Sunday, September 22, 2013

Jaime Hernandez' Locas Tambien

In the 80's one of my all time favorite comics was Love and Rockets. It was produced by 2 Mexican American's brothers from Oxnard California (near LA) named Gilbert (Beto) and Jaime Hernandez (los Hernandez bros). Gilbert was great with his stories of Palomar, a small Mexican town and it's inhabitants but Jaime was my favorite. He wrote about the punk rockers that I so love and identify with. His main characters were Hopie and Maggie and, like the the bros, were both Mexican American. Of all comicdom Jaime expressed the punk rock ideal better than any other creator ever. His characters were irreverent, audacious, infuriating, oh so sweet, but above all, loads of fun. One of my favorite strips of Jaime's was a very early two pager. One incredible thing about this early strip is that not only does he establish a number of his key characters, he gets across what the "punk" life style is all about. So check out Jaime Hernandez "Locas Tambien",



In this two pager all his main characters are very well fleshed out. There is Hopie and Maggie, who are best friends and sometimes lovers; Hopie's brother Joey; Terry, Hopie's jealous lesbian lover and band mate. Maggie's crazy, goth cousin Izzy;. There dumb blonde friend and would be superhero Penny Century; And even their Chinese American tag-along Daffy, all vwell fleshed out in just 2 pages. Jaime goes on to write many urban adventures about them. He adds a few charters here and there but mostly sticks to these few, even to this day.
No other comics creator has created such well formed, and realistic characters as los Hernandez bros. They are a marvel and well deserve their reputation as some of the greatest modern story tellers in the comics medium.


Jaime breaks the third wall with this fun little strip. Jaime also includes 2 other characters of his in the lower left panel, African American space traveler, Rocky and her robot Fumble.
You can see more of Los Hernandez bros on their Tumbler feed - http://losbroshernandez.tumblr.com/
 

No comments:

Post a Comment