ABlog

I’ve got a mad passionate crush on a text: Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories, A Love and Rockets Book, by Jaime Hernandez (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books, 2004). I’d seen occasional references to the Hernandez Brothers’ graphic narratives over the years; Junot Diaz’s mention of them as influences on his own notions of character in an interview that ran in the December, 2005 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle finally pushed me to read the work. I thought I might as well go whole hog, so I checked out this 704-page selection of some of the stories published by Jaime Hernandez between 1983 and 1995. I was glad I went macro, because this volume allowed me to get a good sense of two major dimensions of Hernandez’s accomplishment: the labyrinthine nature of his narrative technique—stories branching endlessly into other stories, all connected by the complex lives and loves of recurring characters—and the ways in which he, unlike many “comic strip” authors, depicts his characters’ movement through time.

What holds this edited book together is the epic love story of two young (and eventually not so young) women: Maggie, aka Margaret, aka Perla, aka Perlita, aka Shrimp, aka Maggot, aka Magpie—officially Margarita Chascarillo, a Mexican-American rocket mechanic from a working-class Southern California community called Hoppers; and Hopey, aka Esperanza, aka Esperanzita Glass, a half-Colombian-American guitar player in a series of punk bands (or is it a single band with name changes?): The Missiles of October, Ape Sex, Las Monjas Asesinas (The Murdering Nuns). I’m crazy about the fact that these women and the characters they interact with, fall in love with, work with, fight with are almost all working-class survivors (some, like poor macho Speedy, don’t survive) actively engaged in hacking some sort of creative fulfillment, individual identity and emotional satisfaction out of a landscape filled with unemployment, dead-end jobs, gang violence, family fragmentation, racism, and gender injustice. I’m crazy about the fact that Hernandez manages, over the years, to be so “political” in the context of stories about characters who seem to be trying to survive in a completely “private” realm, trying to make their lives outside of history. (Examples include Maggie’s early embroilment in a revolution on a fictional Third World island; a wordless panel that shows a group of lumpen types languishing outside a factory labeled “Costigan Industries”—H.R. Costigan being the fantastically wealthy horned gentleman who is the aged, impotent husband of Maggie and Hopey’s bubbly friend Penny Century, aka Beatriz Garcia; and the characters’ periodic conflicts with the law and the police.) I’m crazy about the fact that Hernandez depicts the eroticism of social networks, where the charge that ostensibly occurs between two people gets diffused over the entire surface; this enterprise is furthered by the “bisexual” nature of his narrative, although identity categories are rarely invoked and when they are it’s usually by some clueless or bigoted character who’s trying to assign a label for the sake of his or her own comfort and convenience.

Most of all, though, I’m enthralled with Hernandez’s success in creating an epic love story between two women. And I’m enchanted by the fact that he embeds this story in larger worlds of women—though probably it’s a mistake to write about these two occurrences as though they were separate, for surely it’s the complementarity of female networks (“lesbian” and not) that creates the total impact. We “invest” so hugely in the love story because it crystallizes the implications of the intense female interactions occurring around it (whether in the back story of the girl gang called las Widows, the rivalries of the women wrestlers Rena Titañon and Vicki Glori—Vicki is Maggie’s aunt and surrogate mother--or the interactions of the workers in the strip bar where Maggie’s sometime friend Danita shakes her gorgeous tits, the visual objectification of which Hernandez comments on through the character Ray’s efforts to paint them).

In my experience, this is often exactly how erotic relationships between women do occur: as a kind of crystallization of a broader erotic impulse generated through what in social science-speak might be called homosocial networks. Even rarer at this point in our cultural history than convincing or involving (I refuse to say “believable”) depictions of love and sex between two women are convincing and involving representations of this eroticized female world; in other words, representations of the possibilities for women to be at the center of each other’s emotional and practical experience (and, by extension, at the heart of an enthralling narrative). In my reading, Hernandez has achieved this—paradoxically not at all by excluding male characters from the frame, but by including them and showing their ultimate lack of relevative importance. While reading the 700+ pages I found myself thinking repeatedly of Barbara Smith’s famous claim in her essay “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” that Toni Morrison’s Sula might be read as a “lesbian novel” because of its prioritization of Nel and Sula’s friendship as the core connection of their lives—despite the breach caused by Sula’s sleeping with Nel’s husband. Locas, like Sula, depicts a tragic separation, a rupture that only clarifies for the reader the intensity of its protagonists’ pair bond; in this case, too, the breach has much to do with one character's attractions to men. Maggie is drawn to a series of hunks: rocket mechanic Rand(y) Race, the doomed Speedy, and her eventual live-in boyfriend, a hapless visual artist named Ray.

In Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life, Marjorie Garber noted the versatile possibilities of the “bisexual plot,” one that turns on the suspense generated by the need to make an erotic choice between a man and a woman. Often, as in D.H. Lawrence’s “The Fox” or Henry James’s The Bostonians, a tale that depicts a woman making such a choice paints the second woman as a pathetic dyke destined to lose the competition because she can’t possibly compete with a real man (and/or with Patriarchy). How does Jaime Hernandez avoid this, aside from the obvious plot element of reuniting Maggie and Hopey at the end of Locas (they’re shown being driven away in the back of a police car, Maggie’s head resting tenderly on Hopey’s shoulder, in a sequence that seems to be a “revision” of an earlier dream of Maggie’s)?

As noted above, I think it’s largely by giving such authority to his world of women. “Authority” does not mean immunity or impunity; many of his most intense scenes are of conflict between women, whether it’s Vicki Glori stealing the wrestling title from Rena Titañon by using an illegal maneuver, Hopey howling in dismay when she’s broke on the road and her mother rejects her phone appeal for help, a group of girls accosting Maggie’s sister Esther in the bathroom (“Someone tells me some girl named Chascarillo has been hitting on my boyfriend. Are you her?”) or the final sequence in which a disapproving little old lady slaps Maggie’s cheek in enforcement of society’s judgment against “whores.”

At the same time, Hernandez depicts intense attraction and cooperation between women, often not (exactly) of a sexual nature. At different times, sybaritic Penny Century (Maggie and Hopey's friend from high school days) and mentally unbalanced Isabel (Izzy) bolster the love epic through their fixation on the iconic image of Maggie and Hopey as a couple: Penny schemes to reunite the two, even locking them in a closet while they sort out their differences, and Isabel, who’s an obsessive personality to begin with, becomes fixated on the two of them and starts plastering the walls of her home with pictures of Hopey taken from milk carton “missing person” ads. These (apparently heterosexual) characters’ belief in the legend aids the reader’s belief that the two women have a stronger, more intriguing, and perhaps more “fated” bond than anything offered by the “normal” life that Maggie sporadically hankers for.

Visually, Hernandez’s depictions of the women characters offer endless fascination. Early in the volume, Maggie is depicted as a classic high-breasted, small-waisted, cartoon ingénue (who's also highly endowed in the nalgas department). Soon she gains a considerable amount of weight, looks considerably older, and struggles with body image. Hernandez continually works between reality and the ideal: a procession of secondary characters comes along to supply adequate amounts of feminine pulchritude even as the somewhat faded Maggie continues to occupy center stage. “Maggie the Mechanic” (385-386) cleverly plays with comic strip conventions and Hernandez’s own ambivalence about idealized imagery in a short sequence that returns us to young Maggie’s glamour days of rocket-fixing and romance with Rand Race; at the end, we see that the “real” Maggie, dumpy and poorly-dressed, sitting on a bus, has been reading this tale in a comic book which she tosses disgustedly over her shoulder.

It would be rewarding to do a close, frame-by-frame analysis of the various ways in which so many of the stories tell a visual tale of women’s centrality—whether it’s through the long sequence devoted to Esther’s confrontation in the women’s room (starting p. 311); through the various depictions of Maggie and Hopey together, which are usually restrained in their hints of physical intimacy but eloquent about emotion; or through wonderful cameos like that of Ray’s gaunt-faced, curler-studded mom who's shown vacuuming around him as he lies indolently asleep on the couch, or of that Penny Century’s buff butch bodyguard/butlerette, Demoña. Hernandez’s women, whether glamorous, raffish, or eroded (like the haunted Izzy), are generally far more interesting to look at than the men (though he does give the male characters a few visually stunning, emotionally powerful moments: the ravaged visage of the wrestler El Diablo Blanco after he finally takes off his mask and reveals himself to Danita and her little boy, or the bitter, do-rag-framed dignity on the face of Danita’s violent, abusive ex as the police lead him away).

As for the characters’ spoken language, dialogue is generally serviceable rather than scintillating; after all, these characters are mechanics, punk rockers, topless dancers, wrestlers, starving artists—not literary types. Yet the stories' play with a trope of constant renaming (as the women give each other pet names, resurrect old monickers--Maggie returning to her roots with "Perlita"--and reinvent Hopey’s band) shows them expressing intimacy, exercising creativity, articulating a bicultural consciousness, and generally striving to reshape their world on a verbal level as vigorously as they do in the Wham! Bam! Pow! arena of cartoon conventions for expressing physical action.

Note: An interview with Jaime Hernandez that focuses on the publication of Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories may be found at www.salon.com/books/int/2004/12/16/jaime/index2.html
For an interesting review of a newer book, Ghost of Hoppers, see www.salon.com/books/review/2006/02/06/hernandez/index.html.