Sweet Obsession

Do you ever get stupidly obsessed with something for no apparent reason? It could be anything, and suddenly you just can't get enough of it? Then you feel the need to share and talk about your obsession with everyone you know (like I'm about to do in this blog post)? It happens to me every once in awhile. Sometimes it's because I've discovered something new and want to know everything I can about it. As bizarre as it may sound to some people I love to research the things I get obsessed with. Some of that is my lifelong love of history, some of it is just wanting to know where things come from. I did it with Arthurian fiction, mythology, and any one of a number of other topics that have captured my interest over the years. I get into a new band and start discovering their precedents and influences. I go back farther and farther and discover a lot of great music along the way. The same is true of the comics I'm into. Both of these hobbies are life-long obsessions for me, but I'm still finding connections I didn't know existed.

And then sometimes it's a renewed obsession with something I've been into for a long time. Something reignites my interest and I'm off for a couple of weeks reading and/or listening to everything I can. It happened last year with David Bowie when I read the Starman biography. It happened recently with Love and Rockets (the comic... I swear I'll write those blogs someday), and I have spent a lot of time lately rereading them.

The last two weeks it has been the 1970's Glam Rock band The Sweet.

MickTucker-Drums, Brian Connelly-Vocals, Steve Priest-Bass, Andy Scott-Guitar

You probably know them from their songs Little Willy, Ballroom Blitz, Fox on the Run, and Love is Like Oxygen. Chances are those are the only songs by The Sweet you've heard unless you're a fan. It started when I listened to a collection of live tracks and studio outtakes on Spotify recently. Even though I've listened to them off and on for years and have read about them and watched some documentaries and YouTube videos (see... not really a casual fan before all this), something about this collection set off my obsessive tendencies. I've been tracking down obscure and out-of-print music, rewatching the documentaries, searching the internet... the whole bit. I discovered there was a biography of the band called Blockbuster: The True Story of The Sweet and luckily my local library had a copy in stock (Yay for the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh!). There is a long out-of-print autobiography by bassist Steve Priest called Are You Ready, Steve? that I would love to read. Anyone have $900 for the Buy-It-Now copy I saw on Ebay?

The Sweet had a strange and varied career. They went through several changes in style and public perception, from Bubblegum to Pop Rock to Hard Rock to Prog Rock (though the categories are debatable, I'm sure). In the beginning they seemed to be little more than a teenybopper Bubblegum Pop band, and they were very successful at it. As much as we music fans tend to think of the early 70's as the time of the birth of bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and many others of this ilk, the truth is, in Great Britain at least, and to a large extent here in the US, the top 40 was full of Bubblegum Pop. Sugar Sugar by The Archies, an overtly made-up band based on the comic book characters, was the top-selling #1 song of 1969. There was a lot of money to be made with Bubblegum and a lot of people were making it. Two of the most successful purveyors of Bubblegum were the British songwriting team of Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman. For several years they churned out one top 10 song after another for a variety of bands, The Sweet among them.

On a lot of these early singles, though the vocals and harmonies were by the four members of the band, most of the music was performed by studio session musicians. This was a fairly common practice then, and The Sweet weren't the only successful band this happened to. Unlike many others, The Sweet were actually fairly accomplished musicians and constantly pushed to be allowed to record on their own records. They were allowed to do so on most of their b-sides. One of the qualities that set Sweet apart from many of their contemporaries was the strength of their incredible vocal four-part harmonies. Queen is known for the same, and are probably the undisputed champions. None of the members of Sweet could match Freddie Mercury's sheer range and versatility. But, as a distinct band sound, The Sweet were doing this for quite some time before Queen's first album hit the shelves.

They quickly jumped onto the fashion and make-up that was to become the signature of Glam Rock. It started with simple stage make-up and clothing and quickly escalated from there. Whereas T.Rex's Marc Bolan's experiments with glitter and feather boas was seen as just part of who he was, and David Bowie's stage personas were crafted with a more calculating eye, The Sweet were, to use the British vernacular, just taking the piss out of people. Through their sense of humor they took the image to extremes, usually pre-dating and influencing everyone else in the scene. But every time they took the look up a notch more people noticed and they became more famous. They tapped into the androgyny and repressed sexuality of the scene and played it to the hilt. Though straight they embraced a lot of cliché gay imagery and mannerisms.

