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This mammoth book collects all the "Maggie and Hopey" stories from almost 20 years worth of the comic Love & Rockets. Though I've read various issues of the series, mostly from the recent volume, this is my first real exposure to what this book is all about. It's a great way to read it. Jaime Hernandez is one of comics' great geniuses working in the medium today. His style is clean and simple, using only blacks and whites and the minimum amount of lines to get his imagery across. But it's not simplistic by any means. His characters are more natural and real than in just about any other comic out there. And his writing is a mix of naturalism and surrealism. These are the stories of seemingly real people in a world that is only similar but not the same as ours. Collected together, these stories read as one big, Great American novel. The further you get into it, the more real each character becomes. Not only is Maggie, the most realistic female character ever to be in a comic book, but the characters around her make up the best ensemble ever to appear in a comic.

It's quite amazing to think that these stories came out periodically over so many years but read now as if they were written at once. It's also funny, that the book started with such seemingly out of place comic book trappings like rockets ships and dinosaurs. Eventually Hernandez phased those things out in order to focus on his characters, but he never "retconned" it out completely like most ongoing comics do with their sillier early stories. Occasionally a character will mention the early "adventures in the jungle" or someone in a superhero costume will show up. Hernandez is not embarrassed that this is a comic he's writing, and feels free to embrace some of it's devices. That is most evident in how he tells the story. In this day of "decompressed" comics storytelling, it's refreshing to see, in some instances, so much time pass between panels here. The book is very much rooted in a comic strip format, and doesn't try to read like a movie.

Thankfully, these stories are still going in the new Love & Rockets book.
A+

Posted at February 6, 2005 04:47 PM