BWS has nothing on Jaime Hernandez who’s been working on Locas flat-out since 1985. I picked up a book the other day and it was literally like yesterday. Yes, the past figures in “Ghost of Hoppers”, and 35 years seems like a good time to get back into the groove of what has got to be the darkest fun read of all time (even Totown had got nothing on this!)
There are reviews out there, so I wanna pick up on elements that could more or less meld with mine. Jaime has kept his mojo on the physical front and these are bodies-in-action rather than turgid headscapes.
Where the physical/physique comes first, the moral dimension is not topsy-turvy as it is in our mainstream world. Not just swimming, housecleaning and the odd sex act do we get, but the physical symbols of the Capri housing apartments where Maggie is the live-in manager.
There are the faulty air-conditioners which she tinkers with to not much avail. There are the stray dogs whose shadows haunt stray conversations. There is the empty swimming pool which an attemptingly escaping Izze falls into, and which is covered in flies.
This image is decadent romance of the Pelleas and Melisande variety (P142) Again, BWS has nothing on this! What’s shocking in Jaime is that the fun characters inhabit such a bleak scenescape.
The nymph-like Hopey would be at home in the depths of the swimming pool had it water. As it is, the pool is more of a death-trap. From death and decay can hunting be far away? These are the shadowy dogs that seem to threaten by shadow alone.
Izzy here makes a telling or cutting remark on Maggie’s hopeless reliance on her nymph-like friend.
Implements that work haphazardly; stray dogs that are more or less invisible; nymph and waterless pools - of the underworld. Instead of the modern/future world of pure order, we have a past-historic one of disorder.
If the barrio they hail from was ramshackle, this is ramshackle in a more weirdly modernist way. Even the name you might think stands for crappy. Almost like a medieval castle, Maggie toils at cleaning and fixing and still the patina of neglect embraces the scene.
Like the comic itself, this makes it a liveable place, with a fertile ambiance and crustiness. As it happens, this is the exact thing that modernism seeks to displace. It’s only when attempts to keep places tidy and functioning smoothly DON’T work that the sense of interesting decadence is retained/revived.
When I was saying previously that modern work resembles rubbish-collection I was meaning that the state of interesting untidiness is continually being swept away (by work itself). Living things are by definition untidy in that they eat eachother. The hunting and predatory landscape is ba drag to “them”.
This is what makes pure order –the dragon of electromagnetic Big Tech – a figment of the acolyte’s brain, since we die and decay and so on. The dark elements in Jaime’s work hint at the physical reality that our societies of the head discard into fringe areas (like comics, natch.)
In a morally vacuous world of the head (order, number), the physical reality is king. In Jaime’s case it’s fabulous realism, the Latino penchant for making fairy tales of necessity.
