It is, of course, always a pleasure to return to Love & Rockets, even if things have changed a deal since the last time we were allowed to visit. Jaime Hernandez’s half of the first issue in the book’s rebirth as an annual—which sandwiches Gilbert’s more fractured, but largely familiar contributions—reintroduces a few familiar characters like Maggie, who is, of course, a bit older and more than a few pounds heavier than the first time we met her, more than 25 years ago.

Penny Century is back, too, unmissable as she towers over a cityscape on the book’s front cover. Century’s height, however, is hardly the only thing striking about the image that graces the cover. Decked out in a cape and miniskirt, she appears—save a beanie in her right hand and, of course, Jaime’s instantly recognizable linestyle—to fit right in along side any number of superhero books currently lining the shelves.

Jaime’s portion of the latest L&R number one simultaneously marks an exploration of new territory and a return to the artist’s roots, delving into the fantasy work that colored much of his early contributions of the series by embracing a passion for superheroics that defined much of his youth.

Most importantly, however, is the fact that, even as Jaime lets his characters roam free in his recently expanded universe, they thankfully largely maintain all of those characteristics that made them so have long peppered his contributions to the Love & Rockets canon.
[Part One]

One of the most striking things about the new storyline is the fact that it begins in the real world with Maggie in her apartment complex, but veers off into the fantastic. Was that part of the initial plan when you were first working with Gilbert on putting out a superhero comic?

No. At first it was just going be Zolar the Great, flying through space like a 50s superheroes, and then he sees a spaceship or an alien, and then the story goes from there. That’s what it was going to be—anything goes. But then when I started doing it, I started borrowing characters from my Love & Rockets world. And then I said, “why don’t I do a mystery about the character, Alarma?” I always hinted that Maggie had this tenant in her apartment complex that could have been this superhero in hiding. I was doing that for fun, this mysterious character, and then it just started to evolve. When my superhero stuff started to get more evolved, I just thought I would just do the story of who Alarma is. It’s kind of the reverse of how the comic started. Now the real life people are starting to face this other world that’s kind of a mystery. There’s this world of superheroes that nobody knows about. They kind of stumble onto it.

I always liked the question, ‘if there were, in fact, real life superheroes, would comic books exist in the same way?’ And in the book, the characters use their comics to help solve the mystery of the existence of superheroes.

Yeah. I was thinking back about Maggie’s past, where, if she was depressed, she’d go back to her stack of her favorite superhero comics to cheer her up. I thought, “oh! Those will be involved!” I just grabbed everything. Penny Century always wanted to be a superhero. I just went back into the old history of the superhero in the background of Love & Rockets, and now we find out what that was all about, 25 years later.

Earlier you touched on how important that transition into reality was to the evolution of Love & Rockets. Now that you’re returning to the fantastic, is it hard to balance these two worlds?

No, because I make my own rules. My superhero world is a rewrite of superhero history. I’m just making up my own rules to it. I’m not going to borrow from the real superhero past. I just decided this was going to be my own doing, and if someone says, “that’s not how you do superheroes,” well, it is in this world [laughs]. So it was pretty easy. And to mix the two, I realized it wasn’t that hard because I had made things in the past several years, like Maggie in the ghost world, in the super natural world with folklore from mine and Maggie’s past. So I handled the superhero thing like a dream world. Is it real, or isn’t it? It’s not that big a secret, but one thing I’m giving away is that this could all be a dream. I’m not going to cheat like that and say, “hahaha, this was all a dream. None of this exists.” I like to work where you don’t know which is a dream and which is reality. I want to leave it up to the reader.

Do you still worry about things like continuity?

I do when it deals with things like their lives. Like I can’t all of the sudden say, “Maggie has a kid somewhere” [laughs]. With this particular story, it’s like Maggie’s the guest. She’s in their world in this book, they’re not in her world. I put her in the middle of this total fantasy world where I can do whatever I want with it, and it works. I don’t have to deal with the continuity there. The only thing that’s weird is that Maggie, this real life person, is visiting. She’s the stranger on in this whole thing.

I don’t know if she comes back into play in subsequent issues, but it seem like more than anything, she’s the conduit for this story.

Yeah. And in a way, a lot of the story will go back to Maggie. She plays an interesting part [laughs].

