Love and Rockets: Old punks and new mentors

Where Did All The Cool Kids Go?

Old punks never intended to be role models for everybody else, but it still fucking happened anyway. Musicians and other trendsetters who always championed forging individual paths of your own still got everyone following their example. They bought into the ideological purity of The Ramones’ basic beats, and the political disgust of The Clash, and even the inevitable tragedy of the Sid Vicious lifestyle. These punks left big footprints in modern culture that others can’t help stepping in.

Still, some things do actually last longer than the feedback that lingers from a two-minute buzzsaw of a song, especially when it’s all put down on paper in thick, dark ink. There have been 40+ years of Love and Rockets comics, and Jaime Hernandez’s Locas saga has built up from a pure punk beginning to a legacy unparalleled in modern comic books – a deep, enriching, and emotional series of stories about ordinary folk in an extraordinary world.

Hernandez has produced years and years of great comics that have always maintained a terrifically high standard. The science-fiction stories of the early days soon gave way to crunchingly realistic tales of life somewhere in California and tackling all the big issues of self-worth and suicide and enduring friendship, with the layers of emotion spread thick over years of storytelling. He’s even gone back to the sci-fi for some stream of consciousness brilliance in recent years, but the Locas goes on.

Brother Gilbert, who has shared space in various volumes of Love and Rockets over the years, has an output that is wildly variable. Just when you’ve written him off, or gotten completely lost in his vast and intense family dramas with massive breasted-women, he’ll hit the reader with an emotional kick in the head, one that makes all the meandering so worthwhile.

But Jaime’s work is as beautiful and as tender as it was years ago, and is consistently rewarding. All the cool kids raved about Love and Rockets in the 80s, before moving onto other pursuits, while Jamie has just kept blazing away with absolute sincerity — the punk grown up. A new issue of Love and Rockets is quickly snapped up by the faithful, but hardly makes a dent in mainstream comics culture, where there is far more concern about how Polaris is going to fit into the new X-Men line-up.

Occasionally the collected edition of something like the 2014 storyline The Love Bunglers comes along, and the Maggie and Ray love story reaches an incandescent end, and smacks everybody who reads it upside the head. But the long, slow, and regular burn of the regular issues of Love and Rockets means so few people are regularly talking about how stunning Jamie Hernandez comics still are.

Because his characters — his people — still have something to teach you about how being an honest and decent person can really pay off.

Down Hernandez Way

It’s just so easy to overlook the brilliant work that Jaime Hernandez has produced — a massive, decades-long saga in hundreds of absolutely gorgeous comic books — because he always makes it look so effortless. He always picks the exact right line, the perfect angle for the shadow, a single tear in all the right places, and it looks like there was never any other way to do it. None of his work since the early 1980s is ever anything less than very good, and a significant chunk of it is transcendent and amazing. It’s a fucking great ratio.

Hernandez was right there in the middle of the chaotic West Coast punk scene, and those punk roots run deep. He’s always had the attitude that you can just pick up a pen or a guitar or anything, and let the world hear your voice, let it hear what you have to say -- and he’s stuck to those roots, for years and years and years. He’s always been uncompromising and always doing his own thing, telling exactly the kind of stories he wants to tell. He will do silly six-pagers for the big companies if they flash enough cash, but Hernandez’s heart is in the story of Maggie, Hopey, Ray, Penny, Doyle, Daffy and all the rest, and their weird and complicated lives.

Through this dedication to doing it your own way, on your own terms, Hernandez has become a role model for many, many other artists over the decades.Some comics — including Bob Fingerman’s Minimum Wage, Martin Wagner’s Hepcats and, most obviously, Strangers in Paradise by Terry Moore — were unashamed to show how much they followed Hernandez’s example. It did result in loads of fairly mediocre black and white comics about sensitive bisexuals that have all faded away over the years, but if you had to follow the path of a creator sticking to their vision, better Jaime than practically anyone else.

It’s not just Hernandez’s dedicated focus that sets the standard to follow, it’s the characters he has filled with life and vigor in the pages. After four decades of intense storytelling, the people in the stories themselves have gained their own legacies.

The Many Mediocre Mentors of Maggie

Despite disappearing from the story for sometimes years at a time, Jaime’s Love and Rockets always comes back to Margarita Luisa Chascarillo — Maggie to her friends. The girl from the barrio was there on the first page of the saga, and has always been the center of this universe.

Hernandez checks in on other characters now and then — although sometimes, that might take a decade or two — but Maggie is everything. In the early sci-fi days, she was the spunky mechanic with a crush on her boss who went to punk shows with her girlfriend. That little rebel is still in there, even as Maggie has matured and deepened in the years since.

On the surface, Maggie is just a regular person in a world full of them, working dead end jobs and just getting by with life, as best she can. Even the most normal person has an ocean of hidden depths, and she has known love and loss, and has done well to avoid her family’s professional wrestling legacy altogether — a concept revisited in Hernandez's latest Love and Rockets adjacent graphic novel "Queen of the Ring"

Always wearing her heart on her sleeve and constantly cursed by the guilt of her own mistakes and failures, Maggie’s deepest fears and regrets are all out there for everybody to see, over years of stories.

All through that, in the best spirit of her times, Maggie did her own thing, and didn't give a shit what anybody thought about it. She has turned into a kind and decent human being with a rich and vibrant sex life, and something that is all the more remarkable because in all those years, she never had a good role model to look up to.

There was Hopey, the love of Maggie’s life, who was always just beautiful, maddening chaos. She taught Maggie lots of different stuff, when she wasn’t away with her shitty band.

Izzy is the next big influence on Maggie's life. The two were getting into mischief together since they were the size of Peanuts, and Izzy was busy keeping the teenaged Maggie out of trouble. Like Rena, Isabel Ortiz Reubens had her own path to follow, and hers led her into madness and out the other side. She taught Maggie not to take anything else at face value and to stand up to all the demons.

Maggie has still had friends and family who have taught her how the world works. There were women like legendary wrestler Queen Rena Titañon, whose concerns were always both global and deeply personal. She's sparking revolutions in odd little countries down south and then losing her son for too many years. She taught Maggie self-reliance, and the power of fierce will.

