Life Drawing

At this point — at any point during the 21^st century really — getting into Love and Rockets seems like more trouble than its worth. The reviews are still good, they’ve always been good, but there’s just so much of it. And unlike one of these long-running manga serials with hundreds of collections, the Love and Rockets publication model is a rather convoluted affair. Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez each go on their own path within the same title, with some collections mixing the two, and each story will occasionally have spin-offs, all of which have been collected in different ways throughout the years⁴. I remember first hearing about the series ages ago, getting curious but still giving up from sheer amount of material⁷.

I have since read my share of Love and Rockets over the last few years, starting during the first COVID-19 outburst, though it was only a small percentage of the overall series and not in a particularly straightforward manner (reading whatever volume came into my hands). This probably makes me the worst kind of person to connect with Life Drawing, the latest collection of short stories by Jaime Hernandez, most of which focus around his long-running characters Maggie and Ray, and also around the slightly less long-running character of Tonta. I know just enough to recognize some of the cast, but they have experienced decades of stories while I have stayed behind. It’s like reading the first couple of chapters of one of these extra-long, extra-populated Russian novels and coming back five hundred pages later without reading anything in between: "These two are married now?"; "Oh, that character has a new name?"; "Did I know this person before or is it someone completely new?" Life Drawing doesn’t stop to fill you up on who’s who, it just goes directly into the drama.

I spent the first couple of stories in this recent volume in a mood of intertwined enjoyment and bafflement. Enjoyment, because the cartooning is better than it ever was — Jaime belongs to the rarified category of artist that is not impaired by old age but simply finds newer way to improve without ever losing that part that made them into themselves. You can place him alongside the likes likes of Breccia, Pratt or Munoz — the one-name-is-enough club. It is possible to simply enjoy Life Drawing for the wild comedic double-takes alone, outdoing the best Archie stories at their own game.

But bafflement, because when it comes to the plot, to the characters, I found myself, at first, lost at sea. Grasping at meaning that seems forever floating beyond my reach. I could understand what these characters were doing on a mechanical level, but I couldn’t feel it. It was a series of (superbly drawn) actions on the page.

That was until page 54, in the story “Lifer Drawing.” A single panel here shows Ray semi-hunched in a half-body shot. This, to me, is a perfect panel, as beautiful as any you could choose. It is simple, there is no special framing, no extra details, not even a background⁹. It is pure comics-making, as if the whole life of a man, the weight of the years, the knowledge of what has been, the fear of what might be, is refined to a single image. It is a thing of beauty because Ray is not beautiful and is not a perfect being — his gut is sticking out slightly, his shoulders are loose, his tie hangs limp in the air. Yet the dignity of the person is preserved. Whatever came before, whatever will come, he will bear it. In this one panel Jaime Hernandez captures the whole of the man.

I have rarely felt like that when reading a comics page. Bernie Krigstein once said something to the effect that in comics, in proper comics, every panel must be a work of art of its own while still contributing to the story. It is a standard at which many fail — panels are often just pieces of a larger whole — one that Krigstein himself failed at over and over again¹⁰. But here, it is achieved. This was a moment when I stopped trying to understand the plot and began to feel it.

The moment I hit that panel all the faults I found in Life Drawing faded away, becoming part of the invisible background. Looking at the rest of page 54 I became aware of how well composed this whole page, how each panel doesn’t simply tells a story but captures the essence of the characters that inhabit it. A panel before, seemingly completely unrelated, showcases Tonta and Judy Fair about to get on the bus. There are no movement lines, no attempt to finesse a sense of movement, and yet the energy that is simply bursting out of Tonta is wholly present.

Once again Jaime had captured the whole of the figure. It becomes clear that Tonta is a person that can’t stop, can’t control herself fully; everything in her life is too charged with energy. Likewise, that panel shows you Judy Fair’s reticence, faltering before the more dominant personalities around her. Everyone is Life Drawing carries their own weight, a weight that feels real because these characters have actual history, decades of it, to call on. It wasn’t something that was made for this particular story, instead – this story as the result of what has transpired before, and will have its own consequences down the road.

I have made a comparison to your big classic novels before, a Brothers Karamazov for the Los Angeles punk scene, and others have talked about Love and Rockets in terms of soap opera. Both comparisons are apt, but only insofar as the fable of the three blind man and the elephant. It captures a certain limited aspect of the thing, but not the whole of it. Because Life Drawing, and Love and Rockets as a whole, is not a book, a movie, a play or a tv show; it’s pure comics. It can do what it does — capture the entire being of its protagonist in a series of snapshots — because it thinks in comics terms. It can do this not despite the fact that it has no planned end, no clear arc, but because of that. Like that beautiful panel of Ray, a man for all seasons¹¹, this book is another brick in a road that may end tomorrow or may go on for years. It’s beautiful because we don’t know. And, you suspect, neither does Jaime Hernandez.

Alan Moore once said: "My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky." More than any other work, in any other medium, Love and Rockets seems to embody this notion. It can, and has been, everything. Life Drawing is true to its name, because in any one of his drawings Jaime Hernandez captures a complete life.

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