Los Bros Hernandez duet, with kissing

The boys talk about their women.

By Amy Benfer

Feb 20, 2001 | On the day I interview Jaime Hernandez, who, with his brother Gilbert, has written and illustrated the serial graphic novels "Love and Rockets" for the last 20 years, he tells me that Hopey's birthday is coming up any day now.

Hopey, readers of "Love and Rockets" will know, is a spiky-haired punk rock Latina lesbian Jaime has followed from the time she was 18 or 19. Now, she would be about to turn 37.

"Remember that time, when someone asks Hopey why all the girls like her so much?" Jaime asks, "and she says, 'Because I have a tongue as fast as Muhammad Ali and as sweet as Dolly Parton?' Well, I found out that Muhammad Ali and Dolly Parton were born two days apart. And so I decided that the day in between was Hopey's birthday."

Jaime gave Maggie, his central character, his younger sister's birthday and so now, each year, as he watches his sister age, he thinks, "Wow, Maggie must be 36 now. Is it possible?"

Gilbert, for his part, goes silent when I bring up the death of Tonantzin, the young woman who starts out as the town beauty and ends up dying a political martyr.

"Now I'm going to cry," he says. "I loved her so much, and she's gone. No one will ever replace her."

Talking to Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez about their work is like asking them to describe the women they love most. The brothers grew up in Oxnard, Calif., with their mother, a rabid comic book collector who suffered so greatly when her own mother threw out her comic books that she vowed that her children would have all the comic books they desired. She even let them read comics at the dinner table (though she stopped reading "Love and Rockets," says Jaime, "because it got a little too racy for her.")

The boys she raised on comics grew up to be perhaps the most influential and revered comic book artists of the '80s and '90s. When "Love and Rockets" debuted in 1982, both brothers say that they had planned to do a serial graphic novel that would follow the same set of characters for 15 years or more. Twenty years later, they are still doing just that.

Perhaps this is why the brothers weave stories of their mother, sister, wife (Gilbert) and fiancée (Jaime) with those of their characters. Jaime claims that his fiancée was one of the original models for Hopey, though he rarely mentions it to others, out of fear that people will think, "How gross is that? He's marrying Hopey!"

And Gilbert says that his wife was originally disturbed by Luba, his buxom lead character. "She would say, 'People can see these characters aren't like me, so what are they going to think when they read this?' I would say, 'They aren't going to think anything. You are like them.'"

During our interview, the brothers Hernandez talked about the art of the graphic novel, punk rock, the impossibility of politics, Jennifer Lopez and the importance of maintaining artistic integrity in the face of banality. But mostly, what you will read here is a conversation with two men about the women they love.

So much of the press on L&R is in adult book review sections. People don't seem to be certain who your peers are. Gabriel García Márquez, for example, comes up all the time. How do you feel about being compared to literary novelists, rather than to other graphic artists?

JH: I think it's great. Obviously, novel writers get more respect than we do, so it can only help. I don't read that much, but it's nice to know that we are being taken a little seriously.

GH:I'll take it as flattery if they are talking about the essence of what I'm doing -- looking at the characters. In comics, a lot of the effects you want are not in words. It's that tricky integration of visual art and text. So it's not really a novel on a novel's terms.

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