Over the past three decades, Gilbert Hernandez has produced a library of work notable for its high quality as well as its diversity of subject.







Hernandez's work spreads across multiple genres and audiences. With his brother Jaime (and occasionally brother Mario), he has produced one of the landmark indie comic series, “Love and Rockets,” which has just returned to its original magazine format.







The Swerve recently had the opportunity to speak with Hernandez about his prolific career.







The Swerve Magazine: How did you first develop an interest in comics?







Gilbert Hernandez: They were always in my life. My brother Mario is five years older than me, and he read them as a kid, so they were already around the house. It was a normal thing to have comicbooks around the house. I gravitated to the art in them, and developed an interest in drawing. Later on, I started making my own stories for my personal amusement.







SM: So you were making comics, but what was the impetus to take the leap and launch “Love and Rockets?”







GH: My brothers Mario and Jaime, we had been drawing our own little comics. When we got good enough, we wanted to get published, not necessarily at Marvel or DC, but as an underground comic. We published out own comic, as an underground comic, or a fanzine at the time. When Gary Groth, the publisher of Fantagraphics, saw it, he asked if he could publish it. That's how “Love and Rockets” got started.







SM: In the early issues, your stories are more random one-offs and a lot more sci-fi. What led you to settling down with the Palomar stories?







GH: I had always done comics like that growing up, if I wanted to do a sci-fi story, I'd do one; if I wanted to do a superhero or horror or a goofy kids story, I'd do that. My brain was all over the place. I could never do just one thing.







When it came time to do “Love and Rockets,” that's what I did at first, whatever I felt like doing, whatever I could finish and give the whole story. When the interest in “Love and Rockets” took off, here it was a 64-page comic, and my brother Jaime had gained a fanbase with the Maggie and Hopey stories, and I didn't really have something the readers were following. Having half of 64 pages gave me the freedom to do something serious or something I really believed in, so that's why I decided to do Palomar and stop doing the other stuff so much.







SM: Luba is just an incredible, complex character. How did you decide to focus on her and develop her character?







GH: The process was basically writing the stories. I don't have plans for the characters at the beginning, I just design for the context and the needs of the story. Luba came from another story that I did, and I just stuck her in the Palomar story as a topic of conversation because she's very voluptuous, and I figured it would be easy to write dialogue for young boys to always talk about her.







What happens with characters, is that characters start to write themselves. She started to write herself with how she responded to the boys making a big deal about her figure. It was just an amusement at first, and pretty soon, her attitude became her character, and I was able to really get into what she was all about.







SM: You have done some tremendous work with her and her family over the years, so are you mostly creating as you go, and fitting things in where they fit rather than a longtime plan?







GH: It's not so random, it's simply that I'm building off what I've done. I would do one story with Luba and her family, and then the next built off of that and so on. Sometimes it can get away from you, so there is constant self-editing. Palomar could have just gone all over the place, and there's times where I felt it might have if I hadn't been more restrained to keep it focused on what Palomar was from the beginning. There should be a certain tone to it.







SM: Given that you are still telling stories about Luba and Fritz, does it surprise you that their stories have maintained this long?







GH: No, because I have no yardstick. I don't know when it's not supposed to work. I've been drawing Luba's extended family, and now her half-sister Fritz, and the stories just continue. I don't have any end for them until I'm too old to do it physically. They just continue to develop as characters, and I love going along with it. I never see a reason to stop doing certain characters.







SM: You are telling life stories, and time passes. Does that help to be able to bring in new members of the cast, or have you found that limiting?







GH: It can be both. The limiting factor is that sometimes the characters get too old, too quickly because the younger characters need to get older for a specific story. If I have a three-year-old little kid, and I need this kid to be eight years old or ten years old, in order to advance the series, the other characters have to get older as well. It's easier to have a young person grow over the years than it is to have an older person gets older because an older person gets older quicker.







Sometimes I just have to bite my tongue, and say, 'I've got to age this eight or ten years.' I don't have a problem with ageism. I don't mind that Fritz is 50 years old, I find her as attractive as when she was 20 years old. I've never had that problem. I can continue to do these stories as long as they're not too old to do what I want them to do.









