Comic Con Report, volume 3

I had the honour of speaking with Jaime Hernandez yesterday after watching a panel featuring him and his brother, Gilbert, the two of them being responsible for the legendary Love and Rockets indie comics. Also on the panel was Peter Bagge, creator of Hate, which I've not read. The host of the panel was the man who published the works of Bagge and the Hernandez brothers.

The group reminisced about underground comics of the '70s and agreed that the scene essentially died out before the end of the '70s and lived on only in the works of a few creators who managed to find something close to mainstream success, like R. Crumb. They discussed the impact of Frank Miller and Alan Moore comics in the '80s, creating a bridge between mainstream comics and indie comic style writing.

They discussed their working habits. Gilbert likes to listen to podcasts sometimes while drawing but Jaime has ceased to listen to anything while working because he has taken to writing as he draws. I imagine after so much time, it all must be second nature to him. Someone in the audience asked the panel what new comic artists they liked and none of them knew of any. Jaime confessed that he had lost all curiosity and, when he felt competitive, it was only with himself and his brother. He described being shown the work of some new artists occasionally who were described to him as hot and exciting but stated that he was unimpressed by anything.

This did not surprise me. If you look at how comics of the '80s influenced comics of to-day, the kind of work the Hernandez brothers were producing have been far less influential than the work of artists like Jim Lee, but even then, none of the young artists I've been looking at attempt to approach anything like Lee's attention to detail. Certainly there's little effort to achieve the combination of expressiveness, detail, colloquial culture, and adult styling that the Hernandez brothers mastered. Their style is an evolutionary offshoot that has sadly died out.

I didn't have much to say to Jaime when I spoke to him after the panel. I was kind of exhausted, so I just told him I admired his work and still reread it frequently.