A collage of images from “Love and Rockets,” Jaime Hernandez’s graphic novel series.
The frame transitions to focus on one woman pictured in the collage: she wears a bathing suit and covers her eyes. She appears on the cover of the book “Life Drawing.”
The cartoonist Jaime Hernandez has been drawing the charming, hapless Maggie Chascarillo in “Love and Rockets” since 1982. Hernandez is regularly praised as one of the greatest living cartoonists, and Maggie is his primary creation and alter ego.
A black-and-white page from the comic “Life Drawing.”
Hernandez’s new collection of swift, pithy stories about Maggie and her friends is called “Life Drawing,” in part because Maggie’s boyfriend, Ray, teaches an art class where much of the action takes place.
We zoom in on a single frame of the page: a man is teaching an art class. One of the students refers to him as “Mr. Dominguez.”
But it’s also a nod to Hernandez’s own life, and to a career in comics that is now well into its fifth decade.
A new page of the comic, showing a wedding scene.
The climax of the new book is a big, raucous wedding. The bride is Vivian Solis, who previously dated Ray (and Maggie). The groom is Ignacio, Ray’s little brother. The marriage is pretty clearly going to be a disaster.
We zoom in on a frame that focuses on the three bridesmaids in the background.
Hernandez’s decades-long series “Locas” is a gigantic romantic comedy about an ensemble of wayward chicana punks …
We pan to a frame that focuses on the groomsmen.
… and their rivals, relatives, paramours, and friends — many of whom are in attendance here.
We pan to a frame in which the bride is shown in profile.
Vivian’s beauty is almost a running gag — her foregrounded profile dominates this panel.
We pan to a frame showing the bridesmaids, whispering to one another.
But “Life Drawing” is about Maggie’s friendship with Tonta, Vivian’s younger half-sister. That’s her, talking to their mother, who’s in tears. One of the bridesmaids, oblivious, is winking across the altar at one of the groomsmen.
We pan to a frame showing the bridesmaids; one of them is crying. In bold letters above them all, Vivian says “WILL WHOEVER’S YAKKING SHUT THE *** UP?”
And here’s the theme of the whole book, and of Hernandez’s recent catalog: the flowering of a generation looking forward to awkward young adulthood, when they will no doubt make the same decisions and mistakes that have defined his older characters over the last 40 years. (We removed some of the colorful language here.)
A grid of four covers from the “Love and Rockets” series.
Jaime Hernandez makes “Love and Rockets” with his brother Gilbert, who writes and draws an equally ambitious parallel story of Latin American villagers who later emigrate to California.
We zoom in on one of the covers: a group of young women with punky haircuts are gathered at a bar.
Since 1982, the pair (and occasionally their brother Mario) have published their own comics, and, save for a few short stories, Jaime’s have always focused on the people of Hoppers, a barrio in a California town called Huerta. It’s not exactly the brothers’ native Oxnard, but it’s not exactly not Oxnard, either.
We zoom further in on one of the faces: a woman smiling, looking towards the viewer.
Chief among those characters is Maggie — Margarita Luisa Chascarillo, …
We enter a grid of squares showing the same woman as she appeared in many different comics.
… a sunny, unlucky mechanic who can fix anything from a spaceship to a rusty car.
The woman’s face ages and her haircut changes as we progress through the grid.
As she’s aged, Hernandez has given her new jobs, new lovers, new hairstyles, new wrinkles, and a body that changes shape over time.
“As I grew up and evolved, she grew up and evolved,” Hernandez has said. “I got into punk. She got into punk. She came from the barrio.” In his work, she’s the character whose inner life is most legible to the reader.
The grid ends with an image of the woman’s face: she has lines around her eyes and a streak of grey in her hair.
Hernandez published her first adventure when he was 22. Now, at 65, he has entered middle age alongside her.