The Second Madeleine Cookie

It must be autumn; after our Con-derived, end-of-summer columnar "twofers" -- Rick and I each taking a back-to-back month of Nexus writing -- we're back to alternating fortnightly all the way 'til summer of 2010, one presumes (though one never wants to presume over-much about the future...)

In the first of my midsummer columns, I'd talked about a couple of "Madeleine Cookie" experiences I'd had with recent arrivals over the transom, the first of those being the 4th Batman collection in DC's Showcase series of archival B&W compendiums.

Specifically, in the case of that volume, I'd written about how -- in a pop Proustian vein -- that particular tome collected the first late 60s Batman comics I'd bought on my own, which I still own (somewhere in boxes), but which I hadn't read, cover-to-cover, in decades.

And how that collection brought me back not only to "then," but several subsequent phases/stages of growing, changing, aging in general, and as a comics reader -- and occasional writer -- in particular.

So I wrote of memories, and of course -- and this is always the trick with such things -- the memory of those memories (We recall not only experiences themselves, but our subsequent reactions and reflections to those experiences). I also wrote of a second "cookie," but had run out of space for it, and figured I'd get to it in a subsequent column.

Much to my surprise, I am.

The second cookie, then which arrived that same summer week, is Locas II, a collection of the, well, Locas stories -- the "crazy gals," or "wild women," or however you want to translate it (which is, of course, precisely the trouble with translation, since it omits other senses/shades of the original language) -- taken from the pages of Love and Rockets, written and drawn by "Los Bros Hernandez," Jaime and Gilbert.

My relationship to L&R, and the Locas in particular isn't nearly the same as with Bats -- but whereas the caped one's "early" adventures (in my own personal timeline) brought me strongly to the late 60s/early 70s cusp -- as I lived it in the San Francisco Bay Area -- the latest collected chunk of the (mis)adventures of locas Maggie and Hopey (and the occasional "loco," like Ray, the consort of sexy Frogmouth -- does it seem like a good soap opera yet? -- and their sprawling, recurring cast of compelling, sometimes hard-to-figure supporting characters) all brought me squarely back to Los Angeles. In the 80s.

I'd moved here in the early/mid-80s, after college, for what I thought would be 4-5 years in my 20s, testing out my fortunes as a young man Who Wanted to Write.

Some of that worked out -- especially as a journalist, and children's book author. When the end of my 20s rolled around, and I was thinking of leaving L.A. for grad school, somewhere, I met my Ex-wife. Of course, she wasn't an Ex wife then, and I stayed, and two lovely boys appeared in the midst of a troubled union, and suddenly, "leaving L.A." wasn't quite in the cards.

Stuff that we call "life." Throughout this time, as I read comics more -- or less -- depending what was coming out, there was Love and Rockets. I would read the book a lot in comics shops, bookstores, or at cons, buying it occasionally (as a reviewer, I now have more L&R on my shelves than I ever did before), but with its strong SoCal settings and references, and its birth in the punk 80s, the stories always seemed like a quintessential part of the experience of being here.

Just like listening to a side by X, or Los Lobos or Fear, the decades-long project by Los Bros always evokes a specific moment in my own life, that last gasp era when we thought rock n' roll might still actually save us (we did -- despite the practiced nihilism in a lot of punk lyrics), only to see it trumped, so far, by far more powerful machinations also asserting themselves in those same 80s (think: Reagan-as-front man).

And who couldn't love a collection with a recurring feature called "Angel of Tarzana?" (the ranch house'd valley suburb a few short miles east of where I find myself -- still to my surprise -- currently living).

But returning to L&R, even sporadically, isn't simply an exercise in nostalgia. Just as Los Lobos continues to release albums, and various iterations of X regroup, or release cowpunk sides as The Knitters, what's ultimately compelling about the L&R saga is the way the characters change over the years.

They age (though, granted, more slowly than you or me), they put on weight, they fuck up their love lives (though sometimes not), they get new jobs, they strip off their clothes (Hernandez draws fantastic, zaftig, wide-hipped women), they befuddle men (and each other) and are befuddled by them, and along the way, the occasional mystical, epiphanic event happens. Like life. Though befuddlement tends to linger longer than epiphany. Just like...

Well, you get it.

In one story, there's an "after con" party at an L.A. house, which, the narrator notes, is "full of burned out artists and fanboy types who came to L.A. for work and stayed twenty years too long."

That's always the fear about L.A., of course, and what it does to you -- and what you become (or don't) while living here.

That Hernandez allows his characters to wrestle with all that (his favorite metaphor, and a sport that recurs again and again in the pages of Locas), as they move inexorably through their lives -- as the rest of us do -- keeps the book not only evocative of the time and place of its birth, but of the moment we still occupy.

Not primarily political or social commentary, but mostly emotional commentary on our times (politics and culture being extensions of the emotional, in this case). So it's not just a cookie from our past, but something still fairly warm from the oven.

And if you have any familiarity with SoCal, why, that just adds to the flavor.