A Sense of Doubt blog post 1660 - LOVE AND ROCKETS MIX - Musical Monday on Wednesday 1909.04
So, I delayed this post because it wasn't ready on Monday. Plus I was doing Labor Day things on Monday. So here's the Musical Monday a day late, dated Wednesday but posted Thursday.
This one has been hanging around a long time in my draft list.
I started with two tracks. These two below (Roxy Music's "Prairie Rose" and Belle and Sebastian's "Lazy Line Painter Jane"). Kieron Gillen reminded me that I also (like he does) love Belle and Sebastian.
. From there I had some ideas to use Joy Division, New Order, The The, some Love and Rockets the band, and some signature '80s cuts. But then I let You Tube make suggestions, which led to Sonic Youth, Queens of the Stone Age, and The Julie Ruin.
And then I filled up the content with articles about and art from the seminal and classic comic book LOVE AND ROCKETS.
I could write a big treatise of my own on the importance of LOVE AND ROCKETS, as a story, a work of art, and a community of characters that are compelling and heart-wrenchingly real. But these two articles and the links beyond those that I have shared do that well.
SOME GOOD LINKS
https://benjaminherman.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/looking-back-at-love-and-rockets-series-one/
https://www.haresrocklots.com/words/essays/speedy/
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2017/09/love-and-rockets-notes-on-a-re-reading-i/
http://sumichellesblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/love-and-rockets-luba.html
http://www.fantagraphics.com/series/loveandrockets/
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| Hopey, Daffy and Maggie from Los Bros Hernandez’s Love & Rockets |
Los Bros Hernandez — Jaime, Gilbert and Mario — self-published the first issue of Love and Rockets in 1981. Since then, they (primarily Jaime and Gilbert) have created a substantial body of work. So substantial, in fact, that it can be intimidating to new readers.
But don’t ask Jaime Hernandez where to start.
“I throw up my hands and shrug,” he said in a phone interview. “Hopefully, if you start any place, it will grab you and you’ll want to go back. That’s all I can hope for. Of course, that doesn’t always work, but I’ve given up trying to think of where they should start. You know, you could say, ‘Yeah, start from the beginning,’ and I would say, ‘Well, I was pretty young then and still learning.’ Some of that stuff I’m a little shy of because it’s not fully formed yet. But, you know, I don’t know, if they want to, that’s fine because some readers have that thing where they need to start from the beginning. Well, good. I just hope you stay with it.”
Hernadez will speak as part of the 20th annual International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF), being held this year at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, April 4-6. The forum is free and open to the public.
In its 38 years, Love and Rockets has come to be considered one of the most influential works in the medium. As ICAF Academic Director Brittany Tullis puts it, the book “allowed readers who had previously been swimming in seas of straight, white, male characters to finally see themselves (and their families, neighbors and friends) reflected in the pages and panels of comic books.”
Maggie and Hopey are the central characters of the Hoppers 13 (or Locas) storyline Hernandez has been crafting throughout the run of Love and Rockets. His characters age in real time, growing and changing as their lives and relationships unfurl. That’s a lot of continuity to keep in mind, and Hernandez is up front about the challenges that can present.
“Sometimes I have to avoid certain things because I can’t remember. Like when was the last time this character did that particular thing? Hmm, I don’t know, so maybe I’ll just leave that out until I figure it out,” he says. “For the most part, I kind of do it as life is moving forward, so I try to look at it that way more than the million things that have happened before. So I just think, well, I know this character really well, so I know they haven’t had a major dramatic experience, or traumatic experience, lately, so they’re kind of safe, you know? And I can move them forward innocently, without a bad past. You can kind of forgive their mistakes more, so you don’t have to think so much about what mistakes they’ve made. Some characters made big mistakes, and you can’t forget that. So you have to write that sort of underlying trauma or drama.”
Los Bros Hernandez’s work is often thought of as falling into some combination of categories—Latinx, feminist and more. But Hernandez doesn’t think of his art that way.
“I like to think that I’m just part of the comics world,” he says. “That my comic is just as legitimate as the next comic. I don’t try to put myself in a category, other than the basic: I’m more independent comics than mainstream comics. That’s a given. But other than that, I try to look at it as, this is just a comic for everyone to read; it just happens to have [more] Latinas than the other one.”
