Jaime (sometimes spelled Xaime, pronounced /high-me/) Hernandez (born 1959) is the co-creator of the black & white independent comic Love and Rockets (along with his brothers Gilbert and Mario). It is published by Fantagraphics Books.

Jaime grew up, together with four brothers and one sister, in Oxnard, California. It was a family where 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. Jaime was particularly influenced by Hank Ketcham's Dennis and Dan DeCarlo's Archie comics; in particular, the children in his otherwise rather realistic stories are often drawn to resemble Ketham's, and Jaime's character's often strike very DeCarlo-esque poses. The work of Alex Toth and Steve Ditko were also hugely influential.

Jaime's main contribution to Love and Rockets is the ongoing serial narrative Locas which follows the tangled lives of a group of primarily chicano characters, from their teenage years in the early days of the Los Angeles punk scene to the present day. Two memorable members of Jaime's cast are Margarita "Maggie" Luisa Chascarrillo and Esperanza "Hopey" Leticia 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 entire Locas storyline was collected into one 700 page graphic novel in 2004.

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 (even playing in a few bands himself), and 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.

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. Henrnadez 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 difficult 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. 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 visibily 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-commited 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.

Years ago, 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 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.

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. In the '80s Gilbert, Mario and Jaime collaborated on Mr. 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 sited 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.

Jaime's Love and Rockets stories have been widely praised by both comic and literary critics, and many comics creators have sited him as one of the greats. As Alan Moore has put it,

"Jaime’s art balances big white and black spaces to create a world of nuance in between, just as his writing balances our big human feelings and our small human trivias to generate its incredible emotional power. Quite simply, this is one of the twentieth century's most significant comic creators at the peak of his form, with every line a wedding of classicism and cool."

An early-80s review in Publishers Weekly stated:

"^* stories never fail to entertain, but their claim on literature is due to Hernandez's bracing realism. His virtuoso drawings present characters of intelligence, wit, and human frailty who confront each other -- and the reader -- with such honesty and genuine tenderness that one may find it hard to believe she/he is reading a comic book."

While Jaime's art and storytelling skills have been almost universally acclaimed, he has had some notable detractors: both Harvey Pekar and R. Crumb have repeatedly dismissed Jaime's work as well-drawn but overly glamorized. Gilbert and Jaime are sometimes compared to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, with Gilbert being the "deep", difficult, confessional and sometimes crude one, and Jaime being the dazzling, slick and sentimental one. It is a comparison the brothers themselves have resisted, while also admitting there is a grain of truth to it.

Influences

• Dan DeCarlo
• Hank Ketcham
• Charles Schulz
• Milton Caniff

External links

• Jaime Hernandez at Fantagraphics
• Review of Jaime's solo work at The Comics Interpreter
• Review of Love & Rockets
• Long list of Love and Rockets links
• Character index for Jaime's Hoppers/Locas stories - About 187 characters appear at least once in Jaime's work; 65 of these appear more than once.
• Jaime Hernandez interview
• Jaime Hernandez interview with Suicide Girl
• review of Ghost of Hoppers at Comic Book Galaxy

Reference

1959 births | Living people | Comics artists | Comics writers

Jaime Hernández | Jaime Hernandez