And that was about it. Maggie’s mother was never there, her Aunt Vicki - another wrestling champion, even if she had to use the ropes to beat Rena — tried her best, and was never really good enough, and someone like Hopey’s ex Terri was always more likely to put a cigarette out on her face than offer any advice.

She had the best of friends to help her blaze her own path, and some of the women who failed as mentors still loved and trusted her. But that road can be lonely and scary, when there is nobody to follow.

Now, after decades of real-time characterization and development, Maggie is getting on in years, and has her own lessons to teach. She’s seen some things and made some mistakes and doesn’t want anybody else to repeat them, because what kind of asshole would want that?

Alone In This Sucky Universe

Telling stories about the same people over a 40-year period brings an incredible depth and complexity, but has the potential to get stale over the decades. Hernandez has kept things lively by slowly growing the cast of his Locas stories and bringing in the next generation of young and confused punks. And in recent years, the comic has been infused with the exuberance of youth through the adventures of Tonta and her young friends.

The Tonta stories are often an opportunity for Hernandez to go large, because everything about Tonta is big and fun. She’s been the spirit of youth in the comics for the past 10 years, energetic and keen and very, very dorky. She’s got her own punk bands to follow, but is more comfortable making mini-comics with her nerd friends. A lot of them are growing up and moving on, but Tonta is happy to play the fricking loon.

Her personality is right there on the page — Hernandez’s art opens up on her stories with big, splashy panels and massive emoting faces. It all gets squashed down to more claustrophobic panels when Tonta has to deal with weird real-life shit — her family gets mixed up with some gangster nonsense, even if Tonta is only ever watching from the sidelines. But then it all gets wide and open and in-your-face when Tonta goes on the rampage through the neighborhood woods, or throws a therapeutic fit on the floor of the latest house she’s been dumped in.

She's the new Maggie — a bit goofier, a little looser, a bit more buck-toothed, but the same decent person at heart. Sex is boring, (but only because everyone is doing it). She's more into creating comics than repairing weird space machines, but Tonta is another young punk kid who never had anybody to show her the way.

Her family is even more of a mess than Maggie's with half siblings that are incredibly cruel and a mom that might be responsible for the deaths of several husbands. She has a bunch of extremely cute friends and while they are all designed by the artist to be instantly recognisable, they're all as lost as she is.

Her closest relative is her sister Vivian, introduced years before by Hernandez as a force of glorious balls-out fucking chaos. Viv might be the very worst person in the world to have as a mentor, especially when she is a combination Penny/Hopey figure - a bit unreal and full of pandemonium. She didn't teach Tonta anything, apart from how to take a beating.

Tonta has her own Queen Rena in Rose 'Angel' Rivera, an older figure who looks like she has got her shit together. But while she is out there suplexing super-villains on the edge of space, Angel also can't hold onto a job as a PE teacher, has to wrestle in glorified back yard tussles, and has her own problems to deal with, man. There's not much help for Tonta there either.

No wonder Tonta is always away and racing into various predicaments. It's all fun and games, but she's also stuck in the same cycle that Maggie went through years and years earlier, flailing around in search of a direction, or a purpose, or an identity.

Tonta is the new kid on the block so to speak, despite being created more than a decade ago, because she is part of Hernandez's long game. The artist can have stories and characters simmering away for years that can suddenly crash into a new resolution in just a few pages.

And after years of Tonta running around, she ran straight into Maggie. It didn't go well at first, but it only took them six pages of an issue of Love and Rockets to sort their shit out.

On The Beach

Despite mostly living in California, the Locas characters rarely spent much time at the beach, and when they did they usually did it in a deeply ironic and mannered style. But when Maggie and Tonta finally and properly collide, it's there on the sand and Tonta has nowhere to hide. Which is unfortunate for her, because she has wronged Maggie recently. Over a hat.

After almost 10 years of Tonta stories, she finally met Maggie in a story in the March 2020 Love and Rockets vol4 #8, and it was a complete catastrophe. After getting into another fight with Viv, Tonta is being loud and obnoxious and takes out her usual frustrations on a random woman in a hat, who happens to be Maggie. Tonta strides off in ignorant triumph, which soon turns sour when Tonta finds out the woman in the hat is the partner of her beloved art teacher.

Tonta makes some terrible and vague attempts to apologise with a crappy letter and some melted chocolate, but can’t help running into Maggie at jury duty, and the local comic shop, and just about everywhere. And then, in the six-page 'Rock Your Baby' story in Love and Rockets v4 #10, they meet each other properly for the first time.

Maggie is still a little shaken by a recent attempt to grab onto the past at a punk reunion, where many of her old pals don't remember her, and the young kids don't even know she existed (while being ultra-aware of Hopey). She didn't need this shit, especially not from Vivian's sister.

After recognizing Tonta, and meeting her properly, she would be in her rights to tear into the kid who bullied her for no good reason earlier. But Maggie is just a human about it, and treats Tonta with a bit of grudging respect.

By just being a good person about it, Maggie ends up being the best mentor Tonta never knew she wanted. Someone she could aspire to be like, someone who shows you don't have to be glum and mean about everything. That it's okay to feel scared of going in the water, and that you should take care of your ankles. There's some silly comedy with a hat, because this is a Tonta story and she can’t help bringing that splash of kooky clumsiness, but they two help each other out.

Tonta is already looking sharper. Hernandez body language — as always — tells the story; Tonta is full of self-assurance, and has a sweet new haircut. Her future is wide open. While it might still be scary, she can go into it with a bit more confidence, thanks to the weird, kinda nice and slightly crazy aunt she never knew she needed.

Thanks to Maggie - another punk kid all grown up, still young at heart, still capable of great love and forgiveness. There are worse people to emulate, and worse ways to react.

These are important lessons for anybody, not just the fictional characters of this Locas universe. They have triumphed over the pain and tragedy of everyday life, and have woken up to their own beauty. So can we.

The Perfect Line

Jaime Hernadez's Love and Rockets comics have been beautiful and enticing, with all those perfect eyebrows, and the way he draws faces in profile is absolutely unparalleled in modern comics.