Hernandez says his ICAF presentation will be a conversation with the audience.
“Just the next Love and Rockets. I ended a major story recently and I’m trying to figure which characters to take on next and what kind of stories are coming up.”
Hernandez surprised me when he admitted to being “a little shy” of his early work on Love and Rockets. I asked him if he could go back to the beginning now and talk to his younger self as the series was just getting started, would he have any advice for that young artist and writer.
“Nah,” he says. “I would just say, ‘It’s fine. You did fine. We all grew up together. It worked out.’ I have no regrets, really.”
“Just the next Love and Rockets. I ended a major story recently and I’m trying to figure which characters to take on next and what kind of stories are coming up.”
Hernandez surprised me when he admitted to being “a little shy” of his early work on Love and Rockets. I asked him if he could go back to the beginning now and talk to his younger self as the series was just getting started, would he have any advice for that young artist and writer.
“Nah,” he says. “I would just say, ‘It’s fine. You did fine. We all grew up together. It worked out.’ I have no regrets, really.”
LOVE AND ROCKETS MIX - Musical Monday on Wednesday 1909.041. Roxy Music - Prairie Rose - A = 444 Hz (Solfeggio 528 Hz) Converted Audio
2. Big Country - In A Big Country (The Tube 17.2.1984)
3. The Breeders - Cannonball
4. The Breeders - Divine Hammer
5. XTC - Senses Working Overtime
6. Devo - Beautiful World
7. The Cars - Just What I Needed - The Midnight Special 1978
8. Martha and the Muffins - Echo Beach
9. Modern English - I Melt With You (Official Video)
10. Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart [OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO]
11. New Order - Temptation (Official Music Video)
12. Belle and Sebastian - Lazy Line Painter Jane
13. Belle and Sebastian - "Sister Buddha" (Official Music Video)
14. Joy Division - She's Lost Control
15. David Bowie's lost 1973 Top of the Pops performance of The Jean Genie
16. Love and Rockets - So Alive
17. Sonic Youth - Bull In The Heather (Official Video)
18. The The - Uncertain Smile (Audio)
19. The Julie Ruin - Oh Come On (Official Video)
20. Throwing Muses - Not Too Soon (Official Video)
21. Love And Rockets - "No New Tale To Tell"
22. The The - This Is The Day (Remastered)
23. Sonic Youth - Sunday
24. Saint Etienne - Only Love Can Break Your Heart
25. Love and Rockets - Mirror People '88
26. The Psychedelic Furs - Love My Way (Official Video)
27. Radiohead - Ceremony (Joy Division cover)
28. Massive Attack - "Teardrop"
29. Broken Bells - Holding On For Life
30. Queens Of The Stone Age – Make It Wit Chu (Virgin Magnetic Material Remix)
31. Love And Rockets - Ball Of Confusion [Music Video]
32. The Sundays - Here's Where The Story Ends (Official Video)
MIX VIDEO POD - WHOLE PLAYLIST
A GENERATION LATER, LOVE AND ROCKETS CONTINUES TO REVOLUTIONIZE COMICS
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/a-generation-later-love-and-rockets-continues-to-revolutionize-comics
Groundbreaking, epic, and heartfelt, the quintessential indie comic Love and Rockets is as relevant today as it was when Mario, Gilbert (aka Beto), and Jaime Hernandez self-published the first issue in 1981. A blend of sci-fi, telenovela, superhero tales, comics, jokes, and short stories, the magazine was worlds away from anything anyone, especially Marvel or DC, was publishing during those days.
Not only did Love and Rockets usher in a new age of independent comic books, but it also broke ground with stories featuring marginalized voices and characters from the LGBTQ and Latinx community. By the time DC and Marvel had introduced Latinx characters like Sunspot, Firebird, and Bushmaster in the early '80s, Margarita Luisa "Maggie" Chascarrillo, Esperanza "Hopey" Leticia Glass and the fiery Luba were living out real lives in the fictional towns of Hoppers and Palomar in Love and Rockets.
Over the last 27 years, Los Bros Hernandez's characters have evolved and even aged alongside their creators. For example, Maggie and Hopey are now in their late 50s with significant others. If Peter Parker lived in Palomar, he would be 72 and, quite possibly, years into a well-deserved retirement. Utilizing inventive storytelling and compelling line art to produce universal stories, the Hernandez brothers showcased their experience growing up in Latino neighborhoods in California.
