FFB: THE EDUCATION OF HOPEY GLASS by Jaime Hernandez (Fantagraphics 2008)

Jaime Hernandez is one of the three brothers (though eldest bother Mario only occasionally contributes) who are responsible for the comics magazine Love and Rockets; elder brother Gilbert tends to write stories about characters in or from a small town, Palomar, in an unspecified Central American country, many of whom have emigrated to the U.S.; Xaime (as he sometimes signs his work) focuses on characters who grew up in relatively run-down suburbs of L.A.  JH's comics tend to hew to realism a bit more than his brothers', even given his earliest L&R comics were primarily science-fictional, with his two most consistent characters, Esperanza "Hopey" Glass and Maggie Chascarrillo, working as mechanics on small space-faring vehicles.  Soon, most of the sfnal content was dropped from these narratives, except as occasional reminiscences or such subplots as when one of their friends strove to become a supernaturally-gifted superhero, while Maggie and Hopey made their way through the L.A. punk-rock scene and the interplay of cultures around them. (Another of their friends is something of an actual witch, which allows Jaime to play at times with the fantasy/magical realism tropes more common in his brother's Palomar stories.)

The Education of Hopey Glass collects a series of shorter linked narratives from a period in which Hopey is going through some relatively serious life changes; a lifelong instinctive rebel, as she approaches forty, she takes on her first relatively "straight" job associated with the college courses she's been attending, that of a teacher's assistant in an elementary school.  At the school, the teacher she works with refers to her as "Hope" (a literal translation of Esperanza), and settling into that job has other small bits of estrangement, not least in reminding her of her own troubled early school experience. Hopey is also having troubles with the womanfriend she lives with, who among other things has grown tired of Glass's endless flirtation with other women. Hopey visits Maggie, which in turn connects this series of stories with the second half of the book, comprised mostly of narratives involving Ray Dominguez, like Hopey an ex-lover of Maggie's; Hopey and Ray's relations with Maggie are both unresolved on both ends. Thus, while Ray finds himself in the orbit of a mercurial woman named Vivian, he keeps being reminded of how much he misses Maggie, not least when he runs into Maggie on several occasions. Ray's adventures, despite their peripherally involving the murder of Vivian's abusive  ex-boyfriend, somewhat parallel Hopey's.

This is perhaps not the book to begin one's reading of Love and Rockets with, despite it featuring the charm and wit Hernandez fans have long since come to expect...something like the omnibus Locas would be better for the stories around Maggie, Hopey and their friends and family...but as with most good serial narrative, you might well find you understand enough of what goes on, in the characters' lives as in everyone's...

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for today's prompter entries.

FFB: Walt Kelly: The Life And Art of the Creator of Pogo by Thomas Andrae and Carsten Laqua (Hermes Press 2012); The Art of Jaime Hernandez: The Secrets of Life and Death by Todd Hignite (Harry N. Abrams 2010)

Between the subjects of these two heavily-illustrated celebrations, most of the history of graphic storytelling...or comics, in newspaper strips, comic books and elsewhere...is at least touched on. 

I've dealt briefly with the volume on Hernandez before: 
While los Bros. Hernandez, Jaime and Gilbert and occasionally Mario, the perpetrators of Love and Rockets, the flagship title for the Fantagraphics comics line (along with their critical nonfiction magazine, The Comics Journal), were probably the greatest impetus for my beginning to read comics again fairly regularly as an adult, and thus to come across Wimmen's Comix and Twisted Sisters and Alan Moore's work and that of others who had been busily advancing the form...though I'd never given up on newspaper strips, and so knew of (introduction author) Alison Bechdel's work in the "alternative" press. I'd actually bought this for my friend Alice, who fell in profound love with Jaime Hernandez's two initially-young LA punk-rocker girl characters, Hopey (Esperanza) Glass and Margarita Luisa "Maggie" Chascarrillo (pictured on the cover) who individually and together tend to be the focus of JH's stories for the comic, at various stages of their lives over the the decades the title has been published (Gilbert Hernandez focuses on the characters living in a Central American town, Palomar, in the 1950s, and their often US-emigrated offspring). Whenever one reads of comics being compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one has probably happened upon a reference to L&R.

True, but insufficient, but I won't have time for the full bore exploration of either book today, either, alas...what's notable, and Hignite and his interview subjects are quick to point this out, is how thoroughly Hernandez, even more than his brothers, draws on so much of the past work in in comics as direct influence, ranging from Alex Toth (the clean lines, the black and white masses) through Hergé, the creator of Tintin, to the compositional style of Wallace Wood (often most consciously in splash pages for the stories in the brothers' magazines, Love and Rockets in its various iterations and otherwise). (And I was drawn to revisit this book in part because Jeff Segal made a gift to me of a slightly chewed up but very inexpensive remainder he'd found.)

