Jaime Hernandez | |
---|---|
Born | October 10. 1959 Oxnard, California |
Area(s) | Penciller, Inker, Writer |
Pseudonym(s) | Xaime Hernandez |
Notable works | Love and Rockets |
Jaime (sometimes spelled Xaime) Hernandez (born 1959) is the co-creator of the alternative comic book Love and Rockets with his brothers Gilbert and Mario. [1]
Jaime Hernandez grew up in Oxnard, California. [2] He is the youngest of his family, with four older brothers and one sister. [3] His family embraced comics: their mother read them frequently and old issues were kept in large quantities in the house, to be read and re-read by all over the years. [3] "We grew up with comics," Hernandez said. "I wanted to draw comics my whole life." [4]
They read all types of comics and enjoyed those that gave a fairly realistic depiction of family life as well as the standard superhero adventures. Hernandez was particularly influenced by Hank Ketcham's Dennis the Menace and Dan DeCarlo's Archie' comics. The children in his otherwise rather realistic stories are often drawn to resemble Ketcham's, and Jaime's characters often strike very "DeCarlo-esque" poses. The work of Alex Toth, Charles Schulz, Jesse Marsh and Jack Kirby were also hugely influential. [3]
Hernandez has a lifelong fascination with pro wrestling, especially women's wrestling, and it has been a regular part of his work. Hernandez has also been a lifelong punk rock fan. In addition to playing in bands himself it has been a constant element of his work. His heroine Maggie and her friends are almost all punk fans; he also has done a series of stories about the career of another main character (Hopey) as a bass player for a luckless punk band.
Jaime's main contribution to Love and Rockets is the ongoing serial narrative Locas which follows the tangled lives of a group of primarily Latina characters, from their teenage years in the early days of the California punk scene to the present day. The two central characters of Jaime's cast are Margarita Luisa "Maggie" Chascarrillo and Esperanza Leticia "Hopey" Glass, whose on-again, off-again, open romance is a focus for many Locas storylines. Early on, the stories switched back and forth between Maggie's sci-fi adventures journeying around the world and working as a "prosolar" mechanic repairing rocketships, and much more realistic stories of Maggie and her friends in a grungy, mostly Latin California neighborhood known as "Hoppers". Eventually Hernandez dropped almost all of the sci-fi elements, although he does still occasionally include references to the earlier stories and he still does very occasional short stories about superheroines, robots and other sci-fi genre elements.
The Hernandez brothers announced they were ending Love and Rockets with issue 50, and that they would be doing solo books from then on. For the next few years, the brothers released many solo books, with Jaime doing several books featuring his Locas characters (including Whoa Nellie, Penny Century, and Maggie and Hopey Color Fun) and Maggie generally occupying a supporting role. Eventually they resumed doing Love and Rockets and Maggie again took center stage, but instead of the large, magazine-style format of the original issues, the book was now released in a more traditional comic book format.
The entire Locas storyline to date was collected into one 700 page graphic novel in 2004.
Hernandez has been praised for the physical beauty of his female characters as well as their complex personalities,[ citation needed ] and for years he struggled to create comparably nuanced male characters.[ citation needed ] Hernandez has often said that Maggie and Ray Dominguez both represent different aspects of his own personality.[ citation needed ]
In an interview with The Comics Journal, Hernandez admitted he'd had difficulty aging his characters, because while he'd known girls like Maggie and Hopey when he was young, he'd never known them long enough to find out what they did in adulthood.[ citation needed ]
In addition to his Locas stories, Hernandez has also done occasional work for DC Comics and The New Yorker , and he has done many album covers for such artists as Michelle Shocked. Earlier in his career Hernandez also did album covers for some "Nardcore" punk bands, such as Ill Repute and Dr. Know, the latter of whom featured his younger brother Ismael on bass. Hernandez contributed his artwork for the Indigo Girls' 2004 album All That We Let In . In September 2006, Hernandez also created the artwork for the critically acclaimed Los Lobos album The Town and the City . In 1984-85 Gilbert, Mario and Jaime collaborated on Mister X , a sci-fi comic book series from Vortex Press, with Jaime handling the art and Gilbert and Mario plotting. The book's noirish look has been cited as an influence by the creators of Batman: The Animated Series among other retro-futuristic works. [5] The Hernandez brothers themselves hold little affection for it, however, with Gilbert once describing it being "like a bad zit... it just sort of happened." The Hernandez brothers left the book when Vortex failed to pay them in full. [6] Responding to the non-payment accusations, publisher Bill Marks said "I don't dispute that one bit. And they'll be paid every nickel of it, or every quarter of it." [7] The Hernandez brothers were indeed ultimately paid for their work on Mister X in 1988. [8]
In 2006, Publishers Weekly ranked Hernandez' work Ghost of Hoppers second on its critics' poll of the best comic books of 2006. [9]
Gilberto Hernández, usually credited as Gilbert Hernandez and also by the nickname Beto, is an American cartoonist. He is best known for his Palomar/Heartbreak Soup stories in Love and Rockets, an alternative comic book he shared with his brothers Jaime and Mario.
Fantagraphics is an American publisher of alternative comics, classic comic strip anthologies, manga, magazines, graphic novels, and (formerly) the erotic Eros Comix imprint.
