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GILBERT AND JAIME HERNANDEZ
The brothers are in the vanguard of artists who are showing that illustrated stories aren't just kid stuff. Says Jaime, standing: "We're inspiring a new generation that is taking comics pretty seriously, like real fiction"
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Graphic Sketches of Latino Life
By Andrew D. Arnold
Imagine a Mexican-American TV soap opera written with Federico García Lorca's dramatic intensity and passion for female characters but produced with the randy exuberance of a soft-core-porn video. Then spread it all across the gritty black-and-white panels of a comic book. What you would get is Love and Rockets, the comics series created by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, known to the comixcenti as Los Bros. Hernandez.
In 1996 the brothers took a sabbatical from the series, which first appeared in 1981, but this month they — now joined by older brother Mario — are back with all new installments. When the series started out, most underground comics were political satires and science-fiction fantasies, but Love and Rockets told complex stories about real people, bringing a literary narrative form to the comic-book frame. "I couldn't just write a novel, because my work doesn't work well without the pictures," says Jaime, 41. "And I couldn't just do portraits or illustrations, because I need the words to go with it."
What still sets Love and Rockets apart from other books on the comics racks is how the brothers, who grew up in the ethnically mixed strawberry-farming community of Oxnard, Calif., infuse their tales with multicultural images and references. "We were basing all our stuff on our own lives," says Jaime. "Just kind of bringing real life to it." |