But that's not the only reason why Hernandez’s comics are so special and important, especially in a time when we all feel a bit more alone. Because they show you that people can just be decent to one another, and that can work out well for everybody.

It’s all pure romance and utter melodrama, but Hernandez gets around the cheese of it all by pacing it out beautifully over years of comics, drawing out threads for such a long time.

Hernandez has been an inspiration to many, many other comics artists. Not just all the boys who did sensitive black and white comics about those adorable lesbians, but every artist who had some kind of unique story to tell, and some distinctive way to tell it. Hernandez has shown that you can do your own comics your own way and long as you’re willing to keep doing your own thing. Learn three chords and form a band. Learn to draw a basic human figure and put out decades of some of the best comics created anywhere.

This decades-long dedication to craft means the rest of the world often runs out of things to say about Love and Rockets, and as stunning as the most recent episode in the life of Maggie and her pals is, it's released to the comic crowd with barely a whisper, even though it’s just as powerful as work that was roundly celebrated in the 1980s, stronger even, with the accumulation of years.

But stick with it, and it becomes obvious — Hernandez plays the long game, and the quality wins out over that time. These comics, and the artist who creates them, still have something to say to us. Even if you've been reading his comics for years, there’s still something to learn.

That’s today’s lesson from Jaime Hernandez’s Love and Rockets comics: you can be more like Maggie. She doesn't have to just be Tonta's mentor and role model. She can be yours too.

Scream!: Finding the beauty in the ghastly gloom

The video nasty nonsense in the UK was cresting in 1984, when culture was swamped in tenacious concerns that horror movies were corrupting the youth. Films were banned and video store owners were prosecuted.

And the publishers behind the 2000 AD, Battle and Eagle titles decided it was the perfect time to launch a horror comic for little kids, and gave the world Scream!.

There hadn’t been a hell of a lot of horror comics for kids produced in the UK, especially after the US scene got spanked down by the Comics Code Authority crew. There had been the notable exception of Misty, the horror weekly aimed at all the happily weird young girls in the school playground. That lasted 101 issues in the late 70s, and there were also loads of reprints from across the Atlantic, but that was largely it.

They gave Scream! a good shot —with editor Barrie Tomlinson having raided the titanic talent pool from those other titles — and there was a real publicity push, with television advertisements as far away as New Zealand. Plus, there was a fictitious editor in the hooded Ghastly McNasty, an editorial trick that never grew old.

It lasted 15 weekly issues. A couple of the strips switched to Eagle in one of the publisher’s largely bullshit ‘mergers’ and carried on for many more installments, but the regular Scream! comic was dead in less than four months.

The reasons for the quick demise of Scream! are unclear. While it probably had much to do with some kind of industrial action at the time, the general conservative social movement of the 1980s didn’t help matters. Maybe, in a shocking twist worthy of the comic itself, it just did not sell enough copies.

But as stiff upper lips all over Britain were quivering over the likes of Antropophagus: The Beast appearing at the local video store, they didn’t really have much to fear from Scream!. The comic had an impressive body count – although nothing like 2000 AD’s mega-death events such as Judge Dredd’s “Apocalypse War” or “The Quartz Zone Massacre” of Rogue Trooper fame -- but the gore was tasteful and largely off-panel, and there was certainly no sex or nudity.

What Scream! had instead were some things that the British do very well – a total sense of doom and gloom, rotten kitchen-sink psycho melodramas, decaying monsters, and obscured murders. If you couldn’t show the kind of gore that EC Comics gleefully inflicted on 50s kids, you could still make a world that is full of dark and murky terrors. 

The stories themselves were often nothing special – mostly silly and obvious, with daft punchlines. There were familiar writers like Tom Tully, Simon Furman and Gerry-Finlay Day, and a bunch of names that are suspiciously unfamiliar, (which means they were probably John Wagner and/or Alan Grant behind them, ripping off a Hammer House of Horror episode they half-remembered for a quick paycheque).

The target audience for Scream! were 9-year-olds, so the comics were about as intense as the kind of horror comics DC had been putting out for the past few decades. But what they did share with their US counterparts was some fantastic art. And while Scream! died a quick death, some of that gloriously bleak comic art in those 15 issues is immortal.

Ghastly Tales and Libraries of Death

Every issue of Scream! had a number of regular features that were there every week, as well as a couple of one-offs, with plots that ranged from slightly upsetting – ‘you’re turning into an insect!’ - to absolute pedestrian – ‘it was all a dream!’.

What the stories lacked in imagination, they made up for in artistic talent, with 2000 AD veterans like Brendan McCarthy, Steve Dillon, Steve Parkhouse, Ron Smith and Cam Kennedy happily getting in on the horror, even if the comic was printed on some of the worst paper stock on the planet.

McCarthy got to do a demonic Punch and Judy show in #7 and Dillon’s werewolves in #8 would be familiar to anybody who followed the artist’s work in a lycanthropic Judge Dredd strip. Parkhouse’s Sea Beast shows up in a two-parter late in the comic’s run, and goes from a mysterious and unrevealed menace in #13 to over-burdened monster on the cover of #14, (although the story still has some gleeful in the absurdity generated by the artist’s innate comic timing). Judge Dredd legend Ron Smith got to draw a giant spider.

Cam Kennedy – arguably one of the greatest action artists Britain has ever produced – also got heavy into the atmospherics behind the chills. The ghostly parents and haunted house in the first issue is deeply creepy, even if it’s immediately undermined by a two-panel happy ending.

But there is no happy ending in Kennedy’s second story for Scream!, with the amoral protagonist in All Done With Wires in #4 seeing the truth behind reality in his last moments, and Kennedy giving us vast puppet-masters hovering over us all -

The best looking single-issue story in Scream!’s entire run is another bloody mummy story, as an archaeologist raids the wrong goddamn tomb. It might be the most prosaic plot in the history of horror, but has stunning work by Jose Casanovas. 

The artist, who would later have the misfortune of illustrating the most hated run of Robo-Hunter in the history of 2000 AD, is on fire in the five-page Terror of the Tomb from #12. Never mind the exquisite detailing of his line, his use of shadow is brilliant, generating foreboding, moving the plot forward with splayed momentum and rendering utter terror in all its sweaty darkness.