Peter Bagge is an American cartoonist whose best-known work includes the comics Neat Stuff and Hate. His stories often use black humor and exaggerated cartooning to dramatize the reduced expectations of middle-class American youth. He won two Harvey Awards in 1991, one for best cartoonist and one for his work on Hate. In recent decades Bagge has done more fact-based comics, everything from biographies to history to comics journalism. Publishers of Bagge's articles, illustrations, and comics include suck.com, MAD Magazine, toonlet, Discover, and the Weekly World News, with the comic strip Adventures of Batboy. He has expressed his libertarian views in features for Reason.
Love and Rockets is a comic book series by the Hernandez brothers: Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario. It was one of the first comic books in the alternative comics movement of the 1980s.
Daniel Gillespie Clowes is an American cartoonist, graphic novelist, illustrator, and screenwriter. Most of Clowes's work first appeared in Eightball, a solo anthology comic book series. An Eightball issue typically contained several short pieces and a chapter of a longer narrative that was later collected and published as a graphic novel, such as Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1993), Ghost World (1997), David Boring (2000) and Patience (2016). Clowes's illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, Newsweek, Vogue, The Village Voice, and elsewhere. With filmmaker Terry Zwigoff, Clowes adapted Ghost World into a 2001 film and another Eightball story into the 2006 film, Art School Confidential. Clowes's comics, graphic novels, and films have received numerous awards, including a Pen Award for Outstanding Work in Graphic Literature, over a dozen Harvey and Eisner Awards, and an Academy Award nomination.
The Jack Kirby Comics Industry Awards were a set of awards for achievement in comic books, presented from 1985 to 1987. Voted on by comic-book professionals, the Kirby awards were the first such awards since the Shazam Awards ceased in 1975. Sponsored by Amazing Heroes magazine, and managed by Amazing Heroes managing editor Dave Olbrich, the Kirby Awards were named after the pioneering writer and artist Jack Kirby.
Gotham Central is a police procedural comic-book series that was published by DC Comics. It was written by Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka, with pencils initially by Michael Lark. The story focused on the Gotham City Police Department and the difficulties of its officers living and working in Gotham City, home of Batman.
Gregory Rucka is an American writer known for the series of novels starring his character Atticus Kodiak, the creator-owned comic book series Whiteout, Queen & Country, Stumptown and Lazarus, as well as lengthy runs on such titles as Detective Comics, Wonder Woman and Gotham Central for DC Comics, and Elektra, Wolverine and The Punisher for Marvel. He has written a substantial amount of supplemental material for a number of DC Comics' line-wide and inter-title crossovers, including "No Man's Land", "Infinite Crisis" and "New Krypton".
Mister X was a series of comic books first published in 1983–1990 by Canadian company Vortex Comics. Created by album and book cover designer Dean Motter, it was developed for a year in close collaboration with comic artist and illustrator Paul Rivoche, whose series of poster illustrations stirred up great interest in the project. The series published early work by comic artists who would later emerge as important alternative cartoonists, including Jaime Hernandez, Gilbert Hernandez, Mario Hernandez, Seth, Shane Oakley and D'Israeli.
Luba is a comic book character created by Gilbert Hernandez, featured mainly in the Love and Rockets series by these authors. She first appeared in "BEM", found in the Love and Rockets collection Music for Mechanics.
Mario Hernandez is an American writer, artist, and sometime publisher of comics. He is one of the Hernandez brothers, along with his younger brothers Gilbert and Jaime, with whom he co-created the acclaimed independent comic book Love and Rockets.
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Poison River is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Gilbert Hernandez, published in 1994 after serialization from 1989 to 1993 in the comic book Love and Rockets. The story follows the life of the character Luba from her birth until her arrival in Palomar, the fictional Central American village in which most of Hernandez's stories in Love and Rockets take place.
The Hernandez brothers, also known as Los Bros Hernandez, are the three American cartoonist brothers Mario (b. 1953), Gilbert (b. 1957), and Jaime Hernandez (b. 1959).
Human Diastrophism, also known as Blood of Palomar, is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Gilbert Hernandez. It appeared in serialized form in the comic book Love and Rockets in 1987–88, and it first appeared in collected form in 1989 in The Complete Love and Rockets, Volume 8: Blood of Palomar. The story tells of a serial killer in the fictional Latin American village of Palomar, and the political and social implications of the insular villagers' growing contact with the outside world.
Wig Wam Bam is a graphic novel by Jaime Hernandez, serialized in Love and Rockets in 1990–93 and collected in 1994.
Love and Rockets X is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Gilbert Hernandez. Its serialization ran in the comic book Love and Rockets Vol. 1 #31–39 from 1989 to 1992, and the first collected edition appeared in 1993.
God and Science: Return of the Ti-Girls is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Jaime Hernandez, published in 2012 after serialization in Love and Rockets: New Stories#1–2 in 2008–2009.
The Love Bunglers is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Jaime Hernandez, published in 2014. The story focuses on the character Maggie, the protagonist of Hernandez's Locas stories, and two men with whom she has been involved with in the past, Ray Dominguez and Reno Banks.
The very first Harvey Awards ceremony was presented on July 9, 1988, at the Chicago Comicon convention. This event took place at the Ramada O'Hare Hotel in Rosemont, Illinois. The Harvey Awards ceremony was a notable part of the convention, recognizing excellence in comic book creation and honoring outstanding creators and works from the comic book industry.