"Every day I run into people who don't know what I do. And even after I explain it they still don't know what I do. So now I can just say, 'Pick up the Locas book!' And that tells them all." -- Jaime Hernandez
Jaime (sometimes spelled Xaime) Hernandez (born 1959) is the co-creator of the black & white independent comic Love and Rockets (along with his brothers Gilbert and Mario).
"Comics as art. I do comics as comics, and my opportunity to tell stories. Simple. Basic. Let the characters have the excitement, not the package. That's where I come from.""Every time I copy something, I can draw it for the rest of my life. But research is so painful - I mean just opening up a magazine looking for a picture of a car or looking out the window looking for a car is just hard!""Half of me is very excited and the other half is 'Haven't we seen this stuff before?' But I'm very impressed. I almost couldn't picture it when it was being put together. I couldn't picture it being in my hand, what it would look like.""Hey, every once in awhile the secondary form works better than the original but it's certainly a rarity.""I leave a lot open so I can fill it in later. If I don't have any ideas right away, I can fill it in later.""I used to always read my stuff. And I could never understand why artists would say, 'Oh, I can't read my older stuff.' I'd go, 'Are you crazy? I could read my stuff forever!' Now it's a little harder.""I've done illustration on the side. But other than that, comics have been my main things.""It's rare that I actually have a story in my head. I have events or 'what's the next move?' Like, Maggie, 'where's she going to go in this story, where's she going to end up?' Then the story has to fill in the in-between, and that comes as I'm starting it.""The sizes and shapes of the panels have never been important to my stories. It has always been the words and images that drew me in, kind of like watching a movie.""The Tom Strong thing was totally for the money. I plan to get looser after I finish this Maggie saga.""To me, sex is sex and I don't think it is or should be a problem. Maybe my presenting it that way will unscrew up a few heads out there, including my own."
Hernandez grew up with his four brothers and one sister, in Oxnard, California. His family embraced comics, and comics were not considered a lesser, mediocre art form. Their mother read comics and old issues were kept in large quantities in the house, to be read and re-read by all over the years. The brothers read all types of comics and enjoyed those that gave a fairly realistic depiction of family life, such as Dennis the Menace, as well as the standard super hero adventures.
Hernandez was particularly influenced by Hank Ketcham's Dennis and Dan DeCarlo's Archie comics; the children in his otherwise rather realistic stories are often drawn to resemble Ketcham's, and Jaime's character's often strike very DeCarlo-esque poses. The work of Alex Toth, Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby were also hugely influential, as well as the distinctive styles of Charles Schulz and Milton Caniff.
Hernandez has a lifelong fascination with pro wrestling, especially women's wrestling, and it has been a regular part of his work. Hernandez has also been a lifelong punk rock fan. In addition to playing in bands himself it has been a constant element of his work. Maggie and her friends are almost all punk fans, and Jaime has done a series of stories about Hopey's career as bass player for a luckless punk band.
Jaime's main contribution to Love and Rockets is the ongoing serial narrative Locas which follows the tangled lives of a group of primarily Latina characters, from their teenage years in the early days of the California punk scene to the present day. The two central characters of Jaime's cast are Margarita Luisa "Maggie" Chascarrillo and Esperanza Leticia "Hopey" Glass, whose on-again, off-again, open romance is a focus for many Locas storylines. Early on, the stories switched back and forth between Maggie's sci-fi adventures journeying around the world and working as a "prosolar" mechanic repairing rocketships, and much more realistic stories of Maggie and her friends in a grungy, mostly Latin California neighborhood known as "Hoppers". Eventually Hernandez dropped almost all of the sci-fi elements, although he does still occasionally include references to the earlier stories and he still does very occasional short stories about superheroines, robots and other sci-fi genre elements.
The Hernandez brothers announced they were ending Love and Rockets with issue 50, and that they would be doing solo books from then on. For the next few years, both brothers released many solo books, with Jaime doing several books featuring his Locas characters (including Whoa Nellie, Penny Century, and Maggie and Hopey Color Fun) and Maggie generally occupying a supporting role. Eventually they resumed doing Love and Rockets and Maggie again took center stage, but instead of the large, magazine-style format of the original issues, the book is now released in a more traditional comic book format.
The entire Locas storyline to date was collected into one 700 page graphic novel in 2004.
Hernandez has been praised for the physical beauty of his female characters as well as their complex personalities, and for years he struggled to create comparably nuanced male characters. He succeeded with the introduction of Ray Dominguez, a failed artist who was briefly Maggie's boyfriend and went on to star in many of his own stories. Hernandez has often said that Maggie and Ray both represent different aspects of his own personality.
In an interview with The Comics Journal, Hernandez admitted he'd had difficulty aging his characters, because while he'd known girls like Maggie and Hopey when he was young, he'd never known them long enough to find out what they did in adulthood. For many years time passed very slowly in Locas, but it did pass: Maggie debuted as a slight yet curvy young adult mechanic, and as Jaime developed her character she started to gain weight slowly over each comic issue because of depression and other factors. This was controversial with some fans, but Hernandez was adamant that he'd made the right decision. As he told The Comics Journal, "(Maggie) was born to be fat." Each issue made her less of a character made from lines on paper to a human being with complex layers. A few years ago Hernandez jumped the characters years ahead, aging most of them visibly and shaking up their previously established relationships. The present Maggie is now the 40-ish manager of an apartment complex with bleached blonde hair and a penchant for wearing sexy bathing suits despite her rubenesque figure. While she still strongly resembles the zaftig Maggie readers have grown used to, from some angles she now sports a double chin or bags beneath her eyes. Her relationship with Hopey is now somewhat strained, as she feels some tension over their endlessly non-committed state, and she is also somewhat frustrated with her career (or lack of one). Hopey, meanwhile, has been working with children, something unimaginable for the violent, sarcastic punk we first met.
Other work
In addition to his Locas stories, Henandez has also done occasional work for DC Comics and The New Yorker, and he has done many album covers for such artists as Michelle Shocked (earlier in his career Hernandez also did album covers for some "Nardcore" punk bands, such as Ill Repute and Dr. Know, the latter of whom featured his younger brother Ismael on bass). In September 2006, Hernandez also created the artwork for the critically acclaimed Los Lobos album The Town and the City. In the '80s Gilbert, Mario and Jaime collaborated on Mister X, a sci-fi comic book series from Vortex Press, with Jaime handling the art and Gilbert and Mario plotting. The book's noirish look has been cited as an influence by the creators of The Animated Series among other retro-futuristic works. The Hernandez brothers themselves hold little affection for it, however, with Gilbert once describing it being "like a bad zit... it just sort of happened." After the Hernandez brothers left the book on bad terms with the publisher, various other artists continued it, including Seth.
In 2006, Publishers Weekly ranked Hernandez work Ghost of Hoppers second on its critics' poll of the best comic books of 2006.
Jaime's Love and Rockets stories have been widely praised by both comic and literary critics, and many comics creators have cited him as one of the greats. As Alan Moore has put it,