A Weekly Terror

The short stories were fun, but a British comic relies upon its regular features to keep the dedicated reader coming back every week. Some of that was also pedestrian and predictable, but even the stories about paranormal investigators and killer cats had some nice pacing, and clear, slick art by John Richardson.

But the short stories weren’t as satisfying as the other main features. There was The 13th Floor with Max the mad computer spiriting away wrong ‘uns to a mad virtual reality/supernatural dimension to be served up a massive helping of just desserts. It had real humor, with the strip creators always striving to avoid too much repetition (and not always succeeding) by relying on a nasty wit.

The 13th Floor also had one absolute ace in the late, great José Ortiz. The hugely versatile artist etched the horror into the terrified faces of the unfortunate folk who ended up visiting the 13th floor, sold the absurdity of it, and kept the ordeals lively with an unparalleled sense of panicked urgency from panel to panel.

It also helped that Max’s face was a stupidly simple design by Ortiz, easy for any kids to replicate, and able to show a surprising amount of complex emotions with a few jagged lines.

Meanwhile, Misty veteran Jesus Redondo's scratchy realism gave the fearsome Uncle Terry in the Monster strip plenty of humanity, with plenty more lines carved into the main character's face. The ongoing story never really lived up to the unsettling first chapter by Alan Moore, where the deep terror of being a kid being left alone in a house when something terrible has happened is exposed.

Once Terry and his nephew Kenny escaped into the world, it was another harsh place under Redondo’s pen, and any creeping horror was replaced by the rush to get away from all the people who wanted to do him harm.

Both Monster and The 13th Floor moved over to the Eagle comic for long runs after Scream! dissolved like a vampire in the sun, but Dracula himself only got a couple of later appearances in the comic’s holiday specials.

The Dracula File anchored the entire run of the comic, because you can’t go wrong with Dracula. The creators were much better at bringing the Count into the late 20th century than the Hammer movie attempts a decade earlier - especially with the cold war edge involved in escaping East European countries in the 1980s - but also had the bonus of being the filthiest thing in the comic.

Not in any sexual way, it was just that Eric Bradbury's art looked like everything was literally covered in decaying dirt, as the vampire's undead rot spread out into a modern world of biker gangs and MI5 agents. The entire world was frayed around edges under Bradbury’s eye and was the perfect accompaniment for Dracula’s latest English holiday, the count materializing out of the swill that fills the world and murdering vast amounts of innocent people.

All of these artists obviously relished getting to tell a different type of story, and one of them produced some of the best work in his career, with Jim Watson’s gross and disturbing art for the Tales From The Grave strip.

Most of the short dramas it told were the usual Victorian supernatural vengeance kind of thing, with the wise and deformed gravedigger acting as host to the six-page dreadfuls. But Watson’s art was the real star.

The artist -- a familiar sight in war comics in the previous decade -- seized the opportunity to get into something that didn’t involve guns and Nazis and created a Victorian England that had never looked so seedy, so gross, and so repulsive. There isn’t much beauty in the workhouse, and Watson never romanticized anything. 

The stories are full of nasty people, from hanging judges to murderous dentists, and they’re all doing terrible things, and they always paid the price in the meanest and most apt way possible.

Watson's characters were these haggard, desiccated souls with the darkest eyes – all heavy, black and pendulous – but when confronted with something ‘orrible from beyond the veil, their stark terror and heart-stopping shock would fill the panel.

Watson’s graveyard fog curled through its plots and the whole thing was gloriously awful, especially when the occasional rotting corpse would pop up. Watson conjured new chills and thrills out of the metaphysically dank world he created, and gave horrid life to the miscreants with fantastic eyebags who were mired in it.

Scream Like You Mean It

The eighties video nasties drama came and went, and wrecked some lives in the progress, just like all the moral crusades always do. All of the films on that dreaded list are now easy to get for anybody who puts in a tiny bit of effort, and something like The Witch Who Came From The Sea —once deemed too dangerous for public health - can be easily found.

There’s enough time under the bridge that the video nasties list has even created its own legacy, and there’s now plenty of films that are only known for just being on that list in the first place.

Scream! has had a surprisingly robust afterlife. There were the two Eagle survivors, and even a Scream! holiday special every year for a while, although the quality dropped rapidly every year.

And that was it for decades, until all those mildly traumatized 9-year-olds grew up enough to demand collected editions. Rebellion has owned the rights to all the Scream! stories for several years and have put out books featuring the usual suspects, but there’s still a lot there to unearth.

There have also been brand-new Scream! comics in the past few years. It has been revived as an annual special, sharing a masthead with Misty, and there was even a whole new 13th Floor comic, written by Guy Adams.

These new comics were printed on the kind of slick paper the modern comic consumer demands, and have some genuinely lovely work by Frazer Irving, Kyle Hotz, Jimmy Broxton and Kelley Jones, but they don’t have that decaying brilliance of the original art on that grotty old paper.

These horrors for kids were always meant to be cheap and nasty, even if they didn’t always worry the parents.

Ornery, Dusty, and Gross: The Oddball Jonah Hex Comics of DC’s Vertigo Imprint

In the early 1990s, DC launched the Vertigo imprint on the back of years of comics full of sophisticated suspense – with long-running titles like Sandman, Hellblazer and Doom Patrol easily and obviously folded into the new mature readers line, keeping the cool kids coming back.

It was still finding its feet in the early days, though. Those first few months and years were full of wild experimentation, even if the tried and true tactic of ‘getting some British guy to write it’ didn’t always pay off. The line only really started to find its voice by embracing the sexy, with legendary editor Karen Berger and her crew deciding they wanted their comics smart and they wanted them attractive.

So they made comics that made all the goths feel a bit funny inside, and comics for the club kids who wanted to look at the bright pictures while coming down at dawn. There were, also, comics that made attempts at non-binary identification that can now feel horribly ham-fisted, but were genuinely progressive at the time.