Then there are times when I think that I should have kept them at the same age for a while, and what might have happened, but since that didn't happen, I can't rewrite it.





SM: A lot of the more recent stories have been dealing with Fritz and all of the Fritz imitators, what led you down that path?







GH: The whole thing with Fritz and her imitators, that's an old thing that I came across years ago where Bruce Lee got so popular in Asia that there were all these actors just intimating him. You have Bruce Le, Bruce Li, Bruce Lu, Bruce Lai, just really ridiculous copies of Bruce Lee, because all the guy had to do was have his haircut and then, he was in kung fu movies.







Most of those movies never made it to the States, but I saw a documentary on it and it was hilarious how many Bruce Lee imitators there were, and still are. I think Jackie Chan is the guy who broke that chain and became his own person, and then Jet Li and people like that afterward. Up until Jackie Chan, I think it was just Bruce Lee imitators.







It was very humorous to me, so I just used that for the Fritz story, that there would be a bunch of women, usually in the sleazier end of show biz, adult movies and strippers and that kind of thing. The reason for that is, “Why would they want to imitate someone like Fritz?” Well, Fritz is the first B-movie bombshell that's been taken seriously by critics—within my story. She happens to be a very good actress, and the critics have to admit that even though she has the bombshell body and all that. I kind of just played on that, where she's a critically-acclaimed actress, but she's just doing all these B-movies.







Not to put them down, but I lived in LA for a long time, and my wife worked in a Hollywood memorabilia store for a while. We learned a lot about the seedier side of show biz. Like the regular scream queens, the women who are trying to make their name in the genre films, and it could get pretty interesting.







SM: Shifting a bit, how did “Blubber” come about?







GH: I'm a pretty impatient person, and I was focusing on doing some graphic novels a couple of years ago. I got a little worn out from those because they take so long to do, and I just had wilder ideas. Graphic novels have to be structured, and a complete whole. But because I have such a wild imagination, I didn't have a place where I could just get crazy—I'm talking about as crazy as I could possibly get.







I just saw a certain conservatism encroaching in indie comics. It was more of a PC thing, more of a “let's do comics as art that won't offend anyone.” I just felt that that was encroaching and I thought, forty-five years ago we had underground comics that were so wild and crazy that they wouldn't fit in the modern world of comics. So I decided to create one that did.







SM: There are times where you are doing “Love and Rockets” and “Blubber” and other series or graphic novels. How do you keep all of that stuff straight?



GH: That part's easy. If I'm looking at “Love and Rockets,” it has its own rules. I quickly imagine the potential audience for the story, and I pretty much know what's going to be accepted or not accepted in “Love and Rockets.”







That's why something like “Blubber” exists because I don't have to think about any audience for “Blubber.” So far it's worked, and people are enjoying it for what it is—a humor book. Actually, with “Blubber” the problem is not taking it too seriously. Sometimes I start developing a character, and I think, “I'm wasting this in 'Blubber.'” (laughs) “Blubber” doesn't need a backstory, it doesn't need a person's deep feelings about what monster she's having sex with. It might be funny if I did that, but I usually keep my energy for telling a person's backstory or real life to the serious stuff.







SM: You have worked for a number of publishers over the years, sometimes with projects from different publishers in the same year. What led you to going through different venues for your books?







GH: Sometimes, it's that they asked me at the right time. A lot of publishers just wanted a Gilbert Hernandez book. Also, I made friends with my editor Shelly Bond over at DC, and she was an editor at Vertigo, so I had more freedom to do what I wanted to do, so I worked with her now and again. I did my first graphic novel for Vertigo.







A lot of the work at DC was a learning experience because their mission is to put out books, whereas indie publishers are more about the personal vision of the artist, and they can take as much time as they want to do it. At DC, there's structure and it there's a discipline you need to get your books out, and that was really good for me.







SM: Speaking of DC/Vertigo, how did “Twilight Children” come about?









GH: I was simply asked, and the timing was right. Shelly Bond asked Darwyn Cooke because she wanted to work with him, what person he would like to work with, if he was given the chance, and my name was on the top of the list. The timing was just terrific.





