Locas: Graphic Novel of the Year by Jaime Hernandez

The kind of thing that people deserve to have waiting for them on a Christmas morning, Locas could very well be the graphic novel of the year - say what you will about that Art Spiegelman thing.

From 1981 to 1996, Jaime Hernandez (along with his brothers Gilbert and Mario) published the influential comic book Love and Rockets, a sprawling work that embraced pulp science fiction, punk rock, magical realism and good old fashioned melodrama, dramatically etched in slashing black-and-white panels, mixing a loony sense of humor with a heartbreaking romantic vision. For many readers (well, myself at least), the beating heart of Love and Rockets, and the main reason to buy it, had always been Jamie's Maggie and Hopey stories, now finally collected in this hefty, 780-pager. Margarita ("Maggie") Chascarrillo and Esperanza ("Hopey") Glass are a pair of Mexican-American women who meet in the early 1980s Southern California punk scene. On-again and off-again lovers, Maggie and Hopey's entangled friendships and rocky affairs make for an inordinately fascinating decade-and-a-half-long saga that grew with them - allowing them to grow as living, breathing characters instead of keeping them imprisoned in the frozen scenarios so common in comics.

Much of the laudatory praise heaped on Love and Rockets over the years has focused on Maggie and Hopey's bisexuality and ethnicity - not surprising, given that tales of the young punk life have tended to be written by disaffected white youth for whom the lifestyle was just a phase before reentering the mainstream. Maggie and Hopey, walking their neighborhood's graffiti-splattered streets, hanging with the local lowrider gangsters and punk rockers alike, are outsiders from the get-go, never to quite fit in. But as this is simply their identity, not bored bourgeois rebellion, there's precious little angst over their situation, and instead a simple, burning desire to live life on their own terms.

Hernandez never stoops to polemic, though, he's interested in his characters above all, and it shows. Rarely, in fact, has an artist of any kind exhibited as much generousity towards his creations as Hernandez has towards these lovingly-rendered and imperfect women, especially Maggie - tough and vulnerable, mad for love and yet fiercely independent, girly as can be but a crack mechanic - a rare and wonderful creation.

In the novelistic Locas, we finally are allowed to see Maggie, Hopey and the rest of the gang (ranging from disaffected artists to female wrestlers, gothics, vagabonds, vatos and socialites) grow through the years, and to piece together the patchwork quilt of detail and memory that had accrued over all this time. For all the slamdancing, ghostly imagery and silly sci-fi subplots, this is a love story fifteen years in the making, and all the better for Hernandez making us wait to see how it all worked out.