A short life of the author
Jaime Hernandez (born 1959) is, along with his brother Gilbert, one half of the creative partnership behind Love and Rockets (1981–present), one of the most important independent comic books in the history of the medium. Jaime’s contribution — the “Locas” stories, following Maggie Chascarrillo, Hopey Glass, and their circle of friends through decades of life in a fictionalized Southern California — represents the longest and most accomplished character study in American comics. His clean, elegant line work, influenced equally by Archie comics and Hank Ketcham, is one of the most beautiful things in the medium.
Life and Career
Jaime Hernandez was born in Oxnard, California, the youngest of six children in a Mexican-American family. He and his brothers Gilbert and Mario launched Love and Rockets as a self-published comic in 1981; Fantagraphics Books picked it up in 1982 and has published it ever since.
The early “Locas” stories mixed punk rock culture, science fiction, and professional wrestling into a heady brew centered on Maggie, a bisexual Chicana mechanic, and Hopey, her volatile best friend and sometime lover. The science fiction and wrestling elements gradually faded, and the stories became a realistic, long-form chronicle of the characters’ lives — their relationships, their jobs, their aging, their communities — drawn with increasing mastery and emotional precision.
Over more than forty years, Jaime has followed Maggie and Hopey from their punk youth into middle age, tracing the way life shapes, disappoints, and sustains them. The achievement is comparable to Updike’s Rabbit novels or Proust’s Recherche in its devotion to the passage of time and the accumulation of lived experience — but rendered in comics, with all the visual subtlety and narrative economy the form allows.
His art style is deceptively simple: clean, confident lines that capture expression and body language with a few strokes. He draws the most expressive faces in comics.
Key Works
- Love and Rockets (1982–present)
- Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories (collected edition)
- The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. (collected edition)
- Is This How You See Me? (2019)
Collecting Hernandez
Love and Rockets #1 (Fantagraphics, 1982) — the magazine-format first issue — is the foundational collectible, $100–$500 in high grade. The Fantagraphics collected editions (Locas, The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S.) are the standard reading format. Jaime signs at comics conventions. Original art pages are among the most sought-after in alternative comics, bringing $1,000–$10,000+. Complete runs of the original series are actively collected.