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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
The heroines of the Hernandez brothers' "Love and Rockets" graphic novel series are no longer whip-thin punk girls. They're among the most fleshed-out female characters in American literature.
Feb 20, 2001 | It's a familiar experience. There is a woman and she is a woman you love. She is your sister or your lover or your cousin or your friend and you have loved her since she was a child. Now she is a woman. She is, let us say, in her late 30s, nearing the cusp of middle age. She has done well and she has done not so well, and when you see her now, you see in her all that has come before.
Now she is reclining on a sofa bed in her apartment; she has done the laundry, but she has not yet put it away. She is wearing a tank top and underpants that bind and bunch and her thighs and belly spill out slightly over the too-tight edges, and you love her new softness but you also see, underneath, the whip-thin punk rock girl who once terrorized the neighborhood and commanded the secret love of everyone, even her best friends' brothers. She turns her head and her chin line blurs; she could be 40. She smiles, with red, oil-slick lips; she could be 14. And then her sister (but it could be her daughter) walks into the room, and this sister, who is still thin, with a chic short haircut modeled after the one she loved on her older sister 10 years ago, looks more like her than she does.
The women we love do this to us. We see their past in their present. Sometimes an actress will do this too -- Catherine Deneuve, Elizabeth Taylor, Jeanne Moreau -- but when we follow an actress, we follow her outer life; her inner life remains her own. Women in books may do it, too -- we follow Isabel Archer from 23-year-old ingenue to middle-aged cynic; Anne of Green Gables from bookish orphan to teacher to mother; Tolstoy's Natasha from young virgin sprite to old milk sow -- but in those cases, we are following the inner lives, and the author does not provide us with a visual yardstick that we must follow, whether we like it or not.
But I would wager that no one -- in fiction, in film, in theater, in painting -- has united the inner and outer lives of fictional women and made it possible for those fictional women to seem as familiar and immutable as the women who are our sisters, our lovers, our cousins and our friends as completely as have Los Bros Hernandez, Jaime and Gilbert, in their graphic serial novels "Love and Rockets." There are 15 volumes in all; they ran from 1982 to 1996, and just resumed last month.
When people talk about the Hernandez brothers, they mention how much their work is like that of Gabriel García Márquez in comic book form, and how, in the early '80s, they virtually invented the alternative graphic novel as a pleasure for art kids and "mature" readers who would never, ever have picked up a comic book. They mention how they chronicled Latino culture, from the barrio to below the border; and punk rock culture, and women's wrestling long before these things became part of mainstream American culture.
But all of these explanations for the success of "Love and Rockets" -- as literature, as a stage in the development of the graphic novel as art form, as sociology and ethnic documentary -- while true, fail to get at the singularity of the achievement of two brothers from Oxnard, Calif., who grew up mainlining Marvel and DC comics given to them by their mother.
In part, this is because there is still no body of criticism for graphic art, though today, 20 years after "Love and Rockets" debuted, there is a small but significant canon of graphic artists -- Daniel Clowes, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Art Spiegelman, Lynda Barry, Edward Gorey -- who are worthy of the highest critical attention. Comics journals cover comics as a scene, but when graphic novelists get attention from the mainstream press, they tend to be lumped in with the book reviews, as literature.
Certainly, the best graphic novelists are also literary, but the unique impact of their art comes from combining the techniques of literature with those of painting, cinema and theater. Like filmmakers, graphic novelists can use jump-cuts and flashbacks to move through time, and shadow and perspective to create a mood. Like playwrights, they must depend upon dialogue to create narrative and characters -- the reader knows each character by what they say and what they do to the people around them (with the exception, of course, of the rare interior monologue). Graphic art is the artistic medium perhaps most suited to chronicling life as it is lived: as a visual record of physical action and change, and an emotional record of people as the sum parts of their speech, interactions and relationships with the outside world.
The Hernandez brothers are unique for having mastered the visual and the narrative techniques common to all graphic novelists and fused them with serial fiction -- a genre that reaches back to Homer and Dickens and soap operas and telenovelas -- that unfolds in more or less real time. Their characters have aged along with their readers, leaving or losing lovers and children and parents and friends, adding pounds and wrinkles and more lovers and children and friends, changing hairstyles and cities and apartments and houses, all the while keeping an essence that, throughout all these additions and subtractions, remains the same, or at least, in the right light, on the right day, familiar.
