Jaime Hernandez on "Love & Rockets"

I grew up in South Side Oxnard, which we call Scalon. You got your agriculture inland and it’s surrounded by a beach, so you got your Beach culture there, it’s a weird dynamic.

My mom was a comic reader, so I thought that comics were a normal thing.

Maggie was a character I created when I was in high school, a female character that I wanted to put into stories where anything could happen to her.

Hopey came from the type of girl I would see at the Punk Clubs in L.A., little tiny girls with spikey hair kind of running the place.

In the beginning when we first self published our own version of the comic, I still had all the old comic book science fiction movie trappings in my work. So I thought, I’ll just put that down, yet, I wanna do punk stuff too. I wanna put my home life in there too. So I thought these are Chicana punks; Las Locas.

The question why I choose women to tell my stories, is one question that is always hardest to answer, because it just is. Our dad died when we we’re really young and we were raised by our mom singly and we saw the world through her eyes. You know, that’s one theory. There was something in me that thought, if I am going to put girls in my comics, I felt the responsibility that I was going to do this right instead of just drawing flesh.

I think Maggie is the first character ever in a comic book that put on weight and didn’t loose it. I just wanted to change her physical appearance and I thought this would be a good challenge to maybe I’ll make her gain weight, and hey she’ll stay that way. Cause that’s real life you know. I got a lot of bad mail for that. I found out that a lot of my male readers liked my sexy girls because they we’re sexy. And so the more they complained, the more I knew I was doing something right. It was actually making them think.

The thing I like about Maggie and Hopey now is that they’ve been with me for so long so they’re like my girls. They’re like my babies, I take care of them and they take care of me.

I used to wonder who read it and I thought College Aged kids mostly. But then every once in a while we would get a letter or meet somebody from a whole different lifestyle who liked it.

We fade in and out of hipness, and now we’re kind of old guys. I wondered who was going to follow it but now I don’t know and I don’t care, as long as I am making people happy with my work. I’m satisfied.

My name is Jaime Hernandez, I do a comic book called Love and Rockets with my brother Gilbert.