However, one of the line’s first notable little hits didn’t just reject any kind of sex appeal, it took down its drawers and took a giant turd on the very idea. In fact, Joe R Lansdale, Tim Truman and Sam Glanzman’s revival of the classic Western character Jonah Hex were arguably the least sexy comics Vertigo ever published, revelling in filth and dirt to a truly disquieting degree.

And while a lot of Vertigo’s shambling early efforts now look like adolescent fumblings, the most ornery Jonah Hex comics of all still stand tall.

Hex was created in 1972 by writer John Albano and artist Tony DeZuniga as an obvious answer to the revisionist westerns that filled cinema at the time, with his history and character fleshed out by writer Michael Fleisher in a long run. Wherever he rode, people spoke his name in whispers.

The series was always a bit meaner and a bit weirder than your average cowboy comic, and lasted for a decade, long after more square-jawed cowboys like the Two-Gun Kid and the Lone Ranger bit the dust. It ended after a brief diversion into science fiction as DC comics hurtled towards its first big Crisis and then Jonah didn’t really have much of a place in the new DC universe. He became a legend and an easter egg and a stuffed corpse in a carnival. (No, really; the series ends by showing his corpse, stuffed, in a carnival. The 1980s could be surprisingly brutal.)

And then someone at DC had the bright idea of getting Lansdale and Truman involved.

Joe R Lansdale was – and still is – a prolific and talented novelist and short story writer, who has found vast depths in the dark hearts of men and beasts, and mined genuinely unsettling horror on the back roads and swamps of East Texas. A sly wit with a genuine touch for the macabre, the fantastical and the weird, he can write gritty crime novels that scar your soul and stories about the God of Razors at the end of all things.

By the time he started on Hex, Tim Truman had established himself with the violent pan-dimensional western comic book series Grimjack and was fondly known as one of the few creators to actually make a decent Hawkman comic, while the third indispensable part of the team came in the form of veteran inker Sam Glanzman, who always delivered on the shocking bloodshed.

When, in mid-1993, less than six months after Vertigo launched, Jonah Hex: Two Gun Mojo blasted on the scene, it was easily the grossest thing in the entire line. This was not the gorgeous intimacy of Peter Milligan’s Enigma and Shade comics, or the hot sweat of Rachel Pollack and Linda Medley’s Doom Patrol. There were no Constantine charms or the Endless possibilities of the Sandman’s family. It didn’t even have the seething repression of the Sandman Mystery Theatres.

Instead, Two Gun Mojo was just full of the ugliest people in the comics, with sweat and dirt and mud on every page. It does have Hex dosed up on drugs at some point, because it is a mature readers comic from the 90s, but his hellish trip stays mostly inside his ornery skull. A lot of people die very badly and the never-ending carnage brings instant flies and rapid decomposition, and the great bounty hunter Jonah Hex will literally hide in some manure if it’ll keep some bushwhacker from getting him while he sleeps. Assorted scum often accidentally shoot their own kin in the head.

The Truman/Glanzman team is one of the finest at this kind of grossness and, as a result, the old West never looked so moody. Truman’s line is always straight and clear, and that just gives you more detail of the mire.

Under their pen, Hex himself is grotesque. He is a tiny bit charming in his usually obvious manner, but is a world away from the rugged capability of Jessie Custer, or the fetish-wear fun of King Mob. His trademark scar isn’t just a weird thing in the corner of his mouth, it’s a chasm of flesh ripping up the side of his face, into a devilish red eye. His hair is lanky and filled with beads, and his greys haven’t been washed since the war. He stinks.

In fact, there is a stench and aroma to the whole comic, not least because the unfortunate souls who dwell within these pages are always commenting on it. Baths are rare and good laundry rarer, and body odor is almost drifting on the page. A lot of the stink in their first Hex comic comes from the walking corpse of Wild Bill Hickock, still walking around and still shooting his pistols, long after he left most of his brains behind on the floor of a Deadwood bar.

None of this is a criticism – it takes real skill to get that kind of dank mood out of lines on paper, and while Truman’s clarity really brings out the horror of the tale, there is some definite deep south dark humor. These are inventive, smart and really fucking funny comics. But they really ain’t sexy.

(Unless this kind of thing is your kind of thing. Good for you. No judgments here.)

Even though it was still fucking around with comics about Di Vinci and adaptions of the Tank Girl movie, Vertigo was well into the sexy two years later, with The Invisibles and Preacher underway, and Tim Hunter getting his faerie freak on. Animal Man and Black Orchid came to hot and heavy conclusions and a whole generation of geeky kids would give everything up for the heroes drawn by Phillip Bond in Kill Your Boyfriend – never realising that they’ll always be the Paul in that story.

But again, after Two Gun Mojo had been successful enough to be quickly collected, Jonah Hex came along to stink up the joint, with the truly repulsive second series, Riders Of The Worm and Such. Lansdale’s stories have often had the edge of the fantastical, and Hex stumbles into a proper science fiction story for the first time since his 80s adventures in the future. There’s worm people and lost underground civilizations and graffiti left by Cave Carson and Rip Hunter.

It’s still another gross experience, with plenty of filth. Oscar Wilde is in there, somehow, trying desperately to stir poetry in the hearts of Americans, but getting the tar beaten out of him by inbreeds and rednecks. There is the only real sex scene in this cycle of Hex, and it explicitly takes place on the grave of a dead cat, and a truly horrific home invasion yields even more terrible results.

The comic even gained some weird fame when Johnny and Edgar Winter sued the creators for the portrayal of the (definitely fictional, and in no way related to the Winter Brothers) characters, the Autumn Brothers. Lansdale said it was all satire and part of the story’s general pastiche of Texan music, but you almost can’t blame the Winters for taking such offense, when their analogues are thick as pigshit and have revolting tentacles bursting from their chests. (The case was thrown out of court.)

There was one final burst of this Hex in the last year of 20th century, when Vertigo were starting to look for a new direction while several legacy titles started to wrap up. The comics that would keep the imprint strong for another decade – Y: The Last Man, Fables and 100 Bullets – were still around the corner, but nobody seemed very interested in following the example of Jonah Hex: Shadows West.