Is there something in her character that makes it so easy to adapt her to such diverse scenarios?

No, but I guess because I know her so well, I know how she would react in any situation, so I put her in this impossible situation where there are these superheroes, and there’s no explanation as to why they exist. It’s kind of like she’s meeting new people. That’s pretty much how I handle it, “ooh, there are people with costumes in my house.” I don’t have to explain it, all you see is Maggie’s expression—she doesn’t get it.

You’ve been coming back to Love & Rockets throughout your career. Do you see Maggie being an important part of your professional life, as long as you’re doing comics?

Yeah, pretty much. I try to break away from her, but I can’t [laughs]. She’s too involved in this world I’ve created. It’s almost like she is the world that I’ve created. Everyone around her can come and go, but she can’t. if I burn out on her, all I have to do is focus on another character and bring her back later. I’ve just set her up to a point where I’m never ashamed to use her. It’s never like, “oh, she won’t work in this.” Well, if she doesn’t work in a scene, I just don’t use her. But she can pretty much almost fit in everything, because of how open-ended I’ve left her.

Is that what causes you to back away from Love & Rockets from time to time? Just getting burned out?

Yeah. If you don’t see someone for a while, it’s because they’ve been used up. I use a lot of emotion in my comic—stuff gets pretty emotional for my characters. I run Maggie through the ringer a lot [laughs]. And sometimes I think, “well, maybe it’s time for her to get a break.” I can’t keep pounding on her. I can’t keep throwing all of this stuff on her. I need to take her out of the limelight so she can recuperate and then I come and run her through the ringer again.

–Brian Heater

There’s part of me that felt a bit strange discussing the merits of superhero books with Jaime Hernandez. Sure the subject has come up with plenty of indie creators, and certainly artists like Jack Kirby are obligatorily rattled off when discussing Hernandez’s artwork, but the artist, who, along with his brother and longtime co-conspirator, Gilbert (and to a lesser extent, the eldest Hernandez sibling, Mario), is credited perhaps more so than any of his contemporaries as being one of the primary catalysts in indie comics’ divergence from the medium’s dominant caped paradigm.

The first issue of Love & Rockets’ most recent run (now an annual), however, bears the image of a caped Penny Century on its cover, a subject reflected in Jaime’s contributions to the book, which whole-heartedly embrace the superhero genre. Thankfully, however, they do so in a manner that fits comfortably into the world that Jaime has worked so hard to construct, thanks in large part to appearances by characters like Century and perennial loca, Maggie.

In this first part of our interview, we discuss caped crusaders, the fate of those early sci-fi stories, and the weird and wonderful world of Pogs.

You’ve gone pretty full bore into the world of superheroes, with the new book. Is that something you’ve been interested in pursuing for a while?

Yeah, for a while. It started out with Gilbert and I wanting to do a superhero comic separate from Love & Rockets. We wanted it in color and wanted to do a superhero comic, our way. As it got more involved, my story started to get longer and kept going. Gilbert was working on other stuff, and one day he goes, “why don’t you just do that yourself, and we’ll maybe do something together later?” It just got longer and longer, and I thought, “well, I’m really into this—it’s really exciting, so maybe I should just do it as Love & Rockets. I didn’t know how I was going to split up the chapters or anything, and shortly after that is when we came up with the idea of doing this 100-page annual. It just worked perfectly. I just fell into it. It was the right time and the right amount of work. I don’t know how it happened to work out like that, but that’s how it started.

When you say “do it our way,” how would you define that? What’s the Hernandez brothers’ way of doing a superhero book?

The thing is that Gilbert and I have always been superhero fans, it’s just that, at the time when we were starting our with our comic, we didn’t really like the way the mainstream was handling it. They were living off of a 60s Marvel formula. While we were fans of that way, the way the big two took superheroes was just not the way we would have done it. We were more fans of the 40s- and 50s-style, where superheroes still lived in the fantasy world. They weren’t trying to put them in the real world.

As a teenager, I had always drawn my own comics with my own superheroes as characters. I thought that I would put it in real life, and I would just have them do stuff in my hometown. I lived in a small town outside of LA called Oxnard. The more I did it, the more I was like, “that’s dumb!” [laughs] It just didn’t work for me, so I just started to like having superheroes in more of a fantasy world, because a lot more can happen than in the real life stuff.

