Love in the Time of Rockets

Love and Rockets - the comic, not the band, you poser - is celebrating 25 years here in Seattle in February.

It is possibly the best art comic, the one that really did push narrative graphics into literature. There is a spare grace in the drawing, and a solidity and elegance I can't compare to anything except Krazy Kat, 60 years before. At its start, completely distinct from its legion of neurotic cousins from from R. Crumb to Peter Bagge, it was the Califonia punk rock version of One Hundred Years of Solitude rooted in the Mexican-American experience, when punk rock, if you can dust off ancient memories, had some serious ambitions as an art culture. And as L and R became more ambitious, it had to become, to recall a brilliant word coined by the Laird, desciencefictionalized, discarding it's future fantasy trappings for the harder, richer drama of real life. Maggie and Hopey were strangely hard to remember did not exist and could not be called on to come hang out to, listening to the Pixies or Black Flag on the stoop, taunting the cops.

I despair of the intelligent anarchism and spirit of independent culture in America represented in Love and Rockets; its style was crazily successful - its ethos is a shade. A poll came out recently: something like 70% of young people believe celebrity and money are their highest and best ambitions, double or triple what it was 30 years ago. Bleah.

But Maggie and Hopey are just 25. That's how I choose to think of this.