Short Stories - By Jaime Hernandez
Intro Written By Rob Rodi From The Comics Journal
Jaime Hernandez has been able to take his medium into the realm of art, not by expanding its scale (a popular gambit by low-brow aspirations), but by expanding its scope. Love and sex and death are their preoccupying concerns-weighty matters to be sure, and more than the average comic book drudge would consider using. They are giving us the world written small.

The centerpiece of Love and Rockets is "100 Rooms." It's a surreal, claustrophobic romance, in which Shakespeare's Forest of Arden is transformed into the off-season Grand Hotel. It's like Mervyn Peake with a soundtrack by the Bangles.

The story features Jaime's main characters, Maggie and Hopey, down on their luck as usual and scraping for pennies, going with typical nonchalance from the ridiculous to the sublime, as they (and their roommate Izzy) end up spending a week at the mansion of billionaire H.R. Costigan (by invitation of Penny Century, Costigan's coquettish lover). Costigan is away and the house is empty except for the battery of servants. It's scale is Brobdingnagian.

The rooms are like football fields, doorways soar above the girl's heads, and the ceilings are almost literally celestial. Costigan's wealth is like Scrooge McDuck's: it's comically impossible. The girls stroll through the mansion, they sleep in sprawling beds, looking like ants; they eat peanut butter sandwiches at vast, empty banquet tables.

Within the recesses of the house, Maggie meets, is abuducted by, and falls in love with a fugitive named Casey. He's hiding out in the house, waiting for Costigan's return because he has something to prove to him (we never find out exactly what). Casey and Maggie hole up in one of the suites and live for days, entirely naked, eating and loving, while Hopey, Penny, and Izzy idly wander the corridors, wondering what happened to Maggie.

(I wasn't kidding with that Forest of Arden analogy.) Penny is beguiling; she sunbathes topless by the mansion's pool. Hopey defaces the walls. They're living in New Age idyll, wherein luxury is measured by the potential for both sensuality and destruction.

Jaime regularly celebrates the more polite virtues of anarchy; his quartet of intruders lend a liberating contrast to the mansion's interior. They use golf clubs and croquet mallets for their pool games; they sleep on banquet tables; they prance naked through grand ballrooms. Through carelessness more than ignorance, they serve form over function.

They're utterly beneath Costigan's landscape, and transcendentally above it.  Jaime's art style is often dismissed as "cute" and "clean." That's not so much a reaction to the work as to the simplicity of it's antecedents (Dan DeCarlo's Betty and Veronica, for instance, is the obvious inspiration for Maggie and Hopey).

But there is such a sophisticated understanding of light and shadow, of weight, of perspective in his work, such consistency of line and fluidity of tone, that the instant accessibilty of his work is really its greatest triumph; he can draw anything and draw it pleasingly. His storytelling is dynamic, his kinetic sense invigorating. He is the healthiest, most capable comic book artist of his generation; his work has the swaggering confidence of the Old School.

His peers are Toth, Kubert, and Caniff, not any of his contemporaries. And his artwork shines like the sun in black-and-white (color tends to mute its native brillance). He is, in fact, that rarest of birds: a consummately gifted writer who is also a supremely gifted artist.

He invalidates so many gray, modern theories that he's frightening. He's the laughing boy of modern comics. His genius is like cruelty. He makes you fall in love with ink on paper.