It’s interesting, because a lot of kids who are starting out with their own art tend to work with established characters—Batman and Spider-men, etc.—did you do that too, early on, or were you always working with your own heroes?

It became my own characters when I was in my early teens—actually maybe even earlier. When I was a little kid, I would draw Batman comics. I think I drew Batman’s origin like a dozen times. I would just do it over and over again [laughs]. I remember doing a lot of Batman—I’m trying to remember other characters I did. I think I did one or two Hulk comics, but the one I most remember is Batman, because the TV show came out, when I was about five or six. The Batman craze was all of the place. You couldn’t avoid it. And being that age it was just “give me more.”

Over the years, you must have been solicited by Marvel or DC to work on some of those established characters. Was that something that was ever on the table for you?

Um, actually, it was more like, “hey, one of these days, we’d like you to work for us,” and I’d say, “okay!” And then I’d never hear from them. DC came through a couple of times. “We’d like you to do a pinup or something in a Who’s Who.” But it was really small stuff. So, whenever they’d ask me to take over a character, I’d say, “we’ll see.” And then they’d never call me back [laughs]. And Marvel, the only time they ever approached me was early on to do—what are those things called?—Pogs. Those little discs. It was during the Pog craze. They asked me to draw a Pog, and I was like…”hello?” [laughs] “who are you calling again?” “Well, we were just wondering if you wanted to draw a Pog.” I don’t know, at that time,I was just like, “I’m not going to draw a Pog!” Maybe if they asked me a year before or after, I would have said, “sure it would be fun.”

Depending on how broke you were…

Yeah. But that was the only thing that Marvel asked me to do—I think later on they would call Gilbert and ask, “would your brother be into that?” And he would say, “I don’t know, ask him,” and they would never ask me.

They would call Gilbert to ask about you?

Well, they would call him to ask about a project and then he would say “yes” or “no” and then they would say, “do you think your brother would be into it?” and then he would say, “I don’t know ask him.” It really all depended on who the editor was and what it involved. Did they really want to work with us, or was it, “we need an artist, who can we get?” It was hard to tell.

In the case of Pogs, it sounds like maybe it was the latter.

Yeah, “we need a Pog artist. Who do we get?” Because sometimes I could figure out that they like the way I drew this one character in a certain issue—it looked like Supergirl or resembled Lex Luthor. That was usually why they asked. But sometimes, like the whole Pog thing, it was a big mystery.

You mentioned before that when you were creating superhero comics in your teens that you set them in your hometown. Was one of the things that initially turned you off from these books the fact that they weren’t enough like people you really knew?

I guess so, yeah. That’s a good point. It didn’t feel right because here I grew up in a Mexican-American world, and comics weren’t that. This is before they started adding a Latin character, here and there. So, as a teenager, I decided that I would have this character running down Oxnard Boulevard, next to a Mexican man in a cowboy hat [laughs]. It just didn’t feel right. Now when I think of that stuff, I go, “wow, that’s perfect!” you know, but at the time, the superhero world and Marvel just didn’t click, so I kept it separate. That evolved into the work I did. In the early stuff, I had more sci-fi in the background, and it dropped out, because I got more excited about real life. It was just more interesting to me, my life at the time, and realizing that I could do comics about all this stuff and most comic readers were not exposed to it, so it was kind of new. It was rarely shown in comics at the time.

In the case of the early sci-fi stuff, were you ever afraid of pigeonholing yourself as a genre artist?

It might have had something to do with that. I had a lot of that early sci-fi stuff, but it kept going back home, where the kids were punk and real. That stuff was more interesting to me. The sci-fi stuff started getting in the way, but Gilbert and I just never really talked about it. I remember later, Gilbert did an interview or was on a panel and he said, “you know, if we would have stayed a science-fiction comic, we would have been just another science-fiction comic.” We actually challenged ourselves to do something that was harder, which was normal life. I think it was more unconscious why it turned out that way. I don’t usually have a big game plan. I was just doing what entertained me and hopefully that cuts across to the reader. So, it’s a hard question to answer.

[Concluded in Part Two]

–Brian Heater