Love and Rockets: New Stories Number 4

If there's one thing to say about Love and Rockets, it's that as far as comics go, it is curiously addictive.

Love and Rockets is the long-running black-and-white comic series by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez—an exploration of the life of chica Maggie and the ripped-from-life and put-out-there-baldly environment she occupies. I had always wanted to read it, since discovering an issue decades ago at Waldenbooks, and I had always assumed it was an examination of the L.A. punk scene of the Eighties—I think the issues back in those days, or at least the one I discovered, featured two lesbians, one of whom was depicted as a punk rocker. I remember a drawing of a post-punk gothy guy with a Cure T-shirt. Ah, nostalgia waves hit me so hard.

The comic starts off with Maggie and Angel, who we at first assume to be lovers—and maybe they are—but Maggie is embroiled with Ray, who is going to loan her some big cash to open a garage. Angel volunteers for nude model duty at a drawing school; another bloke, Reno is a painter with an exhibition at a gallery. A particularly hellish and beautiful young model becomes jealous of Maggie. She's depicted as having some rather explicit comic strip sex with Reno, whom Maggie is infatuated with, who could have been played in a movie by John Leguizamo. One is tossed into the deep end of the pool in the beautiful, black-and-white, visually clear-as-day line art of the Hernandez bros.

The corker, "King Vampire," is a tale we never quite understand if we are to take it seriously, or if it is just passing fantasy—later on we get the idea it may have simply been an acting job, but it resonates through the rest of the book. Trini is an actress who wants to join a group or clique of goth kids, but doesn't want to get "raped" by the whole gang. A very real vampire begins to seduce her, and a like female bloodsucker begins to ravage roommate Cecil, who disappears quite happily into eternity with her. She stands out because she has megamastia, and the story itself is a sexy, bloody romp. And, I suppose, it says something about the nature of popularity, love, and the willingness to sacrifice to find "happiness" and belonging.

Are these vampiric notions? it seems to ask. Are we drained of our individuality and vitality by dint of surrendering our free will for a group identity? Maggie, a Mexican American, struggles with her place in the social milieu, made up of beautiful women, narcissistic and shallow men, and those who seem to have a secret code of ethics or conduct by which they appraise others, but never let us in on the secret. Motivations and actions here seem puzzling. Maggie gets popped in the mouth by the jealous woman seen screwing Reno a few pages earlier. We're never quite ceratin why.

"The Love Bunglers" (parts Four and Five, it being a multi-part story from the preceding books) gives way to a tale of Maggie's childhood, related by someone else (we get confused on the characters here, as, despite features such as huge, pendulous breasts, they have a similarity that seems to make them somewhat indistinguishable) as if in a memoir. Maggie loved a boy in school younger--too young by far--and the story centers on a baseball sent over the fence into the yard of a neighborhood boogieman. And it disappears into the reader's mind, and flows without rhyme or reason seemingly, into a dialog between two people on a beach (is this Trini again?), one of whom opines that in the future, televsion will become obsolete to microchipped people who will simply have the images beamed directly into their minds. Which, by and by, is possible fourteen years later.

We are finally left with Maggie in the future--she has married Ray, who was assaulted and nearly killed by a vagrant wielding a brick. Ray is now mentally incapacitated or disabled to a degree. The novel closes on their kiss--the world has not always been kind, but they have love and detachment, and fantasy too, in equal measure, to give them strength to weather he storm. Love and Rockets is a sexy, bold, uncompromising, and often even violent and bloody ride. It's also one often composed of flat affect, and one that may leave the reader struggling ot understand the puzzling and sometimes inscrutable nature of a journey that is, otherwise, rocketing toward love, if nowhere else discernible.

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