It’s a relatively quiet final three-issue bow for the Lansdale/Truman/Glanzman Jonah Hex, with a lot of straight action and more absurd humor, with Hex is blasting away at a carnival crew to save a baby with the head of a bear. Jonah and his world is still as gross as ever, and still an outlier in Vertigo’s dreamy line-up.

And despite the consistent solidity of this interpretation, that was all the world got of this Hex. Lansdale and Truman worked so well together (and still do, with the artist providing spot illustrations for the writer’s Ned The Seal adventures as recently as 2019), but there was no more of this Jonah.

Shortly after the Two Gun Mojo series, they also produced a revisionist Lone Ranger – he gets his teeth knocked out by Tonto on page one - for Topps Comics that also embraced the weird, but didn’t quite have Hex’s truly grungy attitude. After Hex, Truman drew an adaption of Lansdale’s short story On The Far Side Of The Desert With Dead Folk for Avatar Press, with lots of dusty zombie carnage and grotesque undead nuns, kept fresh through the miracle of refrigeration.

As for Jonah, there was a movie that nobody ever needs to talk about ever again, and the character was revived with a new comic series in the 22nd century, led by writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, who proved far more suited to short, weird western tales than long-winded superhero nonsense. But with glamorous artists like Darwyn Cooke, Moritat and Jordi Bernet on the character, they couldn’t help but make Jonah more palatable. He certainly doesn’t stink that much, and that era of Hex even ends with an unscarred Jonah literally sailing off into the sunset and given the most unlikely of happy endings.

The Jonah Hex of the Vertigo series had no sailboat in his future, he would be lucky to keep his skin away from roving Native Americans with legitimate grievances. His was a harsh world and he was a harsh man.

The entire Vertigo imprint itself faded away several years ago. Some sex appeal is still dripping off the pages of the books that remain in print, but any new reader who stumbles across this Jonah better be prepared to get dirty. And speak his name in whispers.

Sharp lines and wired figures: The legacy and influence of Martin Emond

Martin Emond didn’t want to be remembered just as a comic artist. He had a massive Calvin tattoo on his back, but the Kiwi artist thought comics were for geeks.

In his painfully short career as a working artist, Emond did do some fantastic comics, but he was an all-round incredible illustrator; having done gig posters and album designs – both for his own band Flame Job and for other local bands - and created designs for tee-shirts and hoodies for all the skater kids. Even now, decades later, his designs still somehow look fresh and amazing.

But – with all of those parts of his talent aside – if Marty Emond didn’t want to be remembered primarily as a great comic artist, he shouldn’t have produced a couple of hundred pages of idiosyncratic, mystifying and beautiful work. In that respect, this is his own fuckin' fault.

Emond’s comic art was always sharp, always propulsive, and always bouncing right out of the panels –full of ultra-thin and uncomfortably wiry figures, dealing mayhem at a thousand miles an hour; the velocity of their movement stretching out their anatomy and sneering at notions of gravity or general physics. The art was always so alive and fevered and absolutely fucking hilarious, showing very clearly that this brand of creativity was not a place for realism – this was a heavy trip into painted exaggeration, with a wicked sense of dark humour.

His work first started appearing at a time when British comic publishers were thirsty for comic book artists whose art was like Simon Bisley, who had just blown everybody’s mind with The Horned God. The comic book market was flooded with artwork full of heavy oils, trying to recapture the magic that Bisley had bestowed on the world, and that Frazetta had established even before that.

The best of the Bisley-esque boys managed to find their own styles and needs, getting around the editorial constraints to produce idiosyncratic work. They managed to find some real artistic freedom for a full-painted R18 edge while the big American artists were still mucking-about with variations on Spider-Man. But Emond certainly made his own mark, carving into the comic scene with a razor and leaving scar tissue still lingering here and now within the comics stratosphere.

Emond even stayed with the Bisley-style for a while; picking up many of the UK artist’s beautifully raw tricks, such as giving everything a soft and airbrushed sheen –smooth and rounded and three dimensional – often outright pastels shining right up off the page, before cutting it all up with the most jagged and heavily-inked lines possible (often exposing all the viscera beneath the surface). It ain’t easy creating senses of bulk and momentum in painted comics, and many of the Bisley followers of the time just got bogged down in the sludge of recreation and blending. Emond’s comics, however, blasted out of their painted constrictions with absolute glee.

Martin Emond was born in Scotland in 1969 and grew up in South Auckland, after moving to New Zealand as a kid. After traveling back to the UK in the early nineties, the left-handed artist blew onto the scene when he teamed up with the legendary Pat Mills for the most energetic series of Accident Man comics, appearing in the first few issues of the short-lived Toxic!

Emond came back to New Zealand from Britain after that 18-month visit, established a studio in central Auckland with Fred The Clown’s Roger Langridge, and got to work on White Trash – a concept that heavily showcased the slick anarchy of his art. A demented four-issue mini series first published in British indy comic magazine Blast!, then put out by Tundra in regular comic issues, it was later collected in a trade by an Auckland comic shop retailer who got sick of people asking him for it, before being republished in a snazzy new edition by Titan in the past decade.

Starring extremely twisted versions of Elvis and Axel Rose fucking up shit in a semi-apocalyptic hellhole, White Trash was written by Gordon Rennie and is full of absolutely gorgeous art - thick, deep colours that drag you into the page; Emond’s wiry, inked lines still clear and utterly confident, shining through the paint and always driving forward into a neon nuclear sunset.

At 128 pages, it’s the biggest body of work left behind by Emond, which is a terrible shame, but at least it’s 128 pages of beautiful mayhem. You could do worse.

Around the same time he was getting his freak on with White Trash, Emond drew a tiny amount of comics for the editors of 2000 AD and its side publications, including a Chopper one-off story in Judge Dredd Megazine #36 (v2) in 1993 that’s really something else; riding an insanely long board, his long ginger hair cutting through the air as easily as his board.