Meanwhile, Andrae (an academic deeply interested in comics) and Laqua (who had one of his chapters included translated from German by another) are supplemented in their multi-part study of Walt Kelly by Mark Burstein and Scott Daley. Walt Kelly, of course, was the creator of Pogo, from its newspaper debut through Kelly's death in 1973 the most sophisticated of newspaper-strip commentary on the US scene, rivaled early on by L'il Abner (with which it shared a rustic setting, albeit even more rustic inasmuch as it was a "funny animal' strip set in the Okefenokee swamp), after its first decade by the first of the "alternative" paper strips (the weekly Jules Feiffer strip The Village Voice originally tagged Sick, Sick, Sick) and by the end of its original run by Doonesbury (whose Gary Trudeau cited Pogo with Little Nemo in Slumberland and Krazy Kat as the three most important strips thus far). Another gift, this one from Alice, which I'd been looking at whenever dropping by the comics store next to the supermarket near my parents' house over the last several months, and which fellow Kelly fan Richard Robinson picked up. Let it be noted, again, insufficiently, for now, that Kelly went through a similar process of early imitation of the newspaper strips (there were no out and out comic books in Kelly's childhood) and the precocious creation of new variants, that led to Kelly's early work in the field for Disney and Dell...and somewhat less sharp, but still elegant, animal strip and comic book work was a specialty, before Kelly found his metier in the newspaper world.

These are fine introductions to the work of the men in question, Hernandez beginning to publish just under a decade after the passing of Kelly, though, of course, the various Fantagraphics collections (or the older Simon and Schuster volumes of Kelly) are even better introductions...

See, for example, Locas and Ten Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo....

for more of this week's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

FFCTB: From the Coffee Table: OUR AMAZING WORLD OF NATURE; David Kyle's THE PICTORIAL HISTORY OF SCIENCE FICTION; THE ART OF JAIME HERNANDEZ

I've reviewed a number of coffee-table books over the course of the several years of Friday's "Forgotten"...but here are three which have made an impression that I'd not yet featured:

Our Amazing World of Nature, atypically for a Reader's Digest book, was not only not a collection of "condensed" essays, but was a big, handsome anthology with excellent photography accompanying a number of pop-science and natural history essays by the likes of Donald Culross Peattie...almost as if RD was saying to Time-Life, we can play your game, too. And the selections, which went from the most general essays on astronomy, geology and oceanography to rather specific entries on various species of animal, were nearly uniformly engaging...this is the first of my parents' books I remember reading from cover to cover, over the course of a number of bedtimes.

David Kyle's The Pictorial History of Science Fiction, which saw rather bad covers in both its US and UK editions (the latter above...you're tipped in part by the near-parity of UK to US magazine titles in this one) was one of the first references I paged through after catching the fiction-magazine bug full-on, and the illustrations and the rather sensible text were evocative, to say the least...the 1930s Expressionist covers for Amazing Stories alone were enough to give me an appreciation for what had been tried throughout the history of fiction-magazine publishing (I was certainly reading magazine fiction from as many eras as there were already, but one didn't find the back issues trailing that far back casually lying about):



Amazing in 1933 tried an interesting run of covers...






The rather more "realistic" covers of the past and future issues were at times striking, but I've always appreciated these.








Well, this captioning workaround seems to be slightly effective in separating the Firefox-view cover images...




While los Bros. Hernandez, Jaime and Gilbert and occasionally Mario, the perpetrators of Love and Rockets, the flagship title for the Fantagraphics comics line (along with their critical nonfiction magazine, The Comics Journal), were probably the greatest impetus for my beginning to read comics again fairly regularly as an adult, and thus to come across Wimmen's Comix and Twisted Sisters and Alan Moore's work and that of others who had been busily advancing the form...though I'd never given up on newspaper strips, and so knew of (introduction author) Alison Bechdel's work in the "alternative" press. I'd actually bought this for my friend Alice, who fell in profound love with Jaime Hernandez's two initially-young LA punk-rocker girl characters, Hopey (Esperanza) Glass and Margarita Luisa "Maggie" Chascarrillo (pictured on the cover) who individually and together tend to be the focus of JH's stories for the comic, at various stages of their lives over the the decades the title has been published (Gilbert Hernandez focuses on the characters living in a Central American town, Palomar, in the 1950s, and their often US-emigrated offspring). Whenever one reads of comics being compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one is probably happened upon a reference to L&R.








For more coffee-table (and other) books this week, please see host Patti Abbott's blog. And, goodness, does Blogspot suck. On Firefox at the moment, the Amazing covers overlap ridiculously; on IE, they are rather widely spaced. Let's see if I can fix that at all...well, somewhat.