Love & Rockets - classic or dud

Her brother, not his, sorry.

They're done with New Stories entirely though so I'm guessing it won't be long before they release a digest of all of it.

nah because there's still at least one, probably two mag-sized hardcovers of Jaime material to collect (depending on whether the space adventure stuff gets skipped) first

Both Bros have altered/added material in their collections (I think it was Love and Rockets X which added a huge amount of material to the original story).

Jaime never added new material until God & Science, but Beto has been at it for decades. Poison River and "X" are the most significant culprits: with Poison River, he reordered the story from the serialisation, then added pages and rewrote chunks as an unplanned further part of the revision.

Love & Rockets (X) got expanded twice because of the formats: the first collection was done as a 10" to better sell to record shops, and he had to add panels and tiers throughout to keep the impact of new-page-reveals and specific bits of panel-to-panel timing. Then when they let that version go out of print and put the story into the magazine-size TPB line, he didn't want to throw out the new material, so had to expand once more to make it work at a rectangular page layout again.

The best expansion he ever did, which never gets heralded, was adding pages for the first Birdland collection just so it would end on p. 69

Just read God and Science, loved it

I stopped after Penny Century (years ago) bcz Esperanza was out of print for so long, so I have to finish V2 so that I can start New Stories so that I can get to Love Bunglers, which everyone is raving abt.

I don't really sweat continuity and consistency with Jamie's stories - there are so many characters I've usually forgotten all the relationships by the time I read a new one.

But all that "retconning" (seems kind of gross to use that word here) seems to me part of the point, i.e. Jamie has always been clear we are never seeing the whole story all the time

*Jaime

I'd agree, and given the drastic shifts in tone and genre from Jaime's earliest pulp-sf parodies to his more characteristic Hoppers stories, it's hard for me to complain if he keeps revising his charaters' world.

Yeah i dont consider continuity or linearity important w Jaime's work. I'm familiar with enough major chatacters to be comfortable just dropping in anywhere.

Stevie there's 20% off everything on fanta's website all week

Cool news:

http://fantagraphics.com/flog/love-rockets-magazine-returns/

I just picked up a bunch of back issues from the original run this weekend. My local comic store was having a 50% off sale for Labor Day.

along those lines:
http://www.tcj.com/i-dont-think-about-it-i-just-do-it-catching-up-with-gilbert-hernandez/
i mean wtf here

lol

glad he stuck to black and white for that one

pretty stylish tho'

i really should have clicked on that second link at work huh

still, before i clear out my desk and join the unemployment line, i don't think i ever told the story about how i was in san francisco last year wearing a bootleg l&r t-shirt and some guy yelled 'nice shirt' at me across the street before running over and trying to strike up a conversation about los bros hernandez. when he realised i was scottish he was nonplussed that i knew about, let alone read and enjoyed, love and rockets, despite my protestations to the contrary

there's no point to this story really i just thought it was funny

okay bye

er, should not have clicked on that link at work

TBF I would probably be surprised if I met someone from San Francisco with an intimate knowledge of The Broons

true, true

I often get puzzled looks when I parade about town in my Rab C. Nesbitt Underoos.

i think you're mistaking overpowering sexual arousal for puzzlement

I fear that I often do.

It doesn't sound like it from the TCJ interview, but I wonder if there are going to be any changes of narrative direction with the switch in format. I respect Beto's commitment to the saga of Fritz and her doubles, but most of my favorite Beto stories this century (like Julio's Day, Marble Season, or Bumperhead) have been outside that continuity.

Like, the current Fritz storyline recalls "Poison River" or "Love and Rockets X" in its density, but so far it feels much more meandering than those arcs.

I'm hoping that going back to the old format with more frequent issues will help give them a bit more narrative focus and drive, which has been missing from both bros stories in recent years

I stopped after Penny Century (years ago) bcz Esperanza was out of print for so long, so I have to finish V2 so that I can start New Stories so that I can get to Love Bunglers, which everyone is raving abt.

― laraaji p. henson (Stevie D(eux)), Wednesday, 20 July 2016 15:56

Stevie there's 20% off everything on fanta's website all week

― Shakey δσς (sic), Thursday, 21 July 2016 00:19 (four months ago)

Stevie there's 40% off everything on Fanta's website tomorrow only

!!!

goddamnit, like i didn't spend enough money this weekend

oh oh oh I have Esperanza now!! Apparently Penny Century was almost ENTIRELY non-L&R Proper stories and it has only one or two L&R V2 things? But Esperanza is more or less the entire Jaime V2 shebang.

I think there's a long, full-color (and mostly inconsequential) Maggie story in a squarebound issue of V2 that's still uncollected. I may be misremembering one or more of those details.

