By
Upon first opening The Art of Jaime Hernandez: The Secrets of Life and Death, do not fret over the chunks of text. You may initially think, "This isn't the coffee table art book I thought it was going to be," and then half-heartedly promise yourself that someday you'll sit down to read the whole thing. Because, yes, there is plenty to look at--pages and pages of fantastic, humbling, inspiring, and affecting artwork--but I had no idea there was going to be such an honest and page-turning biography included as well.
In the early 1980s, Jaime Hernandez and his brothers Gilbert and Mario launched Love and Rockets, which would become a flagship title for publisher Fantagraphics and the go-to source for readers who wanted more than musculature from their comics. And for the past twenty-five years, through various issues, volumes, and formats, Love and Rockets has provided fans with stories driven by relationships mixed with a heavy helping of punk sensibility. This is the short version of Jaime's story.
The longer version comes courtesy of Todd Hignite, the author of In the Studi Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists (a great look at the work habits of a number of the biggest and best names in contemporary cartooning) and founder of Comic Art magazine. Hignite has the tough task of crafting a story that does not attempt to compete with the focal artwork, yet draws enough attention to lead the reader through its narrative. By pulling heavily from personal interviews with his subject, Hignite balances between a biography and critical insight.
"Indeed, reading Hernandez's work as realism is complicated by the subtle shifting over the years of how characters function in his world: some exist predominantly on only one level, and as such go by the wayside; others are gradually deepened, such as Penny Century"¦In articulating the seemingly disparate worlds in which his characters travel, the overwhelming sense was that home is 'reality,' while the doldrums of work exist as fantasy"¦Hernandez's realism, then, shifts with story and character--after all, realism exists in the daydreams, fantasies, and false impressions within the heads of characters as much as it does in their physical actions. Emotion is where Jaime's realism lies."
As much fun as it is to read reflections upon Hernandez's career and the images herein, this is a rare artistic showcase: Hernandez opens the vault and gives fans a chance to see sketches in his high school notebooks, early fanzine art ("I lettered it with a ballpoint pen."), and, notably, the "very first drawing of his most enduring characters [Maggie and Hopey] in their final form."
Scattered throughout are Hernandez's takes on Wonder Woman and riffs on other popular super-heroes ("Penny Canary," a blend of Ms. Century and DC's Black Canary). The earlier sections feature gig posters for bands, advertisements, and pages from homemade comics, while later chapters highlight unfinished pieces, rejected pages, color guides, and original artwork from some of Hernadez's most famous stories, and much, much more. The full serial, "La Maggie La Loca," which originally ran in New York Times Magazine, is also included in color and expanded.
Beginning with a personal shoo-in for best cover, publisher Abrams ComicArts produced a noteworthy package to do justice to its contents. The front and end papers are the same image, except the front is the initial loose sketch, while the end paper is the final inked image of Jaime's classic heroines. The heavy paper stock reproduces full-color photographs, sketches and finished artwork with equal clarity (pencils lines everywhere!). And the colors are sharp and distinct. I discover new pieces and details whenever I open it--not to mention an abundance of quotes from the artist himself:
"If I'm hired to do a Superman cover, I know it's not me, and there's only part of my heart in it. In the early days, I had that dream like everyone else that I would do the greatest Wonder Woman comic of all time if they gave me the chance. Now that's over. I wouldn't even want to do those characters. It's not that I have anything against them, it's just that I've created my world so much, everything else is B-list. Recreating the myth means nothing to me--Maggie's a much better character."
Jaime Hernandez's Love and Rockets developed its reputation based on his artwork, which is without parallel at this point--and his ability to write believable, lasting relationships is what has kept readers devoted for twenty-five years. The Secrets of Life and Death achieves the same: it's a bound venue for gorgeous imagery and within lies a relationship of the artist to his work.
Further reading: In April, Fantagraphics continued the Love and Rockets Library with Penny Century, a thick paperback loosely centered around the eponymous heroine--and my favorite of Jaime's creations (sorry, Maggie). Then in October, Fantagraphics will release Love and Rockets: New Stories Vol. 3, which promises 104 pages of brand new Love and Rockets material from both Jaime and Gilbert.
--Alex
P.S. Further further reading: Our Comic-Con interview with Jaime Hernandez and Omni's guide to reading Love and Rockets.
By
First-time novelist Darin Bradley, guestblogging on Omnivoracious this week, has published short fiction, poetry, and critical nonfiction have appeared in a variety of journals. He also served as founding fiction editor of the experimental e-zine, Farrago's Wainscot.
Noise takes as its premise that, in the aftermath of the switch from analog to digital TV, an anarchic movement known as Salvage hijacks the unused airwaves. Mixed in with the static's random noise are dire warnings of the imminent economic, political, and social collapse of civilization"”and cold-blooded lessons on how to survive the fall and prosper in the harsh new order that will inevitably arise from the ashes of the old. Critically acclaimed writer Paul Jessup has called Noise "Little Brother meets Lord of the Flies meets Heart of Darkness meets Mad Max and the Road Warrior meets Letham."
