Happy Valentine's Day from Hopey!

Look! She's buying something special just for you! Panel courtesy Love and Rockets vol. 2 #16 by Jaime Hernandez.

A smile is something special, but honestly, ribbons are readily available almost anywhere

Just re-reading Ghost World yesterday.  The part where Enid regresses emotionally while listening to one of her childhood favorite songs is very touching.  It's a very fatherly gesture for her dad to drag out her little turntable and put the single on her bed.  Does anyone listen to 45s anymore?  I had a stack when I was a kid, but most of them were outlaw country by guys like Waylon Jennings.  I especially like the
panel when Enid wakes up in the morning still in her beanbag chair with her hair sticking up all over the place.  I'm almost completely bald and look like some kind of effeminate mirror universe Ike Eisenhower, so of course I'm jealous even of someone's terrible morning hair.

Anyway, I'm doing a deep study of the way Daniel Clowes draws eyes and hands.  You have your slender Alex Toth fingers with prominent fingernails, your dynamic yet claw-like Gil Kane hands that seem rippling with muscles, and then your Dan Clowes hands which are largely featureless.  They're not perfunctory, though.  They're typically well observed in whatever pose he chooses to place them.

Eyes vary.  Weirdo comedian Joey McCobb-- is he for real, or is he simply a hack with an outsider gimmick?-- has wrinkly cartoonish eyes, kind of pointy and football shaped.  Visually, he reminds me a little of Peter Lorre.  Very little.  Mostly just the eyes.  Enid and Rebecca have more nuanced eyes, at least at the beginning of the story.  Eyelids, lashes, little lines underneath to show the roundness.  Eyes protude slightly.  There's at least one panel later in the book where Enid's eyes are simply a curved arc above and below, but they're somewhat obscured by the drawing of her glasses frames.

I could be mistaken.  I'm writing my impressions the next day, at work.  It will be interesting for me to go home this evening and see if I really saw what I remember seeing, or if I'm just making things up in my head.

As an artist myself, I've never settled on a particular way to draw eyes.  Sometimes I want to do sort of abstracted, simplified shapes with full outlines, but other times I go nuts with the detailing.  I change frequently depending on who happens to be influencing me that day, or if I've seen someone new I want to rip off.

Jaime Hernandez has a simple yet convincing way of drawing eyes, the footballish upper and lower arcs, with rounded irises in the center.  The top arc can be flattened and thickened, with a few strokes for lashes.  Interestingly, in a fairly recent story arc, he chose to use the "injury to the eye" motif regarding Hopey, a character whose motivations I often think about.  But prior to that, she spent the story "Election Day" (Penny Century #5, June 1999) hiding her eyes behind dark sunglasses, so much so one of the minor characters mentions thinking she's blind.  At the end of the story she lifts the sunglasses while staring at herself in the mirror, revealing deep lines under them and some kind of enigmatic unhappiness.  What's going on in that head of hers?  Hernandez generally characterizes her as someone not given to introspection.  The eyes are expressive, but they tell us nothing.

His art is slick and appealing, believable yet not exactly realistic.  Steve Rude has a similar approach, but the character he's most associated with usually wears a visor.  No eyes.  When I picture a Rude face, I imagine narrowed eyes drawn as horizontal lines, squinting, the body straining, twisting and moving.  Action eyes.  Some of his aliens have big round insectoid eyes.  Good for science fiction, not so much for earth-bound romance comics-- which is a genre I'm very interested in working in.  I like to say "social realism," but if I'm really being honest with myself, I'm writing romance comics.  They'll never see publication, but it's fun to churn out scripts full of emotional torture for my shabbily realized characters.

Alex Toth and Mort Meskin sometimes drew eyes as little slashes of black ink, or maybe a line up top and then a dab of ink below for the iris.  Very simple and effective.  Alex Toth is my primary influence for drawing eyes, but like Clowes, Hernandez and Rude, he employed different methods.  His sketchbook pages, which are frequently just big piles of faces and heads, show all kinds of approaches.  Some of them are extremely simple, just quick enclosed triangles and ovals.

