The Comic Book Club: “Love & Rockets” and “X-23”

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DOUGLAS: Jaime’s stuff this issue, on the other hand, is totally great. I don’t even know if Calvin Chascarrillo has been mentioned before or if he’s a continuity implant, but the story is just one emotional gut-punch after another. (Rereading it, a lot more pieces fall into place–that scene where Maggie hands Calvin a banana and tells him he can’t stick around is a killer. The guy’s spent his entire life destroying himself trying to keep his sister safe.) So many amazing details–the crying moon over Maggie’s apartments, her offhanded admission to Ray that she’d asked Reno first, little Perla’s historically accurate rainbow shirt, the winking mechanic on the “Career Days” parade float, Nacho freaking out after his daughter’s been talking to his mistress… plus I don’t think I’ve ever before seen a Gary Stu artist character who makes much, much worse art than his creator, you know?

EVAN: I’m very fuzzy on my L&R characters and continuity. But the thing I’ve always appreciated with the serials the Bros. have told over the years is that you can pretty much enjoy the stories as discrete entities.

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I liked Gilbert’s first sci-fi story–”the movie” of “Scarlet by Starlight”–a lot more before the sex actually happened on panel. When it was just tension and innuendos, the threat of threshold-crossing was part of the enjoyment. Once the graphic stuff started happening, it felt like all he could do was escalate the blood and shtupping. That said, I’ve always like the way Gilbert mixes camp and sex and genre fiction tropes. He kinda doesn’t privilege any of them and flattens them into these really surreal yet grounded tableaus. When he gets the balance wrong–as I felt “Killer*Sad Girl*Star” did–the work seems to be just more self-indulgent of his predilections.

Jaime’s stuff has always struck me as more naturalistic, with such great linework and rhythm. His art style lives on the border of finely rendered and cartoony, and the characters seem much more rounded for it. The furtive slip of the banana at the end of the first part of “Love Bunglers” was just so quiet and perfect. And the sense of community in the “Browntown” story felt really rich. In another writer’s hands, all of the hormones and angst would just be bad melodrama. But Jaime makes it feel universal and relatable. And it all makes the act of violence in “Browntown” all the more painful.

MIKE: I am a first-time reader of Love and Rockets (despite the fact that I’m reasonably sure that I own a volume somewhere in my stacks) and I didn’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t this. I guess I thought this was going to be some Napoleon Dynamite-ish small-town awkward love story? Does that make sense? Of course I was thrown unapologetically into this bizarre Hanna-Barbera neckerchief space drama and I had to adjust quickly.

I had no idea, and it’s still not clear to me now, if these stories (especially “Scarlet by Starlight”) are part of a larger continuity. I just sort of accepted that gears were going to switch fast around here and I should just sit back and go for the ride. And then some new panel featuring sodomy would pop up and I’d have to make sure I still wanted to turn pages.

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Having said all that, I think I’m in agreement with the club about enjoying “Browntown” and “Bunglers” more. I wasn’t quite sure if Gilbert’s stories were supposed to be satirical commentary or not. And if they were satire, what were they lampooning?

It was all interesting enough, however, to make me want to go out and get volumes one and two. There is a one and two right?

DOUGLAS: There are indeed two earlier issues of this version–this is actually the third Love & Rockets series. (The first one was 50 magazine-sized issues, the second was 20 comics-sized issues.) I wrote a “where to start” piece here a few months ago!

And yes, the stories are part of a larger continuity… sort of. Jaime’s “Browntown” and “The Love Bunglers” are part of the great big story of Maggie Chascarrillo’s life that he’s been doing since the beginning of the series–45-year-old Maggie in “The Love Bunglers” is the same character as 9-and-11-year-old Perla in “Browntown.”

Gilbert’s stuff is a little more complicated. “Scarlet by Starlight” is an adaptation of a movie in which his B-movie actress character Fritz appeared. Dora a.k.a. “Killer,” from “Killer/Sad Girl/Star,” is the granddaughter of Fritz’s half-sister Luba, the protagonist of a lot of Gilbert’s stories from L&R volume 1.

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