Love and Rockets #4
Artists from R. Crumb to Trina Robbins, Moebius to Adrian Tomine, Neil Gaiman to Alan Moore, Matt Fraction to Alison Bechdel and Kristin Hersh have all cited the Hernandez brothers as influences. For many Latinx comic book creators and fans, the book was revolutionary.
Eric Reynolds, Fantagraphics Associate Publisher and editor of the Love and Rockets series, said the comic arrived at a time when mainstream fare was "moribund, with content catered almost exclusively to young, white males."
"Their comics, populated by women, people of color, gay and bisexual characters, were completely sui generis and blew the doors open for the medium of comics, ushering in the 'alternative comics' movement of the 1980s and '90s," he told SYFY WIRE.
Love and Rockets #1 (Jamie Hernandez)
Former Marvel Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso was growing up in San Francisco in the early '80s when he read his first copy of Love and Rockets.
"To see Latino characters portrayed in comics at all, let alone characters as complex as the ones that both Jaime and Beto put down on the page, was transformative," he told SYFY WIRE this week. "And the fact that so many of the characters lived at the intersection of SoCal Punk Rock and Lowrider culture — it was like they were making a comic just for me."
Alonso said stories like Jaime's "Death of Speedy Ortiz" and "Flies on the Ceiling" had a profound impact on him as a reader and a creator.
"I can't think of a page with more emotional resonance than the one where Speedy's ghost comes back to say goodbye to his friends, ending with Izzy waking up to an empty room," Alonso said. "And when Izzy goes to Mexico to do some spiritual detox, the man she falls in love with is a dead ringer for my father when he was young."
Heartbreak Soup #8
Representation revolution
The importance of representation in comic books is best illustrated by Jaime Hernandez himself, who said the idea to incorporate his real-life experiences living in SoCal into Love and Rockets didn't even come to him until he was a teenager. Having grown up with comic books courtesy of his mother and older brother Mario, both Gilbert and Jaime read and drew inspiration from Marvel and DC heroes, along with Dennis the Menace and Archie comics.
"I didn't see many comics from Mexico so I mostly grew up on the American stuff," Jaime told SYFY WIRE. "Growing up, wanting to do our own comics, we created characters but they were all white. That seemed normal. Kind of like, well, these are the characters and this one's name is Bill Jackson. I just didn't think about it."
At the same time, the Hernandez brothers were growing up in a Mexican neighborhood in America, soaking up the telenovelas, listening to music from the barrio and hanging out with their friends
"We'd be doing all this cool stuff, hanging out, going lowriding, cruising on Sunday night. That stuff is fun. And I thought, 'How come we never put those in the comics? I figured, 'Why don't I change this one Maggie character into a Mexican girl.' It was one of those things we noticed one day," Jaime said. "The more we did that the more we were able to put our life into it. That's why I started liking to do the characters' real lives more than creating a superhero universe."
Love and Rockets #26
Kristen Parraz, Jennifer Lopez and Sara Bazan co-host the comic book podcast Comadres y Comics, which highlights female and Latinx creators and fans in the industry. On their very first episode, the California-based trio discussed Love and Rockets.
Bazan first heard of the comic in high school when a friend said she reminded him of the character "Izzy" Ortiz Ruebens.
"He lent me some single issues of Love and Rockets and there indeed were Latina characters that looked, acted and sounded like me," she told SYFY WIRE. "It wasn't until we read Maggie the Mechanic for our first episode of Comadres y Comics that the impact that this representation had on me resonated. As an adult, I was able to better comprehend what seeing someone who looked like me and represented my culture in media as a teen actually meant. Turns out it meant everything."
What struck Parraz, co-owner of Hi De Ho Comics in Santa Monica, was how genuinely strong and independent the women of Love and Rockets are written and, just as importantly, how they were drawn.
Jamie Hernandez (Courtesy Photo via Fantagraphics)
"The female figures differed character to character with there being all shapes and sizes," she told SYFY WIRE. "Having only read modern comics before reading Love and Rockets it struck me how much of an impact it made on me to see the female form drawn accurately and not for the male gaze. Interestingly, the sci-fi stories stuck out to me the most because it was the first time I had been exposed to Latinx characters in a sci-fi story."