Simply put, there's no one right way to draw eyes.  Do what works best for you, what's appropriate for your characters.  Above all, observe real emotions and learn to draw them.  If you're good at acting on the page, more than likely you're rarely drawing eyes the same way twice anyway.

And work on those hands while you're at it.

Speaking of Love and Rockets...

Fantagraphics promises a "major Love and Rockets-related announcement" to be made at the San Diego Comic-Con this year.  Well, they are celebrating the 30th anniversary of the ground-breaking series from Los Bros Hernandez, and they have a lot of Hernandez-produced books coming out shortly, including Love and Rockets New Stories #5 and Gilbert's all-ages graphic novel The Adventures of Venus, the cover of which looks adorably appealing.  And here's their slate of signings and what-have-you's, which I took from the email they sent, not because I'm special but because I signed up for their emails:

Wednesday, July 11th:
7:00 - 8:00 PM Gilbert & Natalia Hernandez/Mario Hernandez

Thursday, July 12th:
12:00 - 2:00 PM  Gilbert & Natalia Hernandez/Jaime Hernandez/Mario Hernandez
2:00 - 3:00 PM  Esther Pearl Watson/Trina Robbins
3:30 - 5:30 PM Gilbert & Natalia Hernandez/Jaime Hernandez/Mario Hernandez

Friday, July 13th:
10:30 - 12:00 PM  Gilbert and Natalia Hernandez/Jaime Hernandez/Mario Hernandez
12:00 - 1:30 PM Dave McKean
12:00 - 2:00 PM  Gilbert Shelton
2:00 - 3:30 PM  Gilbert and Natalia Hernandez/Jaime Hernandez/Mario Hernandez
3:30 - 5:30 PM  Justin Hall/Trina Robbins/No Straight Lines special guests
5:30 - 6:30 PM  Mark Kalesniko/Shannon Wheeler

Saturday, July 14th:

11:00 - 12:30 PM  Gilbert and Natalia Hernandez/Jaime Hernandez/Mario Hernandez

12:30 - 2:30 PM  Johnny Ryan/Steven Weissman

3:00 - 5:00 PM  Gilbert & Natalia Hernandez/Jaime Hernandez/Mario Hernandez

5:00 - 6:00 PM  Mark Kalesniko/Michel Gagne

Sunday, July 15th:

10:30 - 11:30 AM  Mark Kalesniko/Michel Gagne

11:30 - 1:30 PM  Gilbert & Natalia Hernandez/Jaime Hernandez/Mario Hernandez

I would LOVE to meet Los Bros, but also Trina Robbins.  Frankly, some of the other names are just mysteries to me.  But I've always been... one step... BEHIND!

Thirty Years of Hopey Glass, Super Punk Badass!

With a new issue of the Harvey Award-winning series Love and Rockets: New Stories poised to hit the streets, it's time to look at some of Hopey Glass's moments of punk badassery. I had to limit myself to the first twenty or so issues of Love and Rockets, volume one. Otherwise, this blog post would be almost as long as the series itself. With a career dating way back in 1981 with Los Bros Hernandez's first self-published comic, Hopey's done too many memorable things.  Things that make you laugh, things that make your dog smile and your grandpa blush.  She's such an amazing character, practically any scene she's in becomes a medium-altering moment in comic book history.

Okay, I'm exaggerating a little.  Hopey's probably only the third or fourth most important character in American comics.  And it only took twenty-six years for Fantagraphics to publish a book with her name in the title.  But this poses a question-- just how did Jaime Hernandez pack so much awesome into such a teensy-tiny character? I don't think we'll ever know.  Perhaps she sprang from some real-life source, some proto-Hopey raising punk hell, throwing bottles, spray-painting walls, blowing the boys and girls away with her spiked hair and mean eyebrows.  Perhaps it's a mystery best left unsolved. However, I do know I would never cross Hopey no matter how petite she may be.

1) Hopey's gleefully violent imagination (Love and Rockets #3). When Maggie reluctantly tells a group of doubters about her brief career as a superhero's sidekick, Hopey takes a little mental revenge.

