Los Bros Hernandez duet, with kissing

JH:That's what I did with Maggie's weight, too. I did the weight thing as a way to challenge the reader and myself. I was surprised to find out that many readers hated it. They were so insulted.

The main question I get asked is still: 'Will Maggie ever get thin again?' And I say, 'How many people do you know in real life who get thin again?' Some do, yes, and Maggie goes down in weight, and then she goes back up again. She can't keep it straight. I thought it was my duty to make it real, and to go through with it.

One of the things that I think makes Maggie so lovable is that she seems to chronically fail at the things that are the most important to her.

JH:Maggie is told 'You're a great mechanic,' and she thinks, 'Oh, OK.' She has that guilt of being a girl mechanic when she wasn't supposed to be; when she should have been dating boys. It's her Mexican upbringing that she just can't shake. She's learned to be a good Mexican. When she's a Mexican-American, she's kind of caught between being a good Mexican and a good American.

I take that from my upbringing: You're caught in the middle, and you can't please either side. So she feels like a failure, even though she's very intelligent and very talented at what she used to do. But she just has this block that doesn't let her get anywhere.

She's going to deal with it in the future. I could have been that way if we didn't do this comic. There was a chance we wouldn't have done it, because we weren't confident enough. I don't know what I would be doing if I didn't do it, but I think about it once in awhile. What if I didn't take the chance? So I stick all my insecurities on poor Maggie. She carries my load.

I do it to her because I love her. It sounds weird, but I do this, because I love my Maggie, so I throw all this shit at her. And she's a survivor. She's going to be OK. I always try to give her that tiny, tiny light at the end of the tunnel for her, because I have faith in her.

Although there is a lot of sex in Love & Rockets, it isn't often very explicit, and rarely lasts for more than one panel. It's pretty much an R-rated comic.

GH:NC-17. Some of the sex is just in and out, in your face. Showing the sex in one panel is kinda neat. I don't think you need pages upon pages, showing it in slow motion. I've always thought that looked silly in films. Usually I depict sex one of two ways: The panel either shows they shouldn't be having sex, or that they definitely should be having sex. I don't want to say sex is necessarily a goal -- but it certainly finalizes something in the relationship. I could have characters doing the will-they-won't-they dance forever. So I just like to show them balling, to finally show that this is where the relationship is.

That's what it meant to me when I was growing up. I was a teenager in the '70s, when everyone was having all this free love and sex. But that wasn't what it was like for me. It was all pretty traditional stuff. I went out with one girl at a time. It wasn't any of that wild Playboy stuff -- even though that was before AIDS, and I should have taken advantage of it.

Whether you have sex or not is a major part of a relationship -- even if kids today don't feel that way. They say, we did everything but sex, so we didn't have sex. Then you find out they did worse things than sex. It's like, 'Well we were hanging from a chandelier and she was dripping wax on me, and we did it for nine hours. But we didn't have sex.' They're in such denial. That's sex.

But they are getting better. Now they are starting to understand that kissing is more intimate. It's like they've come full circle, and now kissing means a lot, which is really good, because I love kissing. Have you ever noticed that I don't have much kissing in comics? It's because I can't draw it. It's the most fun thing you can do in a physical relationship, and I can't draw it. That's got to say something about me.

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