Written by a young Garth Ennis, the Emond comic is a simple 8-page story, an interlude between the skysurfer’s usual revivals, but it has a power and thrust that is often lacking in Chopper’s high-flying adventures. The use of color is just as sky-high as Marlon Shakespeare faces up to his past – thick, vicious reds for the blood left in his wake; searing yellow for the violence of the last Supersurf; hauntingly deep blacks for a final confrontation with death; and the bright, blue of a hopeful future.

And then Emond was off again, and in turn his strange work would show up in strange places.

He would be doing covers for Glen Danzig’s Verotik comics – the kind of comics that you 100% had to hide from your Mum – and then you’d see his work in an Axel Pressbutton comic for A1. You could then find his comics in an issue of Heavy Metal or Epic, or he would be off working on a mysterious something called Rolling Red Knuckles for a Japanese publisher.

It’s no surprise that one of the very few things he did for Marvel, other than the odd Punisher sketch, was a truly mind-bending cover for the publisher’s Woodstock ‘94 commemorative comic book, because there was no way his style was suited for anything else at the House of Ideas.

Unsurprisingly, a few Lobo comics were his highest profile comic gig in the US. The joke behind the Main Man really only works when it is taken to the total limits of gratuitous absurdity, and truly needs a real rock and roll artist. They occasionally got a good one, with creator Keith Giffen really digging deep for some of his Lobo comics, while a lot of the 2000 AD boys would show up for an issue or two. And sometimes they got an Ace.

Emond would do a couple of rare pages in a Lobo annual or special, and was given a couple of one-shots written by Alan Grant just as the general public’s interest for all things Lobo started to fade. But the artist got his own hooks into the Main Man, and his Lobo was as beefed up as you would expect, but also truly malevolent. Not just his usual hilarious wrecking ball, leaving gleeful carnage in his wake, but something properly evil and extremely dangerous to be around.

Emond’s brief glimpses of long-standing DC concepts are like nothing else. In Lobo The Brave And The Bald, Emond’s ectoplasmic Deadman takes Kelly Jones skeletal ideas about how Boston Brand works and amplifies it even further into even more grotesque skinniness, while a mean and muscular Etrigan the Demon - with all the charm of a WW2 tank - makes a short appearance in the Bounty Hunting For Fun And Profit one-off. A truly striking Spectre comic cover shows that Emond’s talents in this area went well beyond brainless mayhem, and he could have done a properly wicked comic starring all of DC’s supernatural miscreants.)

After years of comics full of extreme violence, Emond took his cartoon sensibility all the way back into fuzzy cuteness in the early 2000s, with his Switch Blade character, where unrelenting carnage evolved into something out of a 1930s animation studio high on the merriest of mescaline.

A mascot that appeared on more clothing and stickers and posters than comic pages, with just a handful of one-page strips and one single 7-page story, Switch Blade was always recognisably Emond’s work but with extra layers of unexpected cuteness. It’s all offset by that eternal sharpness – the title character’s hair is even more cutting than Chopper or Lobo’s – but this time that blade is aimed at the local community cop.

It was an enormously endearing character and overall concept with promises of a tight universe of memorable characters pulling together some kind of an adopted family from the harsh streets of the world. After all the blood and guts, Switch Blade seemed like the purest Emond comic creation yet. He poured his heart and soul into it, eager to get it out to the biggest audience he could.

Emond took his own life in his LA studio in 2004, shortly after signing a contract with a US company to turn Switch Blade into an animated series.

Comics are just a little less bright without him, but there are still some warm embers of influence seeping through into the world. Beyond the relatively small body of comic work, he has been a powerfully influential artist for streetwear labels with his still-lauded work for the Illicit brand, and punk kids skating down at their local bowl, all over the world, still wear the sort of designs that Emond pioneered.

In the tiny New Zealand comics scene, Emond’s influence has been immense. Artist Ant Sang devoted several pages of his excellent Shaolin Burning graphic novel to an extended homage to his old pal, (plainly stating that Emond was the best of them, and that it wasn’t even close). Hellboy universe artist Ben Stenbeck has his own style but has been inspired by Emond’s confidence in putting your art out into the world, even when you live on the arse end of the planet. Emond’s old studio mate Simon Morse – whose work has always had that same beautiful wiry intensity - moved into tattooing and now has an extremely flash and successful studio in central Wellington, (although he has also been promising some new Straitjacket Ninja comics for a couple of years).

Emond is still remembered in his home town for his passion, energy, and generosity towards other artists, as much as for the things he produced himself. That Emond will live on in their hearts forever, and the rest of us were just lucky we got to see some of it in his art.

The artist once told a friend that people felt bad because they were alienated and felt alone, but that everyone felt that way, so people really needed to recognize this collectively. And while it’s too easy to look at his art and scour for the darkness that sometimes filled his head, there’s something else there, even in the dopiest of Lobo drawings.

Martin Emond didn’t do things subtly and he didn’t do things quietly, but that was just to make sure you knew you heard that you weren’t alone. Even if you were just a total fucking geek.

‘Izzat so?’ - The unlikely innocence of Judge Dredd's Mean Machine Angel

One of the great dark jokes about Judge Dredd is that he doesn’t have that much of a rogue’s gallery, because most stories end with him just shooting the bad guys in the drokking face. Even the great psychopath PJ Maybe eventually found justice at the end of Dredd’s lawgiver, after decades of mayhem, murder and a reign as Mega-City One’s finest mayor.

The most notable exception to this rule is - of course - Judge Death and the other Dark Judges, who can’t be stopped with something as mundane as a bullet. Dredd can shoot them to hell and they will just keep crawling out of the grave to kill, over and over again.

There is one other villain who has constantly butted their way into Dredd’s orbit without being permanently dispatched, and that’s the mighty Mean Machine Angel. He’s a cyborg monstrosity who just kept on coming back, in dozens of stories over more than 30 years.

While Mean Machine’s longevity can certainly be attributed to the fact that he’s funny as hell and a fucking cool looking character, he’s also one of the few true innocents to cross paths with Dredd.

And in the harsh-but-fair (but mainly harsh) world of Judge Dredd, that innocence counts for a lot, and even leads to Mean getting the rarest of farewells.