2) Hopey fights the law (LR #5).  An untagged wall drives Hopey to distraction and depression.  With the encouragement of her friends Maggie and Izzy, she sets out to do something about it, only to have her moment of triumph interrupted by Officer Sado, her personal nemesis-cop.  She ends up doing something about that, too.  Sado later made sergeant, no doubt due to his Javertian pursuit of La Hopita.

3)  Hopey hits her finger with a hammer (LR #7).  With Maggie away repairing spaceships, Hopey decides to go all Bob Villa and fix up their dumpy habitat.  Too bad she's not as skilled with tools as she is with spraycans of paint.

4) Hopey breaks the fourth wall (LR #10).  Hopey loves Maggie, but she's not one to suffer fools gladly, even fools she's sleeping with.  She has a request for the guy who created the two of them.

5) Hopey gets a haircut at an old school barber shop (LR #13).  Where else would Hopey get her hair cut?  This is one of my favorite comic book panels of all time.  I love how Hernandez has Hopey's toes barely touching the barber chair's foot rest base-plate.  When I was a kid, I got my hair cut in a similar place, with photos of gunfighters like Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid on the wall.  Ironically, my barber's ex-wife blew him away with a shotgun.  This drawing brings back memories of that so vivid and detailed, I can almost smell the baby powder and rubbing alcohol and feel the goosebumps I'd break out in when the barber buzzed the back of my neck with the electric shaver.

6)  Hopey wears a vintage-like dress while practicing bass in the backyard (LR #14).  She practices?  Even a vicious little punk chick like Hopey wants to feel like a princess every once in a while.  I love the way her butch hair and in-your-face personality clash with her demure girly-girl dress.  Notice also her bare feet.

7)  Hopey helps Izzy ruin Daffy's day (LR #15).  Poor Daffy.  I love her.  She's really just a sweet kid with a head full of mixed-up ideas that a bit too conventional and suburban for Hopey's tastes.  Looking like the long-lost sisters of Morticia Addams, Hopey and Izzy arrive on the beach pop the balloon made up of Daffy's romantic notions.

8)  Hopey practices street justice (LR #18).  Jaime Hernandez shows some of his humor comics influence in the second panel of this sequence where Hopey does what many of us have dreamed of doing.  Take that, you rich jerk!

9) Hopey's famous near-homophony (LR #18).  Or mondegreen, if you like.  Hopey rarely gives strangers a straight answer, but even she's stumped when it comes to the names of the songs her band performs.  She still hasn't lived this one down.

10) Hopey steals and reads Izzy's diary while Terry reminisces about beating up the hated Julie Wree (LR #19).  During a break from band practice, Hopey obsesses over Izzy's diary.  Terry Downe, her former lover-- and the person most interested in actually becoming a musician in the group-- takes a moment to flash back to to the good ol' days, when Hopey was hers-all-hers and they terrorized Julie Wree on a regular basis.  Man, all these years later and they still hate Julie Wree!

11)  Hopey stabs Terry in the back (LR #19).  Terry has a lot of bad memories about her brief relationship with Hopey.  She learns the hard way you can never get too comfortable with Hopey because she always has her own agenda.  Just when you think you're on the same side, she chooses another team.  Why?  We often learn Maggie's motivations, but Hopey's remain an enigma.  That's just Hopey being Hopey.

12)  Hopey makes the first move on Maggie (LR #20).  While they've both been with plenty of others in the decades since-- Hopey has a miscarriage as the result of a wild three-way and Maggie gets married and divorced-- one of the ongoing plot threads in the various "Locas" stories has always been their on-again/off-again love affair.  Strangely enough, it's always seemed to be more off than on.  Hernandez brought them together, then created long storylines that split them apart.  Delicious torture for the characters (including Daffy, who's as obsessed with the Maggie-Hopey pairing as many of the series' readers) and the fans.  Who knows what was really going on in Hopey's mind right here, but this is a flashback scene to their early days, showing how it started.