In the summer before I went to college, a comic collection came out: Chester Square<\/em> by Jaime Hernandez, the thirteenth volume in the greatest comics series of all time. Love and Rockets<\/em> was started in 1981 by three brothers: Jaime, Gilbert, and the elusive Mario. Gilbert mostly made comics about the fictional Latin American village of Palomar<\/a>, where the slugs are tasty, the children are spooky, and the men are confused \u2019cause the women make you growl. The art is homey and sometimes bulbous or grotesque, and the stories, heavily influenced by Garcia Marquez, include witches and ghosts and mysterious disappearances at the eclipse of the sun.<\/p>\n Jaime\u2019s tales mostly centered on the LA suburban punk community. They started out<\/a> as a kooky mix of low-rent superheroics and punk slice-of-life. These comics star two careening chick catastrophes: Margarita Chascarillo (\u201cMaggie the Mechanic,\u201d a goofy ball of anxieties, worried about her weight, chasing after men, a homebody who ends up traveling the globe and works as everything from a science-fiction robot mechanic to a fake accountant for a lady wrestler) and Esperanza Glass (\u201cHopey.\u201d Whenever there\u2019s trouble, she\u2019s there on the double\u2026 because she started it). And Jaime\u2019s comics also star Maggie\u2019s hometown of Huerta, better loved as \u201cHoppers\u201d: a Mexican-American neighborhood where families fight and gangsters love. Jaime\u2019s style is hot<\/em>, these crisp and glaring blacks and whites, sun-shocked and razor-edged. It\u2019s romantic and iconic.<\/p>\n Maggie and Hopey are best friends. The other punks call them, not entirely fondly, \u201cthe Incest Twins.\u201d (It\u2019s not hard to tell them apart: Maggie is the short one, and Hopey is the shorter one.) At some point they become lovers. I was introduced to Love and Rockets<\/em> by a friend from Riot Grrrl, and while I love a lot of the Palomar stories (especially the harrowing serial-killer tale, \u201cBlood of Palomar\u201d), the heart of L&R<\/em> for me was the epic love of these queer punk teens.<\/p>\n I re-read Love & Rockets<\/em> a couple years ago, and one thing I noticed is how much of the Maggie and Hopey epic is about not having anywhere to live. Half of their million crazy adventures, from the sexy sojourn in the thousand rooms of (literally, but also figuratively) horny gazillionaire H.R. Costigan\u2019s mansion to the terrifying descent into a baby-doll sex cult in Wigwam Bam<\/em>, happen because they don\u2019t have anywhere to sleep at night. Del Chimney\u2019s house o\u2019 gropin\u2019, the car Hopey sleeps in after she sets fire to her relationship with her band\u2026 these are places nobody can call home. And yet the fallback arms of Hoppers are always waiting to catch them\u2013a reassurance, and a threat. Home is always lurking at the end of the long escape tunnel.<\/p>\n After Chester Square<\/em> came out, I got caught up in the college life and its attendant changes (including my conversion to Catholicism). I was reading more Chesterton than comics. Love and Responsibility<\/em>, not Love and Rockets<\/em>. I didn\u2019t reject these books, I still loved them, but they were preserved in my memory stopping right where Chester Square<\/em> stops. And that was a place I loved. Chester Square<\/em> marks (imo) the high point of Jaime H.\u2019s style. It\u2019s white-hot, noir-influenced, aching with isolation\u2026 and it ends with Maggie and Hopey reunited, the way they gotta be.<\/p>\n At some point I realized there had been other L&R<\/em> books while I wasn\u2019t looking. I went and read them. They were okay or whatever. With Jaime\u2019s books especially, I often found myself appreciating or respecting them, without loving them. Even the titles of the collections give you the feeling of characters moving on to a new stage in life, with all the regrets that come with change: Ghosts of Hoppers<\/em>, The Education of Hopey Glass<\/em>, The Love Bunglers<\/em>. Maggie and Hopey broke up again. They got normal jobs: Maggie managed an apartment complex (with a superhero tenant, which felt more like a nod to the comics\u2019 past than like a source of new stories) and Hopey became a teacher. Maggie got back together with Ray D., an artsy ex; Hopey married a woman and had a kid. Life knocked them around\u2013really hard and really physically, in Maggie and Ray\u2019s case. Maggie and Hopey finally attained a certain adulthood; and it couldn\u2019t feel real to me, because they seemed to have lost one another. I didn\u2019t like it, I didn\u2019t want it, I did the classic thing where in your head<\/em> the comics stop in 1996. Continuity is a matter of personal choice!