’s current big client — and has been several times in the past. He’s a big Hollywood producer, currently disentangling himself from a writer to marry Carrie Cartwright, the currently hot teen-queen actress. (Evans looks to have a good three decades on Carrie, but Ares & Aphrodite does its best to ignore that and focus on their individual personal issues. I thought that was fine; others may find it harder to ignore.)

Evans is Will’s client; Carrie is Gigi’s. So they’re currently running into each other a lot. Will asked Gigi to go on a date with him — she shot him down. So he proposed a bet: if Evans and Carrie do get married, she’ll go out with him. And Gigi accepts.

That’s the central thread of the plot — one lawyer, one wedding planner, one too impetuous aging producer, one not-as-sweet-as-she-seems ingenue, and a few friends and hangers-on. It ends at the big wedding, at a mansion by the sea. And their bet is decided there.

They don’t battle ninjas; they don’t even save a movie from ruin. They’re people living their lives and doing their jobs — and those jobs are mostly giving honest, professional advice, to help their clients achieve what they want in the best way possible.

It’s a sweet story, no bigger than it has to be, courtesy of Rich. Levens makes the art equally clean and transparent, like we’re looking through a window into these people’s lives, and this is how they must look at any moment.

Ares & Aphrodite is small — but, as the old saying goes, it’s also perfectly formed. We can always use more stories like that.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Last week, I looked at what Jaime Hernandez did right after the ending of the first Love and Rockets comics series in 1996. At the time, that could have been anything: completely different comics work, gallery paintings, film work, becoming a hermit in darkest Upper Slower Slobbovia. But, as it turned out, Jaime continued the same story sequence in basically the same tone and style in a series of related comics series.

And his brother Gilbert did the same thing: Luba and Her Family  collects comics from mostly 1995 through 2001 (with one 2011 story up front just to confuse bibliographers of the future) that originally appeared in floppy form in Luba and Luba’s Comics and Stories and Measles and New Love. It follows most obviously from the latter clump of stories in Human Diastrophism and from the two graphic novels in Beyond Palomar; the focus is on Luba and her sisters Fritzi and Petra, and their extended families in Southern California — particularly on Petra’s precocious daughter Venus.

They’re not stories set in Palomar, but they’re stories of that now-extended cluster of people with connections to Palomar. Besides the cluster of stories about Venus, there’s also the short serial “Luba in America,” presented here in something like its original serialized form, each installment interspersed between other stories, though feeling like it was originally going to be longer. And the rest of the stories are less defined: they’re mostly about Luba’s daughters, particularly TV-show-host Doralis, and there’s a minor thread running through about how nearly all of them are lesbians and haven’t managed to tell their mother yet. But, mostly, they’re Gilbert family stories: each showing another moment or series of moments, another set of interactions in this big family full of prickly complex people, and how they’re bouncing off each other this time.

The Venus stories are probably the most interesting and distinct: Hernandez had been doing complicated-family stories for twenty years at this point, and he was definitely good at them, but the outlines and details were familiar. Venus, on the other hand, was a smart kid — probably nine or ten in these stories — in a rich-kid LA setting, equally concerned with her friends, her family, and comic books. She gives us a different perspective on her family — particularly her deeply selfish mother — in an almost unreliable-narrator way; Venus sees or is close to things that we’re not sure she understands or can process correctly. Venus herself mostly keeps a light tone: she’s young, and deliberately happy, and surrounded by a big loving (sometimes loving too much with the wrong people, but that’s a different point) family. But the reader is presumably older and more experienced than she is: we see and understand things she glosses over.

But, mostly, this is middle-period Hernandez: he’s moved beyond the magical realism-tinted village stories of the early days to something more traditionally soap-operatic, with the central elements sexual affairs and old secrets and family ties. These particular stories are all domestic, without the gangster flourishes of Poison River or the noir stylings of his later “movie” books of this century. This book might be the best example of that kind of pure domestic Gilbert Hernandez story available now, and close to the beginning of the stories of these people.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

You might think the stories in this book would feel like a break, but they don’t.

Penny Century  collects work from Jaime Hernandez from the great Love and Rockets hiatus: from right after the end of the first comics series (in 1996) through 2002, just after the start of the second series. One might assume that the first series ended because the creators — Jaime and his brother Gilbert — wanted to shake the status quo up, and try different things.

But, for the evidence here, that wasn’t true on the Jaime side of the book: what he did immediately afterward was Whoa, Nellie!, a short graphic novel about the cluster of his usual characters connected to the world of women’s wrestling, and then immediately after the single-issue “Maggie and Hopey Color Fun Special,” starring his two most central and popular characters. (And then the solo series Penny Century, which focused slightly more on the title character, as this book does.)

Of course, these days — twenty years later — we just see Penny Century as the fourth collection reprinting Jaime’s Locas stories. There’s no break, and we don’t expect there to be one. Maggie and Hopey reunited at the end of the previous volume, which means…they’re mostly still living separate lives in different places in this book.

