Love & Rockets - classic or dud

Bwahahah evilness rulez!

I don't know how inclined I'd be to make the effort if I hadn't kept up with it as it was being released (since the '90s anyway), but having kept up with it I can say that it's most definitely worth the effort (except maybe caveat emptor with Beto's stuff from vol. 2 on).

yeah, Dan just buy the tall Jaime collections and forget Beto (or start that Patreon for him). Jaime's 2010s are his strongest decade ever.

and that's for a guy who had Jaime's '80s, '00s and '90s

and if you miss '80s Beto, try his The Twilight Children (drawn by Darwyn Cooke) on Vertigo.

Also, just to be clear, I think it's possible that Beto's volume 1 highs meet or exceed Jaime's (wrt writing if not draftsmanship). Love some of that material so much, and a lot of the Palomar-related material directly after is quite good. Also love the experimental Beto stuff collected in Fear of Comics (mostly culled from New Love iirc) a great deal. He's done some good work in recent years, but it's a mixed bag. It's just much easier to recommend, like, the entirety of Jaime's output sans reservations.

I've been sorta itching to re-read Jaime from the beginning again, but don’t know when I’ll find the time

I think it's possible that Beto's volume 1 highs meet or exceed Jaime's etc

absolutely, I liked Beto even before before Jaime clicked for me in my late teens - but after the FORTUNATO! era, his obsessions have become too niche for me to really connect even with effort. I can enjoy a single read of a story or a Fritz b-movie or an ultraviolence graphic novel or w/e, but I'm never going to get anything more out of re-reading them.

(his recent non-L&R work is a little more accessible, and the new Palomar stories in the current series were promising, but man, there's just too much ~stuff~ and not enough focus)

I started as a Jaime fan (punk rock teen, more accessible) but moved towards favoring Beto, esp circa Poison River and New Love/Fear of Comics stuff, but it all just spiraled out of control for me. I figure when I have some time, on my death bed, I'll get all the collections and read them all.

Just FYI, y'all, having undertaken the re-read several times over, I can report that it doesn't involve that significant a time investment.

Maybe I’ll give it a go, when I’m done with my current re-watch of the original 2 seasons of “Twin Peaks” (...then I’ll revisit all the early R.E.M. albums, for a “teenage me” trifecta).

Starting on pg. 1 of the whole shebang — “Mechan-X Starring Maggie Race Hopey (by Izzy Ruebens)” — it’s kind of astounding how consistent it is with the rest of the series to come. Mag & Hope’s dialogue “sounds” just like those two, as we’ll always know them... Maggie even kind of looks like Vicki Glori.

(Huh, Vicki and Rena are mentioned two pages later — Vicki defeating Rena, “She used the ropes!,” etc. So much of the storyline was there at the inception...)

The long Mechanics story is an early masterpiece... first of many, I suppose.

“100 Rooms” isn’t Jaime’s best, but it’s cool to read the TPB version with an eye to the panels he added in ’86 (they’re not hard to notice). He really added some depth to the story.

Closing out Vol. 2 — “Toyo’s Request” is a story I haven’t given a lot of attention in the past, but it feels like a transition to Jaime’s “mature style”... both in the economy of the storytelling, as well as the terrific layouts and art (particularly the panels of Rena driving thru the desert, and fighting Bull Marie). I guess these are Jaime’s first real wrestling action scenes in the series.

The Rocky & Fumble story at the end of the book is (of course) delightful...

Everything really snaps into place with “The Lost Women”... the confidence & accomplishment both in Jaime’s art (seemingly every pose of every figure) and narrative (covering all the core characters, in multiple locations) is hugely impressive.

The “realism” and emotional stakes are heightened, both in the Mechanics setting and the “back at home” scenes... you have the sense of something richer being made out of familiar elements. (It’s also cool to notice characters being introduced in the Locas world who will take center stage in stories to come, still years down the road.)

The Locas/Locos stories in Vol. 6 are classic (...Rand Race takes Mag & Hope to lunch; Joey goes looking for his Ape Sex record; Mag & Hope move in with Terry; etc.). This is really the beginning of "peak Jaime," leading into Death of Speedy. Also the first appearances of Doyle and Danita.

appreciating these flashbacks, ty, had forgotten about the "looking for the Ape Sex record" story

Sure — I always think of “The Return of Ray D.” + “The Death of Speedy Ortiz” as the masterpiece they are, but the other stories in this book are so great, as well. “Jerusalem Crickets,” the pitch-perfect punk rock tour story ("If you were really hard core, you'd have thrown a full bottle."); segueing into Tex & Hopey's friendship and weird visit with Penny at Costigan Manor... Maggie & Ray getting together, followed by Mag’s ringside tour with Tia Vicki (as her “accountant”); and then everything coming together (for now), on both coasts, in "Valley of the Polar Bears."

This is the first L&R volume I encountered (early in high school), and it still feels like the heart of it all.

(Bonus note: this read-through is the first time I've had a phone at hand to search the snippets of lyrics that the characters rqndomly sing, or which float up from a boombox on an apartment floor, etc. I never knew what most of these songs were until now — Ray listens to the Replacments; young Maggie sings Hank Williams with the words slightly skewed; etc.)

I also moved forward to the “Isabel in Mexico” story... I know this is a banal point, but now that I’m a father, the stuff involving babies/kids has become super affecting to me.

here's a downloadable compilation of all the IRL songs from Locas in L&R volume 1

Ah, that’s awesome!