That was the story serialised in the New York Times Magazine*. Collected in L&R v2 #20, reprinted again in The Art Of Jaime Hernandez.

*whose The Funny Pages section also serialised Mister Wonderful, George Sprott, and part of Building Stories.

when's that sale start again?

Err, hate to break it to you, forks...I think it's over.

what the
but sic said "tomorrow" yesterday!
ah well

If sic loses pedantic accuracy, what does he have left?

I feel like I can really see Jaime's influence in the "the lighter side" of Marvel in recent years... artists like Javier Pulido and David Lopez seem to reflect different aspects of Jaime's drawing style (I think DeConnick's "Captain Marvel and the Carol Corps" Secret Wars miniseries, illustrated by Lopez, even had a mechanic character named Maggie who was a clear tribute?).

But even more fundamentally: some of Marvel's more humorous and "low-key" series, featuring plain-clothed characters "at the margins" of the Marvel Universe (often, literally, in Brooklyn) struggling with rent and relationships while the Avengers save the world in the background, feel directly descended from Jaime's "Mechanics" ideas. I'm thinking of the (excellent) Matt Fraction et al. "Hawkeye" series from 2012-15; Charles Soule & J. Pulido's (also terrific) "She-Hulk" run in 2014-15; and some other stuff. I could pick out particular "beats" and panels that feel so Jaime-inflected to me.

Obviously, even Marvel at its most offbeat still features more "conventional" comic-book action than "Mechanics" (in which Maggie was purely a "regular person," and superhero conventions were heavily satirized) -- though, interestingly, Jaime has moved somewhat closer to "convention" when he revisited superheroes in recent years (in his "Return of the Ti-Girls" story).

I also don't want to overstate the influence from "Love & Rockets" alone; as I'm not very familiar with the entire universe of other comics from the past few decades that may be in the mix. But as a longtime Jaime fan, picking up Marvel again in its current renaissance era, I really get the sense that his aesthetic is coming through... (not sure how much good that does him personally, of course!).

(Btw, completely off-topic -- does anyone happen to know why so many great Marvel artists these days happen to be from Spain? Besides Pulido and Lopez, I'm also thinking of David Aja and Javier Rodriguez... maybe others as well. Is there a "story" in the industry behind how this group of Spanish artists broke into the American market?)

iirc there was an appreciative letter from fraction in one of the "new stories".

That sounds familiar, now that you mention it.

Cameron Stewart too, at least circa Catwoman

Turning back to L&R itself -- I feel as though Jaime, in recent(-ish) years, has tried to "wrap up" his main storyline a few times, and move on to other characters; but he keeps coming back to Maggie/Hopey/Ray, even though they're not really doing much.

This might be one of the difficulties of taking up a central focalized character for as long as Jaime's worked with Maggie. The other side of this, though, is that even if Jaime's plotting has been a little meandering after "Ghost of Hoppers" and "Love Bunglers," Maggie's one of the most richly developed characters I can think of in comics, especially as a rueful middle-aged punk.

On the other hand, I wouldn't be sorry if Gilbert wrapped up or abandoned his current storyline about Fritz and her pretenders.

Yeah, I'm sure it would hard for Jaime to close the books on a character like Maggie. The newer characters, while endearing, aren't on the same level as the classic Hoppers crew; which may be why Jaime's stories with the newer folks tend to involve murder mysteries, etc. And no doubt Maggie will still be interesting even as she continues to age (Jaime's always done really well with portraying older women anyway).

That said, the end of the Love Bunglers storyline really felt like a graceful farewell to Locas (and I assumed at the time that that is what it would be).

I'd agree that Love Bunglers would have been an artful conclusion, but I'll also say that comics as a medium is not exactly groaning under the weight of its nuanced representations of middle-aged queer women, so I think I can deal with Locas remaining open-ended.

I feel you

Btw (just to be clear) -- I have zero problems with reading about middle-aged characters. My comments were related to the fact that their lives don't have the "drama" that they did when the characters were younger (just like with real people), and so it becomes a new kind of challenge for Jaime to keep focus on them and still keep it interesting. But I'm sure he can meet that challenge. (We've seen most stages of Maggie's life since toddlerhood -- I hope someday we see her gray and happy, whether it's on Rena's island, Vicki Glori's wrestling ranch, or a bungalow in L.A.)

i will say i miss the moments of magical realism in hopey/maggie's world; that's been mostly missing for awhile now and could use a resurgence. wanna see em save the world!

lol did you read Ti-Girls

lol my thoughts exactly

that was like 2009! it's been a minute.
or are you saying those stories aren't good, because i would disagree.

I liked Ti-Girls a lot but yeah I only read it last year, and then Love Bunglers shortly after. I have no idea when things are originally published anymore.