{"id":7224,"date":"2010-12-02T00:30:51","date_gmt":"2010-12-02T05:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=7224"},"modified":"2010-12-02T00:30:51","modified_gmt":"2010-12-02T05:30:51","slug":"hignite-on-jaime-hernandez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=7224","title":{"rendered":"Hignite on Jaime Hernandez"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Moebius clouds in Jaime Hernandez's first Locas story.<\/p><\/div>\n

I recently read some fairly depressing essays about the Hernandez Brothers, pieces that were so ill-informed that I despaired of \u201ccomics criticism\u201d as a valid activity. To cheer myself up I went back to Todd Hignite\u2019s The Art of Jaime Henandez: The Secrets of Life and Death<\/a>. Beautifully designed by Jordon Crane, filled to the gill with original art and photographs, this has been justly celebrated as an art book. But I\u2019m not sure that Hignite\u2019s writing has received the praise it deserves.<\/p>\n

Taken just by itself, Hignite\u2019s text is a wonderfully compact monograph which manages to compress many insights into a small package. The book covers, among other things, Jaime\u2019s family background, the influence of classic commercial comics on his art, his interactions with punk music and lowrider culture, the context of the direct market, and the evolution of Jaime\u2019s art and storytelling.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve said before, I\u2019m not sure if fannish knowledge of commercial comics is essential for appreciating Jaime\u2019s work (or Gilbert\u2019s work) but it certainly helps in terms of analyzing it, especially in visual terms. Hignite is very good on Jaime\u2019s debt to artists like Lucey, Ditko, and Moebius. To pick one example of many, here\u2019s what Hignite says about Jaime\u2019s first\u00a0 Locas story, \u201cMechan-X”: \u201cthe Moebius-like hatching in the clouds throughout \u2018Mechan-X’.\u201d That\u2019s very nicely observed. It\u2019s impossible to see the clouds in this story and not think of Moebius (who also inflects the hovering scooter Maggie rides on as well as the bird\u2019s eye view perspective in some of the panels). This sort of attention to Jaime\u2019s visual ancestors isn\u2019t just an example of source-hunting, it also informs us of Jaime\u2019s larger project, which is to use as raw material the vernacular culture that surrounded him as a young man (not just comics but also wrestling, television, lowrider culture and punk music) and by some mysterious alchemy mix and blend these elements in order to create something wholly new: comics that show us a world we could have hardly guess existed. It\u2019s almost impossible, I suspect, for a critic to do justice to Jaime\u2019s work. Hignite comes as close as anyone has, and for that he deserves to be singled out for praise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently read some fairly depressing essays about the Hernandez Brothers, pieces that were so ill-informed that I despaired of \u201ccomics criticism\u201d as a valid activity. To cheer myself up I went back to Todd Hignite\u2019s The Art of Jaime Henandez: The Secrets of Life and Death. Beautifully designed by Jordon Crane, filled to the gill with original art and photographs, this has been justly celebrated as an art book. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[149,612,1304],"class_list":["post-7224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-books-about-comics","tag-jaime-hernandez","tag-todd-hignite"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}