Maggie and Hopey from Love & Rockets
In 2008 a Japanese man petitioned for a law allowing humans to marry cartoon characters because he felt more comfortable in the ‘two-dimensional world.’ I think he even said that he would like to become a 2D ‘resident’.
This is surely insane, and before I go on I’d just like to say I have no desire to marry either of these characters. But if such a law existed, I probably would have made the effort to drink where they drink.
Maggie and Hopey form the backbone to Jaime Hernandez’s contribution to the Love and Rockets comic, a cumulative project with his brother Gilbert (who’s narrative is a different world altogether). They appeared in 1981 as two social outcasts and have since been best friends and occasional lovers in the punk scene of a fictional, deadbeat city somewhere in America.
Hopey, who’s real name is Esperanza Leticia Glass, is a pugnacious, androgynous lesbian who plays bass in a terrible punk band, and has a habit of aggression. Maggie, who begins rather more conservative than she ends up, is a sexy pro-solar mechanic with fluctuating weight issues and a lot of male fans.
Their relationship is constantly punctured by sexual confusion and restlessness, but for more than 20 years they stay together through tragedy, elation, and a lot of booze and drugs.
Perpetually broke, they flit between rooms in dirty houses. Various oddball and brilliant characters come, go, and sometimes die, but throughout it all they remain unshakable.
Hernandez tells their story through a mix of magic realism and gritty reality and writes women better than most women writers I’ve read. It might have been too easy a job for a man to invent two massively sexy, part-time lesbians and put them in his favourite setting.
But nothing is black and white with Hernandez. Except his drawings. He gives them a huge amount of depth and humanity and somehow manages to frustrate them with wholly feminine issues; weight gain, unwanted attentions, trying to be respected in a man’s world.
The comic begins with Maggie landing a top-notch job as a pro-solar mechanic, essentially fixing robots and space shuttles. She is under the wing of famous mechanic, the handsome Rand Race, who, despite herself, she becomes besotted with.
Hopey at this time is playing sweaty gigs in her ever-changing band, spending her days drinking beer with misfits and being teased by jealous boys who want Maggie for themselves.
Together they form a poignant and gutsy core, spilling out into the lives of others but ultimately remaining solid as a pair. And as time goes on they develop and mature with a realism that at times can be shocking.
By the end Hopey is teaching in a primary school, nervous that she won’t be able to pull it off. Now wearing spectacles and looking sexily angular in her adulthood, she retains the punky attitudes of her youth while managing to be a wholly three-dimensional woman.
Maggie is older and plumper, constantly depressed about her big ‘Latino’ ass. For a while the two are living in separate parts of the world, forlornly missing one another whilst trying to get on with their lives. The end reunion is beautifully executed, devoid of sentimentality and entirely real.
Want to see for yourself? Buy Locas: A Love and Rockets Book from £28 at Amazon.
Have you been crushing on a fictional character you think we should feature? Tell us in the comments if so!
Jen Thompson
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