I just recently came across this old Kitchen Sink volume (1993; reprinting issues 9-12 of Mark Schultz' Xenozoic Tales, perhaps better known as Cadillacs and Dinosaurs). Having previously read Dinosaur Shaman (issues 5-8) but not Cadillacs and Dinosaurs itself (issues 1-4), I probably have no business blogging about it, but that's the way the fossil crumbles here in Village Grouchy.
I guess I'll start by simply noting that Jack Tenrec, the hero, begins the real action of this volume with a stirring cross country race between a rampaging "Mack" (some kind of ceratopsian, I guess, though my paleontology is weak), and Tenrec's trusty, (no-longer-) rusty . . . Hudson? That's right: the series may be known as Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, but maybe only because "Hudsons and Dinosaurs" wouldn't have the same kind of ring. An old Caddy always has some class after all, but a Hudson is just a gas-guzzling old dinosaur.
But seriously, Schultz's storyline (apparently continued through only two further issues; I'll trust you all to be able to find a plot summary on Wikipedia, if you're interested in plot), involves a post-apocalyptic world, some 500 years in the future, in which mystical eco-mechanics like Tenrec find themselves pitted against the "evil" machinations (pun intended, I suppose) of progress-seeking archeologist-technophiles who dig up old tech and want to use it (you can't make this stuff up, or at least I can't). This is pre-Jurassic Park, of course, though the dinosaurs are nevertheless depicted as some kind of revenge-of-nature, with which Tenrec attempts to achieve some kind of balance: but all of this (and its green, eco-friendly overtones) is pretty much submerged backstory to a strangely odd mix of dinosaur attacks and dull political maneuvering. But the dinosaurs and pretty girls are pretty, and one can't help suspecting that it's that juxtaposition, more than anything else, that gave this series life.
Anyway, if it's pre-Jurassic Park, I can't help noting that it's post Love and Rockets, where Maggie the Mechanic had already encountered dinosaurs (and even worked in a garage) in some sort of weird alterno-future way back in 1982. Tracing textual influences isn't usually my favorite mode, but this one seems worth pointing out. Or maybe it's just my luck in having read Locas so recently.
Showing posts with label Love and Rockets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Love and Rockets. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Monday, June 30, 2008
Locas
I recently finished Jaime Hernandez's Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories, another massive compilation (about 700 pages). These stories were first printed, of course, in the Love and Rockets comics (the first actual comics, I gather, actually published by Fantagraphics). Though not containing every one of the stories in this strand of the Love and Rockets series, Locas does trace a kind of narrative arc, from the first story to introduce Maggie "the Mechanic" to a moment of long-delayed and crucial reconciliation between the two protagonists.
Hernandez's black-and-white drawings are sharp and often beautiful, but not above invoking the conventional perspectives of the masculine gaze, which presumably operates at times for both artist and (implied) reader. Even so, Maggie, over the years covered by both the narrative and the run of Love and Rockets from which these stories were drawn, grows more or less steadily chunkier, which certainly has the effect of making her seem increasingly like a real, rounded character (pun intended, I suppose).
Relatedly, it seems, the world that Maggie and Hopey inhabit also seems to have evolved over the years, as Maggie, in the first story is a rocket-ship mechanic working in an African jungle setting populated by (among other things) still-living dinosaurs. As the series progresses, however, the "rockets" element of the narrative gets progressively downplayed, and the often-interrupted love/friendship story of Maggie and Hopey is focused on more and more completely. (Although the fantastic elements of their world never disappear entirely: H R Costigan, the millionaire husband of Penny Century, is always drawn with the horns he wears in the early episodes.) One suspects that reading these comics over a ten- or twenty-year span, as they were published, would make these shifts of narrative focus less striking, but for me as a reader new to the series, it seemed to work in Locas as a book--not only as an artifact of the story arc's own history, but precisely as a thematized shift from "rockets" to "love," one that makes the reader go back and reconsider the relation between the two terms of that binary even in the earliest episodes.
Hernandez's black-and-white drawings are sharp and often beautiful, but not above invoking the conventional perspectives of the masculine gaze, which presumably operates at times for both artist and (implied) reader. Even so, Maggie, over the years covered by both the narrative and the run of Love and Rockets from which these stories were drawn, grows more or less steadily chunkier, which certainly has the effect of making her seem increasingly like a real, rounded character (pun intended, I suppose).
Relatedly, it seems, the world that Maggie and Hopey inhabit also seems to have evolved over the years, as Maggie, in the first story is a rocket-ship mechanic working in an African jungle setting populated by (among other things) still-living dinosaurs. As the series progresses, however, the "rockets" element of the narrative gets progressively downplayed, and the often-interrupted love/friendship story of Maggie and Hopey is focused on more and more completely. (Although the fantastic elements of their world never disappear entirely: H R Costigan, the millionaire husband of Penny Century, is always drawn with the horns he wears in the early episodes.) One suspects that reading these comics over a ten- or twenty-year span, as they were published, would make these shifts of narrative focus less striking, but for me as a reader new to the series, it seemed to work in Locas as a book--not only as an artifact of the story arc's own history, but precisely as a thematized shift from "rockets" to "love," one that makes the reader go back and reconsider the relation between the two terms of that binary even in the earliest episodes.
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