This is Bradley's last post for Omni--you can read his previous posts here and here. Thanks, Darin!
So, in my last post, I talked a bit about Noise, the CTB, Salvage Country, and the mishmash of videos, audio clips, and images that make up the whole meta-content that accompanies Noise. Sometimes, blinky moving things are worth a thousand blog posts, so here's a small selection for your media pleasure. Thanks for reading this week.
"The First Broadcast"--an example of one of the many ways Salvage warns itself about what's to come in Noise.
A recording of me reading the first chapter of the novel. Be sure to listen with your security blanket close at hand.
This is just an example of one of the many ways Salvagers use graffiti to get themselves ready for the Collapse.
A still-shot of a short wave television broadcast, Salvage-style. Imagine catching this late one night while suffering from insomnia . . .
Noise, by Darin Bradley--teaser trailer #3 from Darin Bradley on Vimeo.
Another example of Salvage at work--this one's been re-mixed, but you can imagine the original message wasn't very friendly.
There's plenty more of this at Salvage Country. Some of them are creepy, so it's probably best if you watch/listen/click at home and not at work.
By
[Ed: Since we spoke to him last, Gary Shteyngart has been fully immersing himself in the social media that his novel Super Sad True Love Story makes so horribly and amusingly disturbing, with regular (often dachshund-themed) Facebook updates about his book tour. He recently sent us a note which we pass on to you below.]
OMG, I just got back from the West Coast part of my tour and I'm sad to say: reading isn't dead. Darn it!! I just wrote a book predicting the death of literature and here I go out into the world and hordes of people actually show up at my readings. Not just people, mind you. San Diegoans!
Some authors don't like touring, but it's so hard not to love my readers who I think (and I'm biased here) are the cutest, coolest, funniest people out there. They email my agent saying "Um, is it okay if I bring a Kindle for the author to sign?" Is it ever! I'll sign freaking anything. What I really would love is for people to bring a dachshund, because my best friend is a weenie dog and I really miss him when I'm on the road. There was actually this guy at one of my readings who had this big long torso, stubby little legs, and the wettest brown eyes I've ever seen and I just kept turning back to him the whole reading and picturing him on all fours asking for a turkey treat. Sigh. Amazon should consider a rent-a-weenie program in select cities. It does get lonely out there on the road.
But not too lonely! Because people always cry out the strangest things. Elderly Russian woman at West Coast reading: "Do you know zey are killing Jews at San Francisco State University?"
Incredulous author: "I didn't"¦Oh, my"¦Really?"
Russian Woman: "Yes, zey are vishoos anti-Semites!"
Author: "Well, I'm a vicious Semite!"
Later at the signing the woman hovers over me and when the last person leaves says, "You know, you're not a bad writer, but you need to have children. Then you won't be a child yourself. Look at Ayn Rand. Great writer, but never had children." Point taken, ma'am. Shteyngart Shrugged.
By
First-time novelist Darin Bradley, guestblogging on Omnivoracious this week, has taught courses on writing and literature at the University of North Texas, Furman University, and East Tennessee State University. His short fiction, poetry, and critical nonfiction have appeared in a variety of journals, and he served as founding fiction editor of the experimental e-zine, Farrago's Wainscot.
Noise takes as its premise that, in the aftermath of the switch from analog to digital TV, an anarchic movement known as Salvage hijacks the unused airwaves. Mixed in with the static's random noise are dire warnings of the imminent economic, political, and social collapse of civilization"”and cold-blooded lessons on how to survive the fall and prosper in the harsh new order that will inevitably arise from the ashes of the old. Critically acclaimed writer Paul Jessup has called Noise "Little Brother meets Lord of the Flies meets Heart of Darkness meets Mad Max and the Road Warrior meets Letham."
Bradley returns on Thursday with a new post...
Noise, by Darin Bradley--teaser trailer #2 from Darin Bradley on Vimeo.
The CTB became the chaotic hub that Salvagers used to share their warnings--and their instructions for how to build a new nation state, which is what gave rise to "The Book". While this is all well and good, Salvage and the CTB accidentally opened up an interesting venue for marketing the novel.By
I'm a shameless dork about a number of literary things, but perhaps the first of them were the Paris Review interviews. Plenty of other folks might have been doing more interesting things on their study breaks in my college library, but I wore a path in the linoleum between my desk and the shelf in the stacks where they kept all the old Writers at Work collections, and by the end of four years I had worked my way through all of them, from E.M. Forster through Rebecca West and S.J. Perelman and James Jones and Lillian Hellman and all those other mid-century giants canonized by the magazine's editors, and if I hadn't graduated I'd probably have started over at the beginning and gone through again.
