FOR ITS latest show, MACLA presents a treasure from the world of graphic novels. It’s as significant as that traveling typewriter roll of Jack Kerouac’s. The gallery displays 70 pages of original art by Jaime Hernandez from Love and Rockets comics, his long-running collaboration with his brothers, Gilberto and Mario. Central to the show is art for the 1987 story “The Death of Speedy Ortiz”: 39 pages about how a young girl’s freedom to flirt sweeps her neighborhood into trouble, leading inadvertently to a violent death. As word gets out of her activities, skirmishes break out between two barrios. One is a version of Oxnard, where the Hernandezes grew up. The other is a fictional cowtown near Gonzales in south Monterey County.
The chronicles of Esperanza “Hopey” Glass and Maggie Chascarillo (friends, lovers, antagonists) sit at the center of the Hernandez brothers’ extensive vision of Latino life. During the decades, this saga has never dwindled into weak multicultural clichs in which strong families tough out second-class status in the United States. There’s anger here, bitterness at the kind of “guys [who] would kill their best friends over a girl or drugs.” But as Jaime Hernandez told interviewer Chris Knowles, “I found ways of being angry and portraying beauty at the same time, you know?”
Take the most recent work by Jaime Hernandez, Home School (1998): adventures in baby-sitting during a dull summer in 1966, enlivened by stolen cigarettes and loitering sessions at the dugout at the local ballpark. Jaime Hernandez emulates children’s comics for design. As in Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, we see shades of meaning and perspective—a mute watchful child and the silence that tells all. The surprise is the most distilled work: a two-page punch in the face titled Cream City from Love and Rockets Vol. 2, No. 13, in 2005. It’s a first-person story about a late-night visit from a drugged lady: two different angles of heartbreak described in a handful of panels.
Love and Rockets was always one of the densest comics ever done; the nested narratives challenged graphic novelists afterward to take up ever more braided story lines. The storytelling is intricate and subtle; the personal nicknames can be as confusing as the patronymics in a Russian novel. The inking is extremely strong, so there’s not much visible pentimento in these pages. There might be one blotted-out word balloon slathered with whiteout; in short, what you saw on the page on Love and Rockets was what was there in the original art. The difference is, here it is before you.
Harmoniously sharing this show is Rio Ya—ez and Mayra Ramirez’s Las Adventures of the Ramirez Sisters. Ramirez was also raised in Oxnard, as it turns out; making her local gallery debut, she’s the model and collaborator in these 3-D prints complete with nearby glasses to perceive them. Mayra poses as both fictional Ramirez sisters: one an intellectual college girl with laptop and Chomsky paperback, the other a high-haired loca getting her arm tattooed.
Favianna Rodriguez gives the show a burst of color in her serigraphs. The pieces are seven abstract figures showing Rodriguez’s roots in poster and graffiti art. Her work is a blend of pre-Columbian arts reaching from the Pacific Northwest First Nation to Peru. It ought to be a mixed metaphor but somehow it isn’t, thanks to the exuberance and sense of play on display.
Novelas, Love And Other Adventures
Through March 26
MACLA, 510 S. First St., San Jose