I came up with “Twilight Children,” and Darwyn did a beautiful, beautiful job on it. I knew his work, and I knew he could take care of any ideas I gave him. He asked me if I could do a story about people and how they react to a surreal element. I came up with that, and he loved it, and he just took off and did it. He did such a great job, His friend, Dave Stewart, who was the colorist, they worked together and just made a gorgeous book. I'm really happy with it.







SM: Darwyn Cooke, unfortunately, passed away earlier this year, just a few months after completing the book. Did you know he was sick when you were working on the project?







GH: I knew he was unwell because at last year's New York Comic-Con was when I met him. So we met a year ago, and we just hung out, and we got along. He was very quiet, and just kind of distant at times, and he had a really bad smoker's cough, and it sounded really serious to me. He said, “Ah, forget it. Don't worry about it.” I guess he hadn't known he had been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer at the time, but he knew he had a problem. We got along, and he was a great guy. It's such a shame.







SM: For someone like you, who usually handles the complete project, is it challenging for you to work with collaborators?







GH: It was at first, but I've been doing it for 20 years now, working with different people at DC and Vertigo, mostly. The first project I did like that was with Peter Bagge with “Yeah!,” the all-girl rock band comicbook. All I was doing was drawing it, and he was writing it, and that was really difficult because it was a monthly comic, and I had to hustle out the pages. That was a learning experience, but I don't regret it at all, it was a very good experience.







SM: We've touched on your work for different publishers, what led you to work with Drawn and Quarterly to release the graphic novels “Marble Season” and “Bumperhead?”







GH: I like to get a different feel of a different publisher. I mostly work with Fantagraphics and Vertigo, and I've worked with Dark Horse, but I'd never worked with a publisher Drawn & Quarterly. Over the years, they had offered if I had a graphic novel to do, I could come to them. I just felt like doing it at a different place. What happens is, say I do a book for Vertigo, or even Fantagraphics, once I'm finished with it, it can take a long time to get paid (laughs). I do comics for a living, so I'm always jumping from publisher to publisher, so I can get paid.







I'm going to do the same comics, I don't bend unless I'm doing a work-for-hire like a superhero story, I don't bend away from what I normally do. “Marble Season,” I could have done at Fantagraphics, I could have done at Dark Horse, but I did at Drawn & Quarterly because that was a fit. I have to keep moving, it's difficult to make a living in comics.







SM: “Love and Rockets” has just switched from the annual format of the past several years to a quarterly return to its original magazine format. What prompted the change?







GH: The annual format just became a burden. It was too many pages to do over time. My brother and I discussed this. We weren't happy with the way we were handling the stories. It did help with the page count, that there were so many more pages at a time, but as far as writing the story, if the story sits too long on the drawing board, I second-guess it. I'm not really sure if it's done, or if it will ever be done, and so pretty soon, you start spinning wheels, and that's not good.







We grew up reading comics that came out monthly, so we're used to getting comics on a more regular schedule than once a year. That appealed to us again, to have the magazine that has new covers and new back covers coming out every several months. Just as everyone was announcing the death of the indie comicbook, we thought, “Hey, let's put out a book.” We don't know how it's going to go, but it's just there for us as artists.







SM: In addition to “Love and Rockets,” what other projects do you have planned?







GH: “Love and Rockets” is the steady ride. I'm still going to have “Blubber,” for a while anyways. I'm going to be doing companion pieces to “Love and Rockets,” but like “Blubber,” they will be in a 24-page format. One of the books is called “Psychodrama Illustrated,” and that will be the stories that I can't fit in “Love and Rockets” anymore. The first issue will come out in January, will be a backstory about Fritz and her movie career.







Now that I have only so many pages in “Love and Rockets,” I can't do so much backstory, the long dialogue stories anymore. I created this new book, which is backstory of Fritz and the stories of some of the films she's made, which is a topic of interest to me, how films are made, how they're re-edited and re-titled, and how things go long and filmmakers are left with no money and what they have to do to make their films. I wanted it to be more energetic than “Love and Rockets” as far as sex and that stuff goes because “Love and Rockets” has to be a little more for a general audience—we used to be pretty wild, but we have to change a bit for this PC world.







For more on “Love and Rockets,” read our interview with Jaime Hernandez:



http://www.theswervemagazine.com/Jaime_Hernandez_Love_and_Rockets_The_Swerve_Magazine.html