Benny Hill and Monty Python could dress up like old tarts and it was funny. The Sweet, and the rest of the movement, were threatening to the middle class, in terms of image if not the music they were producing at the time. Bassist Steve Priest in particular went out of his way to stir things up, from wearing hot pants on Top of the Pops (a good six months before Bowie did the same thing to public outcry), to appearing on a Christmas special dressed as a gay stormtrooper, replete with WWI spiked German helmet, lipstick, rouge, and a little Hitler mustache.

I can't find a single still image of this on the internet.

Priest once described The Sweet's approach to all of this as “more camp than a row of tents”.

Though they wanted to be taken seriously as a Rock band, their reputation as Bubblegum teenybopper fodder kept critics and a more mature audience from taking them seriously. The other problem was that the singles were making them ridiculously wealthy. It was difficult to turn your back on another Chinn-Chapman composition that was going to go into the top 10. They did eventually begin to move past this impasse, primarily by being allowed to play on their records, and on the strength of their live performances.

Living in the States I didn't know any of this. The Glam movement never really took hold here in the same way as it did elsewhere, and I'm just young enough to have missed it anyway. I was catching the tail-end of it with Elton John's costuming and a couple of Bowie singles. I was into Alice Cooper and jumped on the KISS bus as soon as I saw them, but they were both darker, less androgynous versions of Glam. I'm pretty sure if I had seen pictures of the Sweet in full regalia I would have been interested, but by the time I was reading the actual Rock magazines the Sweet weren't being covered a whole lot, and when they were their image had moved on. I bought the singles of Ballroom Blitz (another Chinn-Chapman tune), and Fox on the Run (the first single written and produced by the band, and their biggest hit in the US), and really loved both songs. I remember looking at their Desolation Boulevard album in record stores based on the strength of the singles, but for some reason I never picked it up. There was probably a new KISS album I needed to buy on my limited budget.

Sometime in 1976 or '77 I joined the Columbia House record club. You sent in a penny and got 10 or 12 albums, then were obligated to buy several more at full price over the next three years. I don't specifically remember most of the records I purchased through this service, but I did choose Give Us a Wink by The Sweet as part of my original purchase. Having never heard the British term wank before I didn't get any of the sexual innuendo (though the less-than-subtle line “up to my balls inside her” in the song Yesterday's Rain certainly, ahem, pricked up my ears).

On the original album the eye on the left was a die-cut hole in
the album sleeve. An inner sleeve had several different images
of an eye, from wide open to closed. When you slid the inner
sleeve out the cover appeared to wink at you. You don't get
that with CD's and mp3's.

Based on the singles I had heard this was not the album I expected. I now know this was the first album the band wrote and performed entirely on their own, and they were going full-on hard rock. Whatever my expectations, I grew to really love this album, and it remains in my personal echelon of favorite records from my teen years.

But, much to the band's dismay, the album really didn't replicate the sales success of earlier efforts. They were a band that seemed plagued by bad luck and bad timing. At every turn it seemed, just as they were poised to take that next step, something set them back. Some of their problems were of their own making, of course, but others were just ridiculous. BBC Radio went on strike just when they released a single, so it went nowhere. BBC thought the phrase “for God's sake” in the single Turn It Down was blasphemous and refused to play it (oh, how times have changed). They were invited to open for The Who by Pete Townsend, who was a big fan of theirs apparently. This would probably have been the biggest show at this point of their career. But singer Brian Connelly was involved in an assault and got kicked in the throat, making him unable to sing for months (and by all accounts he never recovered full use of his voice). They had to back out of the show.

There was one last surge of popularity. The song Love is Like Oxygen hit the charts in America in the late 70's. Like their entire career, they were counted out, but then managed to squeeze out another success. But that was pretty much the end. By this time the ravages of alcohol abuse had taken their toll on Connelly and he left the band. The other three continued on for three more albums that no one bought (as a fan I didn't even know they existed until I read the biography). There was an attempt at a reunion in the late 80's but Connelly's health prevented it from going forward.