I also have a spotify playlist for this.

https://open.spotify.com/user/olken2000/playlist/2IsHUH6FGygjkU7BWVOx35?si=5GSq9Zc4So6WHwf7Keasgw

young Maggie sings Hank Williams with the words slightly skewed

“my eyes are still curly and my hair is still blue” <3<3<3

That’s the one! haha

(Thanks, Moodles — gonna listen right now)

J’G/Jug (Pronounced Jig)

I've always wondered if that's a real slang term or something Jaime made up.

lol same

it's real, and it's spectacular

I forgot that, in “Wig Wam Bam,” Jaime actually begins to ID the songs at the bottom of the page.

This flashback scene at “Lois’s” house still cracks me up (“Uh, how about a... a... platypus?”).

I’ve always loved the scene where Nami walks in on Doyle in the shower. That “worlds collide” scenario — a crusty, homeless punk in Daffy’s upper–middle-class home (which looks just like a friend’s childhood house in Thousand Oaks; at least the parts you see of it) — is so “narratively resonant” for me.

The "Nan Tucker" stuff at the end of Wig Wam Bam is super bizarre, but it's such a great longform story... particularly everything happening back at home with Ray, Danita, Doyle, etc. I love Doyle walking out of town at the end, casting his shadow on all the sleeping characters as he passes by.

I guess many of the gang's East Coast adventures have a slightly surreal, fantastical (and sometimes sinister) vibe -- including the visits with Penny, the wrestling tour, etc. It's sort of the reverse of a longstanding narrative cliche, in which characters travel west to "reinvent" themselves, encounter strange people with constructed identities, etc. In the "Locas" world, California is home of the mundane, familiar, everyday life; and the East Coast is where shit gets crazy and people are "fake."

A lot of the "Locas" storyline (I'm realizing in this re-read) involves characters being haunted by events in their past, trying to fix things so they can "move forward," etc. (I think this theme is expressed even more explicitly later, with stories like Ghost of Hoppers and The Love Bunglers.) And this isn't limited to cases of childhood trauma, or Izzy's personal history, etc. -- it also applies to relatively "well-adjusted" characters, like Rena and Vicki Glori, and decisions they made or things that happened to them in adulthood.

Anyway, it's terrific how Jaime develops this theme by cutting back and forth between flashbacks & present day, starting early in the series; so that the "past" is always right there, bleeding into the present, nipping at the characters' heels, revealed to the reader simultaneously...

(One minor note is that the timeframe gets a little funky here... at the end of Wig Wam Bam, one of the kids posting the flyers says that it's been five years since Hopey's band broke up on their East Coast tour... which matches the passage of time IRL, but it doesn't seem to fit with when the milk cartons started appearing, during Maggie's reunion w/Hopey in "Ninety-Three Million Miles From the Sun." I think that was "two years later," and it wasn't long before the events of Wig Wam Bam.)

I’m reading “Chester Square” now, in the individual issues. I think I only read it once or twice (never bought the collection). It’s pretty rough seeing Maggie this degraded.

In “We Want the World and We Want It Bald,” Hopey says she hasn’t seen Hoppers “in about six years”; so I guess the timeframe does check out. Didn’t seem like she was crashing on couches for that long...

Interesting retcon in issue #46 — circling back to the very beginning.

Also, this is the issue where Jaime & Beto do each others’ characters. The results speak for themselves, ‘Nuff Said.

FYI -- (most?) everything is 40% on Fantagraphics.com today. #wannacyber?

The "Penny Century" miniseries (as collected in Locas in Love) finds 40-ish Ray living in Hollywood, grousing about young people, and serving as narrator for long stretches. I never loved this move, because (a) it made me kind of dislike Ray as a "person," and (b) he seems to serve as something as a stand-in for Jaime, the writer (at least when he makes observations about music, culture, etc.)... which is very on-brand for comics, but doesn't quite feel L&R to me.

On the other hand, I like the stories about Negra (H.R. Costigan's estranged teenage daughter); and Jaime's casual, short-form pieces in this book are great.

(As a sidebar: Penny's floating all around, but what happened to her two kids? I don't remember if they're seen/addressed again, other than in the fantastical Ti-Girls story. Guess I'll find out...)

Jaime writes so well about teenage girls -- characters like Nami, Negra, and (later) Tonta -- who are "ordinary" suburban kids, but maybe a little smarter/more perceptive than their friends. He presents these characters in a realistic, matter-of-fact way, respecting their emotional lives without "romanticizing" them or overplaying their drama. It's highly impressive for a male writer, IMO.

Re: “To Be Announced,” the series of gently surreal, 6-panel “young Ray” vignettes — the “H-bomb” installment deserves a f’in Eisner Award.

I appreciate your live-'blogging' fwiw. It'll probably still be another couple years until I'm ready for my umpteenth read-through or I'd play along at home.

Thanks, glad I'm not being annoying...

(I ordered The Love Bunglers collection in the Black Friday sale, so I can re-read it in that format and see if anything's been added, etc. Haven't re-read the New Stories material since publication, other than Ti-Girls.)

Material was added for the collection, which was then carried over to the most recent Jaime digest.

Hey -- looks like after the next Jaime book comes out in March (Is This How You See Me?), Tonta gets her own collection in July!

After all that stuff's been collected, I would toss those "New Stories" issues right in the recycling bin (LOL) -- but one of them contains a published letter from me! :P

I ebayed all of the New Stories, confident that I would not cry if I never get to read the Beto parts again

I would cry if I had to read the new Beto parts again.

Jaime really gets into the 8-panel grid in L&R Vol. II.

...beyond that, his storytelling is also much more "decompressed" than it was in Vol. I. Reading straight through, it's very apparent how Jaime began taking a different approach in the new series.