<\/p>\n This year a friend sent me a link to an LA Times<\/em> story<\/a> about an upcoming Love and Rockets<\/em> book. Hopey and Maggie would go to a Hoppers punk reunion\u2026 and come to some kind of reckoning. Somehow they\u2019d reconcile what they shared back in the day with the reality they go home to now. That book, Is This How You See Me?<\/em><\/a>, sold out so fast that I ordered it in June and only got my copy this weekend. I\u2019ve just finished it.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a million things to say, and I\u2019m trying to pick what is most important to say for people who don\u2019t (yet) love the greatest love story in comics history. Is This<\/em> weaves together the past (1979 and 1980, the good old bad old days) with the present (smart phones, menopause, regrets). It\u2019s an education in how to tell a certain kind of love story. Maggie and Hopey shaped one another\u2019s lives. Their love is a fact about them now. It can\u2019t compete with the love they share with their partners\u2013but it doesn\u2019t need to. We get to see good ol\u2019 Maggie, needy and vacillating; and good ol\u2019 Hopey, reflexively sarcastic and then suddenly so tender. We also get to see how they\u2019ve changed, Hopey especially, how she\u2019s lost some of her cockiness and has a harder time feeling at home in this reunion with her misspent youth. We get to see, once again, how they\u2019re always getting into situations where they\u2019re a lot more vulnerable than they realize.<\/p>\n We get to see how they pull one another back into old dysfunctional patterns. We get to see how there will always be a place in Maggie\u2019s heart where nobody but Hopey can live, and vice versa.<\/p>\n There are things about every marriage (at least, every good-enough marriage?) that only the married people know. The marriage creates a private language, a realm apart, which even the children of the marriage, even the spouses\u2019 closest friends, can never enter. What struck me about Is This How You See Me?<\/em> is that it portrays that exclusive union (which each partner sees in their own way\u2013a shared secret life doesn\u2019t mean a shared perspective on that secret life) in Maggie\u2019s relationship with Ray D., and in Hopey\u2019s relationship with Sadaf\u2026 and in Maggie and Hopey\u2019s relationship with one another. Irreplaceable, impenetrable, inescapable: There will always be things only you can understand in me<\/em>.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a story you can only tell if the intimacy between Our Heroines and their new partners is also<\/em> real, life-shaping, everpresent, and exclusive. This is a story about a love even deeper than the love at the end of Chester Square<\/em>: a love which accepts that it will never be the only love\u2026 and that it will never go away, even when you want it to, it will never simply be replaced, it will always be as close to you as home.<\/p>\n Love & Rockets mural feat. Maggie Chascarillo via Wikimedia Commons.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the summer before I went to college, a comic collection came out: Chester Square by Jaime Hernandez, the thirteenth volume in the greatest comics series of all time. Love and Rockets was started in 1981 by three brothers: Jaime, Gilbert, and the elusive Mario. Gilbert mostly made comics about the fictional Latin American village […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":12635,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[56,32,78,197,80],"class_list":["post-12632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","tag-friendship","tag-gayer-than-a-picnic-basket","tag-home-is-anywhere-you-hang-your-head","tag-los-bros-hernandez","tag-memories-are-films-about-ghosts"],"yoast_head":"\n