Connelly died in 1997 from a series of heart attacks, drummer Mick Tucker in 2002 from leukemia. At present Steve Priest maintains a version of the band in America with all new members. Guitarist Andy Scott does the same thing in England and Europe. Both bands tour and perform the classic songs. Scott's band has released a couple of albums of new material that sounds remarkably like the original band.

So why this obsession on my part right now? I'm not sure. Maybe I'm just feeling nostalgic, though in truth I really didn't experience much of their career first hand. I didn't even hear the vast majority of their songs until they were rereleased on CD in the 90's. But, thanks to a couple of singles and one album they are a band that is linked to my youth. I can't see the makeup and costumes and stage spectaculars of a lot of modern artists without thinking of what came before (and I'm old enough to realize that fans of Liberace probably felt that way about The Sweet, at least in terms of fashion). Part of it is simply that it's fun. It's over the top and slightly ridiculous and just when it needs to it really rocks and most people don't know anything about it.

I'll leave you with a video of Ballroom Blitz. This song probably sums up The Sweet better than any other single song. It's a Chinn and Chapman top single. It has great Connelly vocals, driving Mick Tucker drums, some great rock guitar from Andy, and the requisite amount of Steve Priest camping it up. Enjoy. It's a lot of fun.

Are you ready, Steve?

Connections and Vectors and Degrees of Separation

So, I decided I needed to reread all of Gilbert Hernandez Love and Rockets Palomar stories before continuing my ongoing Favorite Comics posts. That's taking a little time, though the experience has been rewarding and worth it. But, in the meantime, I wanted to write about something else.

So I decided to write about Love and Rockets. The band this time, not the comic.

Well, sort of.

This past Sunday night I went to see David J perform at the Thunderbird Cafe, a little bar about a two-minute walk from my apartment. David J was the bass player for Bauhaus and Love and Rockets, as well as having an ongoing solo career, plus having played in some other random bands over the years. It was a really great show, featuring music from his entire career. I was a pretty big fan of most of this music at one time or another, so there were a lot of great moments for me last night.

But the main thing I want to talk about here are the random connections between people and events as we spiral around this planet of several billion people over time. During his performance, as he sang songs from his thirty-plus years in the industry, my mind started recalling all of the various connections I have with David J, though we had never met until last night.

This is rambling and out of any kind of chronological order, and probably of no interest to anyone but me, but I find these sorts of things fascinating. Bear with me.

I discovered Bauhaus late. They originally existed as a band from 1978 to 1983 when I was living in a place with no access to music that was, at that time, fairly obscure. I have since seen video of their live performances from the time, and I'm pretty sure, given my penchant for costumes and theater, that if I had seen them in 1979 I would have gotten into them. As it was it was 1986 before I discovered them when I moved into a college apartment with five other guys. One of them, Steve, had an amazing collection of vinyl records, most of which were alternative bands I had never heard of. To say his record collection changed my musical life is an understatement. That fall, 1986, Love and Rockets second album Express was relatively new and spent a lot of time on the turntable at the apartment. I got really into L&R. It took awhile to associate them with Bauhaus in my mind. I found Bauhaus to be more challenging for me, and it took longer to get into. At the same time I got really turned onto a band called The Jazz Butcher. David J had played bass on two of his albums between his time in Bauhaus and Love and Rockets.

About a year later (November 9, 1987 to be precise... thank you internet search engines), still at Edinboro University of PA, we discovered that Love and Rockets were playing at Indiana University of PA. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment road trips where a friend borrowed his father's van and 10 or 12 of us piled into it for a road trip. L&R were touring for their third album, Earth, Sun, Moon. We got to the Fisher Auditorium and for five bucks, if memory serves, saw not only L&R but another band none of us had ever heard of prior to that evening, Jane's Addiction.

Lookie what I found on the internet!

Two years after that on August 31, 1989 I saw L&R at the Syria Mosque in Pittsburgh. The Pixies, who I had just discovered, opened. Say what you will about L&R, but they could pick great opening bands. The Pixies completely blew me away.

Then, twenty-three years later, I met David J at a bar near my house. We've been pinging around on this planet together for years. This was the same person I had seen on stage all those years ago and our individual trajectories had finally brought us to a very nice personal conversation. That's when I started piecing together all of the various overlapping vectors in our lives.