Jaime Hernandez might be a romantic in some ways — he does write great stories about the ways people love each other — but not the way we usually mean that term. Maggie and Hopey lived together, and had a relationship, for a short time when they were both very young, and have been separated for a good decade at this point. In fiction, we tend to assume that means they’re “meant” for each other, and that they’ll be deeply in love when they meet. But in a real world, it just means they each once was a different person, and those people were close.

And let’s not forget that one of the core traits of all of Jaime’s major characters — from Maggie to Doyle, from Ray D. to Speedy, from Hopey to Izzy — is that they all find ways to doubt and sabotage themselves. (The one singular exception is Penny Century, maybe because she resolutely refuses to be Beatriz Garcia, the person she would sabotage. That also makes her the most surface-y of Jaime’s characters, with quirks like repeatedly running away from her billionaire husband and wishing for superpowers substituting for more substantial flaws.)

That’s made clearer than ever in two of the long stories towards the end of this book: “The Race,” a Maggie dream sequence focusing on her worries and inadequacies, and “Everybody Loves Me, Baby,” the flashback-filled story of Maggie’s marriage and divorce to a guy from the old punk days. That self-destructive impulse may be most obvious, and most pervasive, in Maggie, but maybe that’s just because she’s the central character.

If you want to be really reductive, Locas is the story of people making choices — often without even realizing it was a choice — that turn out badly in the long run. Not genre fiction badly — real world badly. Like missing a step here and missing a step there and finding yourself older than you thought and without any of the things you thought you wanted. That’s where Jaime’s characters live: in that feeling, in that world.

They’re happy enough, like any of us: that’s what life is like. And Jaime Hernandez is one of the best at showing that feeling, that kind of life: his people feel like friends we’ve known all our lives, or like ourselves. Penny Century collects an era that’s not talked about a lot — not like “The Death of Speedy” for a decade before or the “Browntown” from a decade later — but it shows those people in the middle of those lives in all of their glory. And, as always, he draws like a dream.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

It’s a welcome surprise to see a story wrap up in two books. Oh, there are still single-volume stories, even in these fallen days. But anything that goes longer than that seems to stretch on forever, or at least to go much longer than anyone expected when it began.

Not here, though.

Knife’s Edge  is the second half of the historical adventure graphic novel that began in Compass South ; the story began in the first book and conclusively ends here. Everything is wrapped up, all of the details mean something, and it ends the way Oscar Wilde said fiction should.

It may seem like faint praise to single out writer Hope Larson and artists Rebecca Mock for actually ending their story well the way they said it would, but it really isn’t: endings are much harder than beginnings. And doing it in a thematically appropriate way — this story is about a set of tween twins in 1859, and I won’t spoil all of the doublings and dual roles in the series — is even better.

We begin with a flashback, which may be confusing: I didn’t realize it was a flashback at first. But then Cleo and Alex Dodge’s father is shanghaied, and we all realize where we are. They were reunited with their father at the end of Compass South [1], and now they’re learning the backstory: who their mysterious mother and father are, since Mr. Dodge is not actually their father by blood. (Though he’s raised them since infancy.)

The twins are in possession of a compass and knife that, together, are the key to finding a lost pirate treasure, somewhere in the far South Pacific. And they are on a ship whose captain is willing to help search for that treasure, for a cut of it. But the pirates are not all safely dead with their treasures, and the antagonists from the first book come back with a faster ship and an eye for vengeance.

Before Knife’s Edge is over, we’ll have thrilling stern chases at sea, foot chases through a bustling town, sword training and fights, shipwrecks and betrayals, surprising allies and enemies, and a climactic visit to that treasure trove that will solve all of the plot complications in a moment.

We also have a very preliminary, tentative love story, though only for Cleo — there are very few women on board ships in the mid-19th century, so Alex will have to wait until he’s on the right shore.

It’s all presented in mostly bright, colorful art by Mock, using chapter heads and pages with wide white margins for a classic adventure-story feel. The people are real and historically honest; Cleo pushes against what a woman’s supposed to do in her time without being a superwoman, and she gets treated in complicated ways by the men around her — because she’s twelve on top of everything else.

Knife’s Edge doesn’t just end the story of Compass South; it ends that story well, which is more important. This series will mostly been seen in school and local libraries in the YA section, but it’s worth seeking out for adults who like historical adventures — it’s not quite swashbuckling, because it’s more realistic than that, but it does have excellent adventure and intrigue on the high seas.

[1] Not to give anything away, but there’s a nicely matching similar scene, with somewhat different characters at the end of this book.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Any place with mysterious secrets has a backstory, by definition. And, the longer the creators take to roll out that backstory, the more convoluted and detailed it gets, with flashbacks and strange characters from the past and previously unknown giant mountains that are retroactively declared to have always been right over there.

