Drawing Their World

Mainstream comic books remain filled with the adventures of superheroes, the graphic violence of “Spawn” and the never-ending pursuit of Archie Andrews by Betty and Veronica. But the “alternative comics” at the fringes of the market allow artists to explore serious questions about culture, religion and life in the contemporary United States.

In their popular “Love and Rockets” series, which ran from 1982 to 1996, cartoonists Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez created lasting Latino characters and addressed such issues as a Catholic woman’s guilt over an abortion; a gang-related death; the exploitation of Latin American poverty; and cultural misperceptions in Los Angeles.

They began writing and drawing comics as Los Bros Hernandez almost 20 years ago as teens growing up in Oxnard. Like many young artists, they drew comics to entertain themselves but soon realized there were no Latino characters in the comics they bought, only in the ones they drew.

“The lack of interest in Latino culture when we were starting helped us in a funny way,” says Jaime, 40. “I may tell a common story, but I set it in my world, which I know but a lot of people don’t; that makes it interesting.”

Their “Love and Rockets” series has won both a loyal readership and critical praise. The 15 volumes have been “perennial sellers since they were first published,” says Gary Groth, president of Fantagraphics Books, publisher of Los Bros’ work. Volume 1 of their collected works, “Music for Mechanics,” is in its fifth printing and has sold more than 35,000 copies, an exceptional figure for an alternative comic collection, Groth says.

“I know it’s important to have a Latino comic book out there; it’s very important to me,” says Gilbert, 42. “When I throw up my hands in disgust at the market or changing tastes, I remember that if we don’t do it, nobody else will. That sounds pompous, but we don’t see much else out there.”

‘A Time for Change’

But after drawing “Love and Rockets” for nearly two decades, Gilbert reached a turning point.

“I felt, ‘This is it, I can’t continue,’ ” he explains. “I was done with Palomar, and I didn’t want to ruin those stories by repeating things. It was time for a change.”

“When ‘Love and Rockets’ ended, all of a sudden, I was a kid again,” Jaime adds. “I wouldn’t say Gilbert and I had worked ourselves into a corner, but ‘Love and Rockets’ had started eating us up.”

The brothers, who now live about a mile apart in the San Fernando Valley, both started new comics, many of them involving their old characters.

Writing in the Nation, Patrick Markee called their work “a new event in our culture: a rich and all-too-rare portrayal of Latino lives in all their messy, unrepresentative splendor, and of Latino communities, from Central America to the cities of the North.”

Although they appeared together in “Love and Rockets,” Gilbert and Jaime each drew and wrote in his own style about his own continuing characters, and the separate stories ran together in the comics. Gilbert is best known for stories about Palomar, a tiny Latin American town “somewhere between the U.S. border and Antarctica.” Critics have compared the magical realism of his style to the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Luis Bunuel. Jaime focuses on the misadventures of Maggie (Margarita Luisa Chascarrillo) in Texas and a barrio in a fictional L.A. suburb. Both settings are actually based on their hometown.

“Growing up in Oxnard, the world was my neighborhood, my school, my relatives and friends,” Gilbert explains. “When I started doing the Palomar stories, the only way I could tell stories was in a small setting, so I came up with a facsimile of Oxnard and made it a small Latin American town. By making it an almost primitive little town, I could draw whatever I wanted. But I was also trying to make it feel like home to the reader: The most important thing was to make the reader feel he’d been there or that there could be such a place.”

Their work is as dissimilar visually as it is in subject matter. Gilbert uses a scratchy pen-line style that suits his moody fantasy world. Jaime’s drawings are marked by a sharp, sensual line and bold areas of black and white. His carefully observed facial expressions and body language fit the more realistic setting of his stories.

Strong female characters have always dominated Los Bros’ stories. Markee said they are “populated by strong and complicated and absolutely unpredictable women.” Fiona Jerome declared in Panelhouse, a fanzine, that “for the first time, female comic fans of my generation had role models who were forthright and sexy, emotional but not weak.”

The central character in Gilbert’s stories is the redoubtable Luba, who runs the local bathhouse and eventually becomes mayor of Palomar. Luba apologizes for nothing, including her many sexual partners, and her temper can turn a trivial disagreement into an epic drama.

In contrast to the flamboyant Luba, Jaime’s main female character, Maggie, is drawn on a more intimate scale. Maggie has a loving heart, a passionate nature and a persistent desire to do what’s right. The conflict between her emotions and her common sense often leaves her in a quandary.

“It’s obvious Maggie’s special to me,” Jaime says, with a laugh. “That’s why she gets put through more than anybody else, because I love her.” Her best friend and sometime lover, Hopey (Esperanza Leticia Glass), is sassy, impatient, irrepressible and spontaneous. The two women share a deep bond but drive each other crazy.

The brothers cite two reasons for the preponderance of female characters in their comics: Their preference for drawing women over drawing men, and the influence of their mother.

“Our dad died when we were really young, so we saw the world through our mother’s eyes,” Jaime says. “How everything was run by her, how she reacted to things.”

“Growing up, it was just our mother and her mother, our grandmother, raising us: two women raising six kids,” Gilbert continues. “I saw what it was like for a woman to be on her own. It was easy to create Luba, because I was more or less raised by a Luba. Of course, Luba’s much more out there, much more extreme, but the spirit and strength of the character come from [our mother].”

Continuing Adventures

In his new comics, Gilbert is writing and drawing “Luba,” which follows her adventures after she moves to the United States, and “Luba’s Comics and Stories,” which depicts the recent lives of other Palomar characters, many of whom followed Luba.

“Moving the characters north offered new story opportunities: I want to explore how they perceive living in the United States and how people perceive them,” Gilbert says. “In the last issues of ‘Love and Rockets,’ I was just cramming too much in, each character would get three panels, which was driving me nuts. With the new book, I can give them each 24 pages.”

Jaime’s current “Penny Century” is named after an eccentric friend of Maggie’s from “Love and Rockets” and features much of the same cast. Over the years, Maggie has gone from a svelte woman in her early 20s to a chubby one in her late 30s. Her reactions to the onset of adulthood reflect some of Jaime’s thoughts on turning 40.

“When I started ‘Penny Century,’ it was like my characters were reborn,” he says. “They’re grown-ups now, and they don’t want to be. I look at people my age, and I’m disappointed. I worried my whole young life about becoming a grown-up. Then I see people who are just as childish as ever, and I ask, ‘Is this it?’ We’re all still kids, we’re all still failing. I’m trying to put that in the comic now. My only plan is that Maggie lasts forever--other than that, anything can happen.”