Back in 1986, at the same time that I was first getting turned on to David J's work, was when I was reading Watchmen for the first time. I didn't know then that David J was friends with Alan Moore and that they had worked together on various projects. I found out most of this not too long after the fact, but still. David had written the musical score for This Vicious Cabaret, a specific chapter of Moore's V For Vendetta, which I had read at this point. He was in a short-live band with Moore called the Sinister Ducks and recorded a song called Old Gangsters Never Die which came with a comics adaptation of the lyrics by Lloyd Thatcher (you can see it here http://asylums.insanejournal.com/scans_daily/474540.html). Since then he has contributed music and participated in Moore's spoken word performances like The Birth Caul and Moon & Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels among others.

1986 is when I first met Steve Bissette and John Totleben, the artists for Moore's Swamp Thing series for DC Comics. For a couple of years I saw Steve and John on a pretty regular basis and hung out with them enough that they know and remember me years later. So even then I was only one degree of separation from Alan Moore, which I knew, and therefore two degrees from David J.

Around this same time (the details of this are a bit fuzzier because I wasn't directly involved) was when the Pixies were coming together as part of the Boston indy music scene. Among several bands that were part of that scene was a group called The Five who were originally from Pittsburgh (The Pixies used to open for The Five). I didn't live in Pittsburgh at the time, but I was coming here fairly regularly for comics and record shopping. One of the comics shops I went to was a place called BEM. Turns out, as I discovered many years later, the proprietor Bill Boichel was friends with the guys in The Five. So I was only three degrees from the Pixies.

In 1990 a couple of friends and I made a trip to Cleveland where we saw The Jazz Butcher at a club called Peabody's Down Under. I met Pat Fish, the Jazz Butcher himself (the only consistent member of the band over their thirty year history), and I also randomly ran into my friend Joelle who had been one of the people crammed in the back of the van with three years earlier (Joelle now lives in New Zealand, opening up a whole new country of potential connections). While there I had Pat autograph the booklet that came with my CD copy of Scandal in Bohemia/Sex and Travel. These were his second and third albums, the ones David J played bass on. At the time this was a very rare German import that I had manged to get my hands on, and for years the only way these two albums were available. When I showed it to Pat his response was something like, “Where the bloody hell did you get this? I've barely seen these.”

A few years later I'm writing for In Pittsburgh Magazine and get the chance to do a phone interview with Frank Black/Black Francis of the Pixies. It ends up being my first cover feature article. One of the musicians opening for Frank at that Pittsburgh show is Reid Paley, former lead singer of The Five. Through a lot of mutual Pittsburgh friends I met and got to know Reid, as well as Five guitarist Tom Moran. At the time Tom was in an Alt-Country band called TheDeliberate Strangers. I saw them a lot and one of my articles about them in No Depression ended up being my first in a nationally published music mag. A couple of years later I met with Reid and some other people for hanging out and drinks at a local bar called the Squirrel Cage and Frank Black is there, just hanging out.

In 2000 the original members of the Jazz Butcher reunite for an American tour and a new album and I met the whole band at the Millvale Industrial Theater (as well as at some small bar in Erie whose name I don't remember). While there I got signatures from drummer O.P. Jones and guitarist Max Eider. Eider had also played guitar on David J's 1989 album Songs From Another Season.

I have a friend, a remarkable poet, by the name of Margaret (check her stuff out at http://margaretbashaar.wordpress.com/). I met Margaret as one of my customers at Phantom of the Attic when she was like twelve. Through her teen years we bonded over Elfquest and now that she's an adult I'm happy to call her a genuine friend. She is part of what for lack of a better term I'm going to call an artist's community that gathers at the Grand Midway Hotel in Windber, PA. The Hotel is home to a mixed group of artists, poets, photographers, musicians, filmmakers, and pretty much anything thing else creative you can think of. I have only been there once, to a really amazing Halloween party. One evening, while having dinner with Margaret the topic turned to music and I mentioned Bauhaus, or Love and Rockets, or something, and Margaret casually mentioned that David J hangs out there occasionally. She had met him one morning in the kitchen of the Hotel while he was attempting to make tea.