Why are they special? Well, because they were first (author interviews were nowhere near as ubiquitous then as now), but, as the newish editor of the Paris Review, Lorin Stein, pointed out during his guest stint on Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog last week, because they treat these interviews like no one else does. This isn't some guy (like me) calling up an author for 20 minutes and calling it a podcast. As the writers I've talked to who have worked on these have confirmed, they are a major, collaborative project:
In the first place, the method is slow. My interview
with Jonathan Lethem took a couple of weeks, with reading assignments
before each session. Joshua Pashman's interview with Norman Rush,
coming out in the September issue, took three years, eight sessions,
and 500 pages of transcript. (Later boiled down to 33 pages in print.)
In the second place, the interviews are collaborative. After our
interns type up the transcripts, the interviewer and subject sit down
and edit them"”together. Often they rewrite the questions and answers
completely. When Frederick Seidel interviewed Robert Lowell, the tape recorder didn't work: Fred wrote up the whole thing from memory, then gave it to Lowell to revise.
When writers have total control, George realized, they feel safe. And when they feel safe they open up.
Stein's post is of course quite rah-rah for his own magazine, but I'd no doubt feel the same if I had been bequeathed a legacy like that. And as a dork, I loved the glimpse behind the curtain, including a preview of the interviews in the pipeline for coming issues, starting with Norman Rush and Michel Houellebecq in the September issue, and after that "Dave Eggers, Ann Beattie, Samuel Delaney, Louise Erdrich"”and, yes, Jonathan Franzen." And, perhaps best news of all, they are in the process of putting the full archive online and searchable. You can also find some of them in the newly curated collections Picador has put out in the past few years: volumes I, II, III, and IV. --Tom
P.S. Coates, one of my favorite bloggers, had a couple of editors as guests while he was off writing in the woods this past month, and I had meant to point to them earlier, since it's relatively rare that book editors step out from behind their desks to speak for themselves. Along with Stein's posts, I liked what Chris Jackson, who edited Coates's Beautiful Struggle at Spiegel & Grau as well as folks like Victor LaValle and Matt Taibbi, had to say about his approach:
Part of the fun of being an editor is the occasional fantasy that
you're calling together a league of literary superheroes to take on the
forces of evil in the world. Put your art to work, I say. I've always
been drawn to stylistic outliers, polemicists, and revisionists--I'm a
firm believer that the greatest need in our age is for writers to move
readers from whatever comfortable positioned they've fallen into. I'm
a fan of vulgarity. In part its a function of my upbringing: growing
up in Harlem in the 70s and 80s taught me a lot about the irrepressible
power of a true thing told in the most resonant possible language.
Jackson and Stein also each had responses to the Weiner/Picoult/Franzen hoo-ha that managed to get them heaped with more hoo-ha, about which more later.
By
What makes a Star Wars book stand out?
Having a page on Wookieepedia is good. Receiving a glowing book review from Jeff VanderMeer is even better. Having your book unboxed on Techland? Very cool. And getting everyone from Tommy Lee Edwards to Darth Vader to read your book at Comic-Con? Pretty memorable. Back in July, Daniel Wallace shared his newest book, The Jedi Path: A Manual for Students of the Force, with a wide array of Comic-Con attendees--and gave us the photos to share with you (check them out after the jump).
Jedi Path has already generated lots of buzz among Star Wars fans after it was previewed on starwars.com. Daniel provided some more information on why The Jedi Path is such a unique edition to the Star Wars mythology:
The Jedi Path was conceived as a textbook that was carried by young Initiates and Padawans to guide their instruction in the Jedi Temple. It's supposed to look like an in-universe artifact that fell through a rabbit hole from the galaxy far, far away. In fact, this copy is ostensibly the last one in existence following Order 66 and the destruction of the Jedi Temple.
The "vault edition" is packaged by becker&mayer! and sold through Amazon. It features a mechanized metallic case and removable items including a letter tracing the book's history, a severed Padawan braid, a metal Jedi Credit medallion, a Jedi starfighter patch, a burned poster of the Jedi Code, a map of the Jedi Temple, a lightsaber sketch on the back of a Dex's Diner napkin, and a note concerning some missing pages apparently torn from the book.
The book itself contains the wisdom of eight revered Jedi who put their thoughts to paper approximately 1,000 years before the events of the movies. This particular copy was printed approx a century before the movies, falling into the consecutive hands of Yoda, Thame Cerulian, Count Dooku, Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Ahsoka Tano, Darth Sidious, and Luke Skywalker. All of the owners left handwritten comments in the margins so they could complain, educate, mope, or gloat.
Action Figure
Chris Reiff and Chris Trevas
Clone Trooper
Little Trooper
Sith Cheerleader
Tommy Lee Edwards
Darth Vader
--Lynette
