Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Mi Vida Locas
Physical State: headachey
Mental State: rubbery
Music: Jolie Holland - Escondida
Fashion sense: green t-shirt, sweats
Anyone who missed the Love and Rockets bandwagon in the 80s can finally catch up with this exhaustive 700+pg release from Fantagraphics. One of the best comics ever created (and still worthy of an onscreen version...still waiting for Terry Zwigoff to say yes to this). Here is a description from the Fantagraphics site that explains what this collection is about much better than I could. A definite cornerstone of any comic book fan's collection.
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Dear God, it’s here! The biggest book we’ve EVER published! One of the most humane, graceful and imaginatively inexhaustible artists in American popular culture, Jaime Hernandez has created in Locas one of the great American novels of the last 25 years, graphic or otherwise. Created over 15 years from 1981 to 1996 in the pages of the legendary comic book series Love & Rockets,Locas tells the story of Maggie Chascarrillo, a bisexual, Mexican-American woman attempting to define herself in a community rife with class, race and gender issues.
Maggie’s story begins in the early-1980s Southern California rock scene, when it was shifting from the excesses of the 1970s to the gritty basics of punk and new wave. Hardcore punk rock came to the fore, and the teenaged Maggie finds herself drawn to the anarchy, energy and diversity of the scene, which in the hands becomes a very real, habitable place populated with authentic human beings rather than stereotypes. She quickly befriends Hopey Glass, a feisty anti-authoritarian punkette who quickly becomes Maggie’s on-again, off-again lover and a constant presence in her life throughout the book.
Maggie comes of age in this tumultuous environment, with class and racial tension fueling the rising violence between punks and the already antagonistic LAPD. Hernandez’s naturalistic storytelling and mastery of body language and facial expressions, and his pitch-perfect depiction of barrio life all makes for an exhilarating read. His characters are infused with strength, intelligence, independence, imperfection, bitchiness, frailty, obsessiveness, and so much more.
Maggie evolves from an angry young punk into a mature woman. She encounters cruelties large and small and resigns herself to dashed hopes, shattered illusions, and even death with ironic acceptance. Locas presents an incomparable body of work in comics form, created over 20 years (which not coincidentally mirrors Maggie’s arc), and told with an uncompromising beauty and grace. As ALAN MOORE (author of From Hell and Watchmen) has put it, “Jaime’s art balances big white and black spaces to create a world of nuance in between, just as his writing balances our big human feelings and our small human trivias to generate its incredible emotional power. Quite simply, this is one of the twentieth centuries most significant comic creators at the peak of his form, with every line a wedding of classicism and cool.”