Small world.

Margaret and several other denizens of the Midway were at the show on Sunday.

And on Sunday night I completed my quest and got David J's signature on the booklet.

Twenty-two years in the making!

I could go on with these connections. One of Reid's albums was produced by Eric Drew Feldman, former member of Captain Beefheart and regular PJ Harvey collaborator. Reid and Frank Black just released a collaborative album. The lines drawn between musicians seem to connect that whole world, and if you end up knowing one of them your world just gets a little smaller. The same is true of the world of comic books, or of any one of a number of hobbies and professions. When these things overlap it's even more true. What I find most fascinating about all of this is backtracking the history. I was listening to David J, the guy who wrote the prototypical Goth song Bela Lugosi's Dead, and reading Alan Moore, the guy who wrote Watchmen, both genre-changing, significant pieces of Pop Culture history, at a time when they felt worlds away from my life. Twenty-five plus years later I know they weren't a world away, just a couple of steps.

And not to overstate something that we've all known since the advent of Kevin Bacon, that's true of everyone.

Anyway, I just want to end this rambling post with a quote from a Love and Rockets song called A Private Future. I've always thought this was really good advice.

Live the life you love

Use a god you trust

And don't take it all too seriously

9/11

This morning on Facebook I saw a lot of posts about September 11, 2001. Of course this is a date that everyone will remember and think about on the anniversary. One of the posts was by my friend Terri. Her son Matthew, who was a baby then, had a homework assignment to interview someone who remembered 9/11. He interviewed his Mom. That resonated with me, because I was at her house in Washington DC that morning.

We all have our stories of that day. Where we were. What we did. How we reacted. This is mine. I don't think I have any great revelations here, or insights. But Terri's post reminded me we now have children who don't remember, and those who were not born yet to whom this is just history and not memory. We should share those stories, not just because we should never forget, but because they help unite us in our humanity.

At the time my friend Fred (whose name regular readers of the blog will recognize as my collaborator of the Grey Legacy comics), was living in an apartment in the house of our mutual friends Terri and Peter in Capitol Hill, about three blocks from the Capitol building. I had driven to DC from Pittsburgh to visit all of them and to see the musician PJ Harvey at the 9:30 Club on the evening of 9/10. She was on tour for her Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea album and played an amazing show. I think that's the night Fred and I walked all the way back home in the middle of the night instead of waiting for a cab.

I had planned to leave early the next day. All of my friends had to go to work, and my car was illegally parked and I wanted to escape the city before getting a ticket. Peter had left for work and Terri had taken Matthew to his daycare, then returned home to get ready for work herself. Fred and I were up, having breakfast and watching one of the morning news shows. I don't remember which one, but at the end of the hour they were planning on interviewing a British man who was the world's foremost “Ugly Model.” I don't know why I remember that detail, because we never got to see the interview.

Someone broke into the show with garbled information about a plane having crashed into the World Trade Center. Like everyone, we watched in horror as the story unfolded. I can't remember the exact timing, but Terri had seen the news and came down to Fred's apartment to make sure we knew and were watching. We saw the second plane crash into the tower live.

The one thing I specifically remember Terri saying is, “Do you think the Towers might actually collapse?”

The panic hadn't quite set in yet, and Terri decided to call off work and go pick up Matthew at daycare. Fred decided to go with her, and they have their own stories of traffic and confusion. I went to my car to go home.

The route I took out of DC took me past the Pentagon as I made my way to the George Washington Parkway (not the way I usually went, but I think I made an accidental detour). I was very conscious of the low-flying planes coming and going from Ronald Reagan Airport and Dulles. I made it to the Parkway and onto the Beltway and out of DC with very little difficulty. The second tower was hit at 9:03. The Pentagon was hit at 9:37. I drove past the Pentagon during that short thirty-four minute window.

I drove home. I took Route 68 through Maryland instead of the Pennsylvania Turnpike because I had planned on going to my parents house in Greene County, south of Pittsburgh. Very early in the trip I started to get a migraine, something that happens to me periodically. I'm sure the lack of sleep and stress of the morning contributed. I remember it being a really horrible trip. I made the whole four-plus hour drive without hearing any news. Somewhere along 68 I stopped at a convenience store to use the restroom and buy some painkillers. The entire rest stop was in an uproar. They were talking about blocking off the parking lot and closing down and there was a general air of panic. I didn't catch all of it because my head was killing me, so I did what I needed to do and left.

