But I'm on the fence about this one. We want comic books to reach a new audience, to keep getting better and better, to get more perspective, and when we are old men, we want to see new, young comic artists whose work is taken as seriously as any novel. We hope to see that in our lifetime.

On the other hand, the comic books are in their own neat, kitschy, junky world that is unique to comics. We like that too. We like that it's outlaw. You can't repair comics, you can't hang them in a museum and say, 'This belongs next to the Mona Lisa.' It's the whole squirrelly factor, like early punk: There is the sense that this is bad, and we want it to be bad.

The early "Love and Rockets" are filled with rockets. But they abruptly disappear after the third issue. What made you decide to move away from the sci-fi stuff?

JH: Readers said that they loved the characters. And I said, 'Well, good, because I prefer the characters.' I was itching to show their real lives. The sci-fi stuff was just for fun. It started getting in the way. You can't really take Maggie seriously when she's bummed out if there is a rocket ship in the background. But if I put her in a realistic setting, you can get deeper into it, because you can relate, you can feel it.

The word made fleshy
There are women who are fantasy women and women who are real women and women who are both -- they are the ones who are drawn by Los Bros Hernandez.
By Amy Benfer

I also hadn't realized that my life at the time was more exciting than what I was reading in comics. We were just showing what we were experiencing -- going out, seeing bands, having fun, and things like that. We found out that a lot of people didn't know about this stuff, but were intrigued by it. So we just said, 'Well, I have a whole life full of this stuff that you people don't know about.'

GH:It's more fun to draw a rocket ship than a Volkswagen. It's more fun to draw an alien asking for change than it is to draw a homeless person. But you're missing a lot of the real world when you decide to draw a rocket ship, rather than a Volkswagen. So by the third issue, we realized, we didn't want to do the science fiction anymore. Of course, we didn't realize that, while our readers liked the characters, they also liked that Flash Gordon world. If we'd stuck with the science fiction, we'd probably be millionaires by now.

At the time, we were part underground, part mainstream. We didn't know at the time that we would end up being the kind of cartoonists who would be interviewed for Time magazine.

What I find fascinating is how central the women are to the narrative. First of all, because these fabulous women are drawn by two boys, and second of all, because the comics industry is one in which there are so few female characters to begin with.

JH:Well, that's part of the reason they were put out there. It all started with loving to draw women. And then we decided that, 'Well, I can have my cake and eat it too if I make them interesting characters, because we certainly ain't getting it from anyone else.'

I like drawing Maggie's big butt. But I'm not happy unless her personality is well-rounded. No pun intended.

GH:We learned to draw women after we learned to draw men. At first, we couldn't draw them -- they looked like football players with hair. But once we reached our adolescence, we began to refine them. Then it became an obsession: We just drew women all the time. When it came to writing stories, we would usually create a male. But they weren't as interesting. We immediately went back to the women. So we just gave up.

When we asked ourselves why it was so easy for us to do, we came up with the answer: We grew up with women. Our mother and grandmother raised us, because our dad died when we were pretty young. We were influenced by our mother's attitude towards the world. She was real boy-crazy.

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