TONTA - JAMIE HERNANDEZ

Full confession: I haven’t really read any LOVE AND ROCKETS. I suppose I could look back through this archive but I think I’ve, maybe, read one other stand-alone in the Hernandez bros corpus. In fact, it is the sheer size of this corpus that has intimidated me into inaction w/r/t LOVE AND ROCKETS. I’m certainly aware of it’s reputation and I have no reason to doubt that its boosters are wrong, I just honestly don’t know where to start. Fortunately, my partner is a big Hernandez fan and she’s currently swimming through the Library’s collection, which is ample, the comics are a Fantographic tent-pole and Fantographics is a real source of pride for bookish/artsy Seattle, and she mentioned this one was stand-alone and good so I sat down and read it yesterday afternoon. I’ll cut to the chase, it was quite good. It first seems to concern a punk-rock girl in Southern California but then pivots to be more about a family murder drama.  The Tonta, the titular punk rock girl, stuff seemed to be the more “stand-alone” section of the book and appealed to me more. Jaime does a good job of rendering Tonta as the sort of person who laments/brags about being a loner whilst constantly being surrounded by people.  K8’s assured me LOVE AND ROCKETS is famous for retelling the same events from different perspectives and angles, Rashomon-style, and so I’m going to assume the family-murder stuff falls into this camp. As someone with no context, it was confusing. Though it was never boring, even when I struggled to understand why characters were acting the way they were, I was always compelled. I’m certainly the ten millionth person to say this but Jamie Hernandez is a god-level illustrator. Even when characters are just talking he flips the blocking and perspective almost every panel. I’m not sure how LAR is usually set up but most of this book is gridded 2x4 with excursions into double panels and slightly different arrangements but the pages flow very well and the whole thing reads really quickly. The drawing style verges more into the cartoonish (people seeing literal stars, big onamonapias) when there’s violence which I found a little surprising. Again, based on no context, I had assumed LAR was more “serious”. In that same vein, I had also assumed the series was more melodramatic and I found this book funny as often as it was dark or sad. Might have to ask K8 for more LAR recs. 80 Rockets.