After the fact I looked at some maps and saw that the rest stop was not very far south of Shanksville, PA.

I arrived at Mom and Dad's in the early afternoon. They weren't home. I immediately turned on the TV and the very first image I saw was the smoking Pentagon. That was really when the first real sense of the enormity of the whole thing hit me. I had just been there. I had just seen the Pentagon. When I heard when this happened I realized how close I had been. That was when it really became real to me. In the next few minutes I saw the film of the collapse of the Towers and Terri's words came back to me. I spent the rest of that day trying, futilely, to reach her and Fred (they were all right).

And that's really it for my story. The rest was shock and mourning, like everyone else. I didn't personally know anyone in the Towers or the Pentagon, or on the planes. I know people who were there. I have a cousin who was in New York. She had an appointment at the World Trade Center later that day, but hadn't left her hotel yet. She was among the people who walked out of town. One of my customers at Phantom of the Attic was on the New York subway and didn't know anything was going on at all until he came up onto the sidewalk in time to see the dust cloud and a collapsing building.

I think it's important to remember. I think it's also important not to let this wound define us. That day, and in the days after, we were united as a nation in our grief. That unity, one based on recognizing our shared humanity, is what I think is most important to remember. The victims of 9/11 were men and women, straight and gay, conservative and liberal, Christian, Jew, Muslim, atheist and all the others. So were the first responders and heroes of that day. All of these differences ceased to matter in the face of catastrophe and death. No one stopped to ask religion or party affiliation. In those terrible moments we were all human first, and the natural reaction to other human beings who were suffering was to help.

That gives me hope. That is what we should remember.

2 New 5-Star Reviews For Bedivere From Barnes & Noble

 Great story. Can't wait to read book two!

A wonderfully well told story from a perspective that I've never been

exposed to before in Arthurian fiction. The pages and the hours flew

by. This book is worth far more than $2.99. I can't wait for the

next in the series. Get busy, Wayne!

www.barnesandnoble.com

Favorite Comics Part Eight: Love & Rockets (Part 1)

Love & Rockets (the comic book, not the band... for those who don't know, the comic came first), is very high on my list of all-time favorite comics, and one of the single most influential on my art style and approach to comics. Like a lot of books from this time period I didn't catch on immediately. My lack of access to a direct sales comics shop was the primary reason for this. It was only through the enthusiastic reviews of a couple of friends of mine who were more adventurous than I that I finally read L&R. I think I read the first four or five issues in one sitting. I've been a confirmed fan ever since.

While it's been on my list of books to write about for this project from the beginning, I have been hesitant to begin. A lot has been written and said about Love & Rockets, and I'm not sure what I have to add to the conversation. L&R by itself is a complex work, and my own reactions to it are complex as well. Trying to find a focus for this article has been difficult.

I have heard Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, the primary creators of L&R, referred to as “the most important comics creators of their generation.” This is a generation that includes Frank Miller, Alan Moore and a host of other significant writers and artists, so that is a pretty remarkable judgement, and one I don't completely disagree with. It is not just loved by fans, and they tend to be rabid supporters, it is one of the most critically acclaimed comics of the last thirty years.

That wasn't always so. When the first Fantagraphics issue came out in 1982 a reviewer for Amazing Heroes, R.A. Jones, was less than receptive. I'll let his words speak for themselves;

So, Jones seem to think L&R was dated and hopelessly rooted in the past, when what actually happened was that L&R was the vanguard of a new generation of comics creators. While thoroughly immersed in the comics traditions that came before, a much broader spectrum than the Underground Comix Jones refers to, L&R presented a unique outlook and voice that has changed the approach to what comics can be. Rather than a pastiche of a dated past it represented a future not yet fully understood or comprehended.