Love and Rockets #18
Placing women in non-traditional roles was an ongoing theme in Love and Rockets and way before its time, Bazan said. One recent example of a book that carries some Hernandez Bros influence is Lowriders in Space by Cathy Camper and Raul (Gonzalez) The Third, she said. As co-creator of that series — which follows three anthropomorphic animal friends chasing their dream of building a lowrider against the backdrop of the borderland of Mexico — Gonzalez III has made a career of depicting Latinx life, especially along the U.S./Mexican border, with his art.
Much like Hernandez, Gonzalez III thought all heroes were meant to be "white dudes with tights" so that's how he initially drew them. It wasn't until college when he found Love and Rockets.
"Suddenly I found myself working in a comic book shop and Maggie, Luba, the Death of Speedy, wrestling Abuelas popped out at me in a way that was familiar in a whole different way," Gonzalez told SYFY WIRE. "I felt like I was reading something personal. It felt like my Mams novelas via Mexican Archie comics. I saw myself and my barrio reflected in a way I'd never seen in comics before."
In the way fellow El Pasoans Gaspar and Luis Jimenez paved the way for Gonzalez's art career, he said, Los Bros Hernandez showed him through comic books that being Mexican American was something to be proud of.
"They illustrated stories about Latinx culture and created an opus that is rich in both personal and cultural history," he said.
Love and Rockets #31
Independent influencers
A comic book retailer, Parraz said she's seen the influence of Los Bros Hernandez on the independent comic market directly.
'There was no clear independent market before Love and Rockets but over time, with their success, the Hernandez Brothers helped to grow the market share of indie comics," she said. "So much so that indie comics now make up close to one-third of the comic book industry market. That doesn't even account for the individual showing up to local conventions and zine fests, self-publishing and selling by word of mouth, a tactic largely used by the Hernandez Brothers in the early days."
According to Gilberto Hernandez, he and Jaime have served as reluctant role models, of sorts.
"If we could do it, why not others," he told SYFY WIRE. "In my eyes, there's the mainstream artists who want to make the best Batman comic ever, with cleverness and detailed art. The indie artists tend to come up with stories about themselves and the readers want to see themselves in the comics. I'm in the middle there somewhere."
Love and Rockets #49
Although he discovered Love and Rockets later in life, Sebastian Kadlecik took inspiration from the series before creating his own Latinx-inspired comic book, Quince, the story of a Latina teen, Lupe, who discovers her superpowers on the day of her quinceañera, or 15th birthday.
When networking and researching for his book, the name Los Bros Hernandez kept coming up in his discussions with Latinx comic creators and fans.
Gilberto Hernandez (Courtesy Photo via Fantagraphics)
"I appreciate how we are dropped into this interesting familiar world with so much Latinx culture and yet there's this otherworldly sci-fi element," he said. "I love seeing punks, chicanos, robots, vatos, and hover bikes all living in the same world."
Kadlecik said the storytelling in Love and Rockets continues to inspire and creatively challenge him.
"I love seeing the integration of Latinx culture in a futuristic world without there needing to be a big explanation as to why-- there doesn't need to be an explanation," he said. "We exist. We have existed. We will continue to do so."
When Domino writer Gail Simone was a kid, Love and Rockets was the comic that showed her what comics could be, she told SYFY WIRE. Not one to get starstruck, Simone said that all changed when she met Los Bros Hernandez at Excalibur Comics, for Wonder Woman Day, benefitting a shelter for victims of domestic abuse.
"A lot of it flew right over my head, but there would be scenes of gut-busting comedy, heart-rending romance and the lyricism of real-life worlds I had never before experienced in any media," she said. "I was somehow seated at a table right next to these two titans, these brilliant, brilliant creators, and I was just almost completely unable to speak. But it turned out that Gilbert and Jaime are as kind as they are gifted, and they welcomed me like a colleague, they could not have been nicer. Gilbert drew me a Black Canary sketch, and Jaime drew me a Wonder Woman sketch, and they treated me as a sister, and even years later, it puts a smile in my heart that can't be contained."
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1909.04 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1523 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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