Lumberjanes is full of secrets, at least at this point. (I’m running several years behind; maybe all the secrets have been answered and the comic is all-friendship-all-the-time now. But I doubt it.) Issues 14 through 17 of the comic, originally published in 2015 and collected the next year as Lumberjanes, Vol. 4: Out of Time , has most of the stuff I somewhat sarcastically described in that first paragraph and more.

It also has a lot of all-friendship-all-the-time, since that’s the core of the series. There’s even a boy who gets in on the friendship, at least some of the time, possibly because he doesn’t feel quite at home with full-on boyishness. Whether all-friendship-all-the-time is available to male-identified persons is still an open question at this point.

If you’re not familiar with Lumberjanes, I can direct you to my posts on the previous three books: one and two and three . They’re probably not the very worst explanations of Lumberjanes online, at least.

But I do have to repeat, as I have every time I’ve written about Lumberjanes, that this is a series about young women (some people might call them girls) and their friendships. I am not now, and have never been a young woman, and I’ve been known to be grumpy about friendships.

So Lumberjanes is cute and positive and full of lovely art and smart and inclusive (of female persons) and adventurous and has interesting Deep Secrets that are being gradually revealed, but it’s a book for young women and the adults those young women grew into. I like it, and I think Lumberjanes is happy enough that people like me like it, but that’s not why it’s here.

That is fine. That is better than fine; too much of the history of art has been made for people very much like me, and is still made for people like me today. What I’m saying is that you might want to get a female person’s take on Lumberjanes. For just one example, can I point you to Johanna Draper Carlson , who is also much more up-to-date on reading all things Lumberjanes than I am?

Lumberjanes, as always, is written by Noelle Stevenson and Shannon Watters, and all of the art here is by regular series artist Brooke Allen. There are also now a couple of novels written by Mariko Tamaki for those of you allergic to the comics format but still possessed with a burning desire to experience the glory that is Lumberjanes.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

If you can read the stories of a whole bunch of women pioneers — such as the ones in the book I’m about to discuss — without being at least a little bit annoyed at men in general, frankly there’s something wrong with you.

And you can take “men in general” as expansively as you want, o dudes who insist “man” is always and ever a perfectly good word to mean “humanity.” There’s enough shittiness and negativity in the world for at least two genders.

But damn did every single advance for women come because a woman demanded it, fought for it, and faced down multiple men who insisted that not only shouldn’t she do that, it was physically impossible for her to do it, so she should just go back her knitting and housekeeping.

(And if I hear a single “not all men,” I’m going to smack you so hard. Nothing is all anything, you bozos.)

On the other hand, reading a bunch of stories like these is also energizing — sure, a lot of horrible people tried to stop nearly every woman in the book, but horrible people are ubiquitous (insert reference to the political figure of your choice here), but every one of these women did the thing they’re known for, despite that opposition.

So, yeah, people in general are the worst, but some individual people are the best — that’s the story of humanity from the beginning.

Penelope Bagieu has thirty individual stories to tell in Brazen — all individual people, all women, and generally of the best. (There are some debatable candidates here, like the awesome but also pretty bloody Wu Zetian, Empress of China.)

Each story gets a title page, a three-to-seven page comic (nine-panel grid) telling the story of her life in as much detail necessary for the story Bagieu has in mind, and then a lovely two-page spread, more evocative than purely illustrative, of the essence of what make that woman great.

The comics are good: text-heavy, but snappy and quick-moving, setting the scene for each of these women in their very different places and times. But those spreads are even better: if there was a gallery show of them, I’d want to go to see them large and in person.

Bagieu casts a wide net here, from modern US and Europe (Giorgina Reid, Betty Davis — yes, that’s the correct spelling, it’s not the woman you’re thinking of — Tove Jansson, Christine Jorgensen, Temple Grandin, Jesselyn Radack, Katia Krafft) to slightly more historical figures from the same places (the amazingly kick-ass Nellie Bly, Hedy Lamarr [1], Clementine Delait, Margaret Hamilton, Josephina van Gorkum, Delia Akeley) to women from further afield in time and space (Nzinga, Lozeb, Wu Zetian, Agnodice, Leymah Gbowee, Sonita Alizadeh). Unless you have really eclectic knowledge and tastes, some of them — maybe a lot of them — will be unfamiliar to you, which is a big plus.

Every story taught me something I didn’t know, which may say more about me than the book. Every one was zippy and fun: Bagieu is focusing on women who succeeded at something. (No Joan of Arc here, for example — the closest thing to a martyr is Las Mariposas, three rebel sisters from the Dominican Republic in the 1950s.)

It’s all true, it’s all good comics, Bagieu’s closing spreads for each woman are wonderfully iconic, and you might learn something, too. Brazen is a total win all around.

[1] True story: recently, in a work meeting, the ice-breaker question was “What Hollywood star, past or present, would you want to have dinner with?” I was having trouble thinking of anyone until I remembered Hedy: she was my easy choice.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.