The reasons I feel this way are mixed in with my experiences of reading the book. But, there are a few things I can say in general. L&R was post-modern. The Brothers Hernandez (and in the earliest days of the book, brother Mario contributed as well), threw everything they knew and loved into their work. Their influences came from the traditional superhero comics, but they seemed to incorporate everything they read: Romance comics, Archie comics, Sci-Fi. Their characters lived in a world where everything that existed in comics existed. The day-to-day lives of the characters were the normal stories of people with jobs and families and relationships, but it was easy to imagine that the Fantastic Four were fighting giant space monsters just over the horizon, that you could run into Betty and Veronica at the local fast food joint, or that the neighbor kid was Dennis the Menace. As a comics fan of their generation who had grown up devouring all of these it was as if the Hernandez Brothers had delineated the world I had always lived in in my head, and somehow it all fit together.

And it wasn't just comics that served as an inspiration. Anything they were fans of made its way into the comic. Monster movies, music, television, and wrestling (particularly the masked luchadore tradition), all went into the mix.

The cover of a police lineup of fantasy figures with a real woman in a housecoat summed this up. It was intriguing and stood out as being something very different than what we had seen on the racks before.

This drawing by Jaime was inspired by the Punk Rock artist Raymond Pettibon and his artwork for the back cover of the Black Flag single Nervous Breakdown.

The Hernandez Brothers were among the first distinctly Hispanic voices in comics. They related that cultural heritage in the form of traditional imagery and folklore handed down to them through older generations as well as through their own urban experience as Hispanic youths in America. Their approach was also multicultural. Though most of the primary point of view characters were of Hispanic origin they were not the only character types present, especially in Jaime's work. The Punk Rock culture of Los Angeles that provided the backdrop for his stories guaranteed that many other races and cultures were represented as well.

It's important to me to redefine the term multicultural for my purposes here. What I mean by Culture in this context goes beyond specific racial or religious backgrounds. I want to expand the definition to include any culture or sub-culture one finds oneself a member of, in this case specifically, Comics as a sub-culture and Punk Rock as a sub-culture (though there are many others included as well). If I were to completely simplify the primary themes of Love & Rockets I would say that it is the continuing story of the attempt to define oneself, within the strictures of the various cultures to which you belong and identify with, and against the expectations they bring with them. A recurring idea is that as characters grow and age, which they do in this series, they often become something they never dreamed of in their youth.

While the cast was large and varied, both Gilbert and Jaime focused on female point-of-view characters, and both managed to create some of the most fully-realized women characters in comics. Their protagonists were real, with a fully human spectrum of emotions, motivations, strengths and flaws. Unlike the standard, idealized superheroine form, the women who populated L&R also showed a full range of body types, and just like real people, their bodies changed over time.

Some of the varied female residents of Palomar.

Maggie Chascarillo at various points in her life.

They were also able to present the reality of human sexuality in ways that always felt real and not exploitive. There were characters who were straight, gay and bi-sexual, transvestites and transsexuals the polyamorous and the chaste. There were characters in committed relationships and those who were promiscuous. Characters were tempted and fell in love and fell in lust. Sex was presented as powerful, life-changing, emotionally messy, romantic, prurient, ridiculous, embarrassing, hysterical and confusing... just like it is for all of us in real life. It was a topic that stood on equal footing with everything else that went on in the characters lives. There are scenes I'm sure some people would view as pornographic (and the book is really not meant for kids, for a variety of reasons), but if L&R is porn, then so is the life of everyone I know.

L&R can be difficult for a new reader to jump into. Like Marvel and DC, at this point the L&R universe has a long history. Reading the latest installment has great meaning for me, but only because I have watched these characters grow for thirty years. They are old friends by now, and I know the back story that has brought them to their current place. If you don't know that back story, it's just events happening to strangers. Even though the series has been collected in various formats over the years it's not as simple as saying “Start at the beginning.” Unfortunately the original format and printing history can make it difficult to follow, though it has gotten better than it used to be.

L&R was originally a magazine-sized black and white comic. It is important to note, for those of you who have never read it, that its contents were never simply one big story. L&R was essentially an anthology featuring separate stories by each of the brothers. Over time both Gilbert and Jaime developed recurring casts that they focused on (loosely speaking, the Palomar stories and the Locas stories, respectively), but they both contributed tales in each issue that had nothing to do with their longer, continuing narratives.

