Aha Moment: “Love and Rockets”

Cover detail of a Love and Rockets collection

(Fantagraphics Books)

Comic books have not traditionally been a friendly place for women, unless they’re wearing spandex bodysuits with push-up bras. But artists likeJessica Abel are changing the way women appear in and write comics. Abel is the author of the graphic novelLa Perdida, about an American woman’s misadventures in Mexico City. And, along with her husband Matt Madden, she’s teaching a new generation of graphic artists: her classes often have more women than men, she told theLos Angeles Times.

Abel was drawn to comics more than two decades ago by the Latina mechanic Maggie Chascarillo, a character in the seriesLove and Rocketsby Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez. “It just immediately spoke to me,” Abel remembers. “First of all it’s beautiful. It’s beautifully drawn, the title is very compelling, and it just felt like, this is gonna be good.” At the time, Abel was a college freshman, a punk girl from Chicago awkwardly transported to small-town Minnesota.Love and Rockets,on the other hand, is set “in a Mexican town outside of LA, a very poor neighborhood,” Abel says. “Even though it’s not my environment, Jaime is so good at telling us about that world that it feels like you could know it. It’s a world you want to enter into even at its grubbiest, even at its meanest. That’s when I really started feeling like I could take hold of this identity for myself, and build it, and do something with it.”

When Abel started drawing comics, it was a boys’ world, and remains that way in many respects.”Being female and wanting to do this was my opportunity to be punker than I was before,” she says. “I would’ve been thrilled if there were more women involved in it, but it was a cool challenge that there weren’t.”

Love and Rockets: New Stories is Jaime Hernandez’s latest installment in theLove and Rocketsseries. Jessica Abel and Matt Madden have an instructional book calledDrawing Words and Writing Pictures: Making Comics: Manga, Graphic Novels, and Beyond.

(Originally aired: October 31, 2008)

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