ESPERANZA - JAMIE HERNANDEZ

My partner is deep in the Love and Rockets game. She’s working her way through the whole giant series, starting with the Xamie stuff, and I believe she’s somewhere past half way. Hard to tell. Like American Splendor, part of L&R’s cache is it’s sheer size. The three brothers have been working on this thing since ‘81. The downside to creating such a huge work is that it can be intimidating to start, which has been my experience with it. That being said, my partner recommended this volume, saying it contained her favorite single issue she’s read so far, so I picked it up. Like all great soap-operas, you can read this two ways. As part of the decades+ L&R universe (how my partner experienced it) or as a stand-alone (what I did). It is still comprehensible under my method but the gap in your understanding is palpable while reading it. I only have the vaguest notions about the plots, characters, and themes of L&R, and even that is L&R broadly, not the Xamie-verse specifically, so I could tell that certain panels and revelations would hit harder if I fully understood their context. K8 kept looking over my shoulder and trying to give me context but there’s too much there to summarize. That being said, I did enjoy this. Typically, these books are pretty realistic. Xamie does a great job using more cartoonish drafting styles when people are fighting or emotions are otherwise heightened. There’s an extended section that focuses on elementary school children which is drawn in a more cartoon-y, Peanuts-adjacent style. For the rest of the book, it is interesting that Xamie doesn’t ever shade in skin tone, everyone is the color of the background, which occasionally makes it jarring when the dialogue revels someone’s race. But the layout and blocking within the panels is God-level and so easy to read. As far as plot, Xamie continues to dominate the Bechdel test. For a male cartoonist, I believe him to be unpassed in terms of how many women his comics forefront. I think you could probably complain about frogmouth/Viv being a violent, chaotic version of the Manic, Pixie Dreamgirl, especially in the sense that we are typically following men who are infatuated with her rather than Viv herself, but there are enough other female characters with less-stereotypical qualities to more than make up for it. It is interesting that my partner picked this one as the highlight of the series so far since she based that distinction on the fact that this volume includes the most surreal and horrific vignette that I’ve ever seen in a L&R story. It features some grotesque body-horror stuff that reminds me of Charles Burns and would seem out of place in the hands of a lesser writer but Xamie manages to pull it off. I could see myself reading all of these one day but in the meantime I think I’ll focus on less massive comics. 81 Rockets.