It was obvious in the beginning, like many young creators, that they were experimenting and had not yet found their voices or their style. If you pick up the original issues, or read the original trade paperback collections that presented the issues as they first appeared, the experience can feel a little choppy and unfocused and are likely to make the uninitiated wonder what all the fuss is about.

More recent collections have streamlined the experience, collecting each of the brother's main stories separately.

This is probably the best way to read the best work by both of them, or only the one you're most into, but all of the extra stories, those outside Palomar or Locas, are missing. 

While not as essential, the lack of side characters like Errata Stigmata and the adventures of Rocky and Fumble lessens the overall L&R experience.

Errata Stigmata

That's Rocky and Fumble in the lower right.
The central figure is Cheetah Torpedo.

I'm pretty sure I haven't done justice to the series. It's difficult to talk about just why this book has been so important to me. Part of it, the part that a new reader simply can't experience, is the concurrent growth of the series with my life. These characters have been with me for thirty years now. As the circumstances of my life have changed, as I have grown from a twenty-something to a fifty-something, these characters have gone through similar changes. They feel like old friends, friends with whom I have an investment of time and emotion. I go about my life and they go about theirs, and once a year or so we get together and get caught up, discovering what has happened in the meantime, and learning more about each others journey. To new readers my old friends are simply strangers with an interesting past. For me, they are people I have shared the road with, just like real people in my life. There is a difference between hearing someone's story and feeling like you have shared it.

It's impossible to talk about L&R without considering the contributions of Jaime and Gilbert separately. While both are instrumental to the overall feel of the book, they are, in the end, very different creators. I plan on spending time with both the residents of Gilbert's Palomar and the cast of Jaime's Locas in the next couple of posts, reminiscing with these old friends of mine. I hope I can convey why I love them.

Love and Rockets and all associated characters are copyright by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez.

New 5-Star review for Bedivere

Here's what happens when you don't check your Amazon page for awhile. This is the second review of one of my ebooks I've seen today. I don't even know this reviewer, but thanks!

5.0 out of 5 stars Heartfelt story of a knights memories., August 6, 2012

By 

Candace Jacobs - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: Bedivere Book One: The King's Right Hand (Kindle Edition)

Beautifully written. I stumbled upon this book by accident...or perhaps not. If you were enthralled by Gillian Bradshaw's Hawk, Mary Stewart's Merlin, or Sarah Luddington's Wolf (strong adult content); then Wayne Wise's Griflet will not disappoint (there is a twist to this one folks -- no spoilers here) Will anxiously await the coming books as Sir Bedivere slips his memories through the veil and into the hands of Wayne The Wise.

New Review for Scratch!

In the interest of fairness I want to point out that the reviewer, Laura, is a really good friend of mine that I don't see enough of these days. She is one of my oldest, dearest friends and one of my harshest critics (and I say that in a loving and grateful way).

4.0 out of 5 stars Really enjoyed this book!, July 27, 2012

By 

Laura C Lewis (Wyckoff, NJ USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: Scratch (Kindle Edition)

So I guess I have Mr. Wise to thank for a couple of new bruises... after dropping my Kindle on my face at 1:30 in the morning because I COULDN'T STOP READING! (Hurts a lot more than a paper book, if you're interested...)
As a native of the town upon which Appleton is based, it felt particularly "real." He absolutely captured with 100% accuracy, the cadence of life in that area, the speech, the behaviors, the small-town interconnectedness (not always a good thing, regardless of the opinions of John Cougar Mellencamp) of the citizens of Canaan. I loved the juxtaposition of Gabrielle and Scratch and the implication that one could not exist without the other, the light and the dark, the good and the bad, although I didn't think of Scratch as evil any more than a shark is "evil." It is the nature of the beast, so to speak.
Even the "other bad guy" was fleshed out in such a way that it was possible to see him as a sympathetic character. His fantasy about his future life was very sad.
There are a lot of other things I'd like to address but it would make my review too much of a spoiler.
All in all, it moved along at a snappy pace, was entertaining, thought-provoking and led up to an appropriately apocalyptic finish (a previous reviewer said something about "cinematic," and I have to agree, this book would make a GREAT movie! I'd go see it!!)
All my best to the author. I will definitely be looking forward to his future works!