Created by John Wagner and Mike McMahon – although it is notable that the late Alan Grant joined Wagner as Dredd co-writer at about this time - Mean Machine Angel first appeared in 2000ad prog 160 in early 1980, along with the other members of his murderous clan.

The main villains of the Judge Child Quest mega-epic, the Angel Gang were a homicidally ornery crew, quick to torture and murder, and fleeing into the galaxy with the Judge Child. Mean was the gang’s big heavy, with a metal skull that could headbutt anybody into oblivion.

It did not end well for the Angel Gang. Along with his Pa and brothers, Mean was quickly despatched once Dredd finally caught up with him, blowing himself up after getting his dial stuck on 4½, (an event that would keep happening to Mean with guaranteed hilarity).

The editorial and creator droids at 2000ad quickly realised that while dead usually meant dead in the Dredd universe, Mean was too good a character to let rot on the planet of Xanadu. When his long-lost brother Fink Angel came looking for revenge a few weeks after the epic ended, a significant part of the story was devoted to Mean’s origin.

It showed how he was a sweet, innocent young man who happened to be born in a family of the most ruthless scum, and they decided the only way to fix him was some dirty brain surgery, creating the psychopath with their brutality.

A year later and Mean was brought back to life by the Judge Child, and went on a rampage that never really stopped. He butted heads with Dredd multiple times and always lost the fight, but was never permanently dispatched, his misadventures almost always ending with him back in the padded walls of a psycho cube. He accompanied Dredd on several incursions into the Cursed Earth and had a few solo stories of his own, although he was always at his best when he went toe to toe with the law.

Mean Machine Angel only has four moods, all controlled by that thoroughly punk dial that has been soldered into his brain. On one, he’s surly; on two he’s mean; on three he’s vicious; and on four he’s downright brutal.

But like a lot of the wonderful freaks in Dredd’s world, his appeal has more sides to it than that. A lot of it is in how the man looks – such an incredible design from McMahon, with the claw arm, one bulging and red robotic eye, and the greatest of redneck sneers.

All the great Dredd artists – including Carlos Ezquerra, Ron Smith, Ian Gibson, Steve Dillon, Henry Flint – had typically powerful interpretations of Mean, while Simon Bisley’s amped-up look for Mean in the Judgment on Gotham crossover became the default beefy look for the character for the next decade.

It’s such a striking design, that it’s little surprise that it was one of the few things that genuinely worked in Danny Cannon’s misfire film adaption of Dredd in the 90s. His monstrous form - based on concept art by Chris Cunningham - gave the film a real kick of sci-fi absurdity, and was almost enough to forgive it for Dredd taking his helmet off 10 minutes into the film.

Another great appeal of Mean Machine is that he does tend to be very funny when he shows up in stories. While full of animal cunning that has kept him ticking, he’s not exactly a smart man, and is frequently getting up to all sorts of weird escapades.

The comic effect of his altered nature clashing with Dredd’s unbending strictness never went out of style, and that moment where he inevitably goes butt-crazy is always funny.

(It’s even arguable that Mean is an advocate for disability rights, as he spends almost all of his adventures with no arms. After his left limb is blown off by Dredd towards the climax of the Judge Child Quest, it’s never replaced and he just has that robotic claw and a stump. And it never slows him down or bothers him, he’s just as capable as anybody else. As long as he gets to lead with his head.)

All of this is obvious to anybody who has ever glanced sideways at a story with Mean Machine Angel in it, but the Judge Dredd strip is all about playing the long game, and all those tales of Mean’s misadventures over all those years have created strange depths.

Because one thing that slowly becomes clear is that Mean Machine Angel is a true innocent. He’s committed more crimes than anybody, but he’s not really guilty, because he’s mentally impaired, and it was done to him by his own goddamn family. Underneath that grizzled and harsh exterior, somewhere behind that metal plate he has for a skull, there is a kind soul.

Mean headbutts a shitload of people, some into absolute paste, but never anyone who doesn’t really deserve it. The people he pounds tend to be other scumbags, or dickheads, or arrogant arseholes who think they can easily push Mean around (before finding out that he has some kind of smarts they didn’t reckon on.)

Even Judge Dredd knows it would be wrong to summarily execute Mean, although a little light maiming may be necessary. The world of Mega-City One is a true nightmare, and terrible things often happen to good people, but the truly innocent have a chance.

Consider the case of Mrs Gunderson - another Wagner co-creation - a little old lady who is almost completely blind and deaf, and still tottering along happily. Gunderson is one of the very, very few people to survive prolonged contact with Judge Death and somehow walks through all the gunfire and other madness on a regular basis.

Mrs Gunderson might not look much like Mean Machine Angel, but it would be wrong to do either of them any real harm. It would be mean.

The last time we see Mean Machine Angel in a story by John Wagner, he’s given the quietest of exits from the series – all the aggression finally burned out of him, the dial removed, his monstrous claw replaced by a thin prosthetic limb. His endlessly optimistic son, who shares the rare gene of kindness in his bloodline, takes him in happily.

He’s done, he’s just another citizen and no threat to anybody. He’s another reminder to Dredd that even an Angel gets old, and isn’t a threat forever.

There has been another story since then by a non-Wagner writer, that has Mean turned back into a monstrous figure roaming the Cursed Earth again, but there was something so understated by Wagner’s version, that it’s easy to ignore.

Because there shouldn’t really be a blaze of glory ending for this damnable robo-hick. Just a quiet shuffle off the stage, where he can take the time to smell the flowers again. That’s all Mean ever wanted to do.

- This was originally published by The Gutter Review, and edited by the most excellent Chloe Maveal. The Gutter Review site doesn't exist right now, so I'll be reposting all the essays I did for it here in the Tearoom for the next week, because everyone must know how Mean Machine is really a big softy.

Back when Vertigo was everything

Art by Jon J Muth

Art by Chris Weston

Art by Bill Sienkiewicz

Art by Alex Toth

Art by Phil Winslade

Art by Matt Wagner

Art by David Lloyd

Art by Chris Bachalo

Art by Mark Chiarello

Art by Steve Dillon

- All art from The Vertigo Gallery: Dreams and Nightmares, published in 1995. Vertigo is coming back, but it won't be the same, baby.