Esperanza: A Love and Rockets Book

Love and Rockets

by Jaime Hernández

In the fifth batch of "Locas" stories by Jaime Hernandez, which originally ran from 2001–2007 in the pages of the Love and Rockets comic series, an older and wiser Maggie faces down the "Ghost of Hoppers" in a full-length graphic novel (which also introduces one of Jaime's greatest recent characters, Vivian the "Frogmouth," who creates chaos wherever she goes). Meanwhile, in “The Education of Hopey Glass,” Hopey (her Spanish birth name giving this collection its title) career transitions from tending bar to teaching kindergarten (while still juggling a complex love life). The final quarter of the book shows Maggie's lovable ex, Ray Dominguez, being dragged into the aftermath of a grisly murder thanks to his affair with the "Frogmouth."

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Fiction, Graphic Novels Comics, Sequential Art, Comix, Comic Book

248 pages, ebook

First published July 1, 2011

About the author

Jaime and his brother Gilbert Hernández mostly publish their separate storylines together in Love And Rockets and are often referred to as 'Los Bros Hernandez'.

Reviews

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esperanza is the title of the fifth omnibus volume of (and maybe last) Jaime Hernandez’s Love and Rockets “Locas” stories. If you wanted to pick up one book to read from the series, you wouldn’t want to start here. This is the story of a group of L.A. punk rock women (some of them pro wrestlers, some strippers, and so on) (men being somewhat peripheral, as it is a women-centric story), spanning more than a quarter century, and in this one an older and wiser Maggie, no longer a mechanic, now the “super” of an apartment complex, takes some time to look back at her past, especially in “Ghost of Hoppers,” a full-length graphic novel included in the volume. One darker story here is of the haunted and probably mentally ill Izzy; the destruction of her house by fire is both dramatic and sobering. It’s one of the heavier and best cartooned stories in the Locas history, just really well done.

The title of the volume is somewhat misleading because the stories focus as much on Maggie and crazy Vivian “the Frogmouth” as much as Esperanza Leticia "Hopey" Glass, the sharp-tongued, wild and adventurous lesbian friend (and sometimes lover) of Maggie. Hopey, once a wild punk rock bassist, is now a teacher’s aide, friends forever with Maggie, and still so fun to connect with. Ray’s obsession over Vivian (and Maggie) is sort of a (semi-anguished) fun story in this volume, too.

I highly recommend you begin early and fall in love with this crowd, created by one of the greats in comics history, Jaime Hernandez.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esperanza collects stories from Love and Rockets Volume II featuring Maggie and Hopey and the characters caught in their orbit.

The lives of the locas continue. Maggie is the super of an apartment complex. Hopey splits her time between tending bar and being a teaching assistant. Old favorites like Ray Dominguez and Izzy are featured, as well as a new character named Vivian, aka The Frogmouth.

Jaime Hernandez's art continues to amaze me. His minimalist style conveys so much emotion. As much as I love the art, the writing is even better. The characters are among the richest in comics, feeling like they must exist out there someplace. The stories are of the slice of life variety, ranging from Maggie's long series of tales involving her relationship with Vivian to Hopey's shorter tales about getting glasses and her relationship crumbling even as her life seems to be getting on track for once.

There's really not a lot left to tell. The Locas are about 20 years deep at this point. I can't imagine anyone sticking around this long and not wanting to continue.

Esperanza is the best Locas compliation since the last one I read. Five out of five stars.

[Shoshanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel like initially I thought that I would like the earlier comics in this story better, that when Maggie and Hopie were young punks, that would be the most exciting. What I have found is that as time goes on, as the characters age, the stories really develop. Yes there are still lil funny or sexy throw away shorts, but you really get to feel the weight that Maggie and Hopie carry around: memories from their childhood, wondering about where their lives are going, the dull pain of a love that never quite happened... Maggie and Hopie still think about each other, though something still keeps them from truly connecting. Utterly beautiful and sad.

The next book is the most recent published collection. I know the comics are still being written, but I feel like it will be a while before the next collections are published, so I'm really looking forward to it.

[Baba · Rating 4 out of 5]

An older and wiser Maggie visits the Hoppers after years away. Jamie debuts a new fascinating character Vivian the 'Frogmouth'. An older and little bit wiser Hopey tries to grow up.. I think! Ray's life's flat, until Frogmouth explodes into his life. More superb storytelling by Jaime! 9 out of 12.

[Chris Infanti · Rating 4 out of 5]

The more of Love and Rockets I read, the more I'm convinced Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez are the most vital comic writers out there. Some of my other favorites (Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Bryan Lee O' Malley) have created grander and more imaginative works, but Los Bros' intense dedication to a set of constantly evolving and most importantly, intensely human characters over a span of 30+ years makes stories about even the most mundane activities rewarding.

Esperanza, Fantagraphics' final volume of the early-mid 2000s second run of the series, is no exception. Two multipart stories make up most of the volume: one chronicling Maggie's intense, magical-realism drenched return to Huerta, and another one consisting of a "week in the life" of Hopey as she learns to grow up through taking a job as a teacher's assistant. Woven throughout these stories (and some standalone ones sprinkled around the novel) is the introduction of a new character (the sexy, loud-mouthed Vivian "Frogmouth" Solis), and the re-emergence of an old one (one-time Maggie flame and troubled soul Ray D). I found both long stories equally entertaining, although I have to admit that I have a special place for Hopey...can't think of any other literary character with her mix of wild energy, charisma, and vulnerability...sometimes all at once. Can't wait to dive into the new annuals soon.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

My wife: So is this whole series about lesbians?

Me: Pretty much.

Wife: I'm not sure how I feel about a straight dude writing some really long series about lesbians.

Me: Yeah. I mean, the entire series pretty much passes the Bechdel test on every other page, and I think he's kind of going for a whole feminist-ally, sex-positive vibe... but at a certain point it is also just a lotta, lotta boobs.

Wife: Yeah.

Me: Yeah.

[I.D. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I shouldn’t have read these out of order. This book is sort of a grab bag of characters and short vignettes that deals with Maggie, Hopey, Viv, and others. I was a bit out it sorts since I hadn’t read the previous volume but it came together as it went in. It’s just not really a full story arc, more little slices of time. Don’t do what I did, go in order.

[Clint · Rating 5 out of 5]

This fifth collection of Locas stories feels like it sticks more consistently to Maggie, Hopey, and Ray as its POV characters, and similarly occurs mostly in the current era instead of flashbacks. The digressive perspectives and eras are some of my favorite parts of previous Locas books, but surprisingly I didn’t mind the more focused approach this time.

Well into their middle age now, with their 30s either behind them or nearly so, Maggie and Hopey and Ray all find themselves confronting the course of their haphazardly plotted lives and trying to figure out where they want to go next. Some unexpected character growth is a delight, as are the usual messes they each wander into. Frogmouth is a new character that dominates a lot of this book; she’s a wonderfully frustrating addition that enchants and torments multiple characters with her beauty and allegedly “near-psychotic” drama. I was also glad to see Doyle make an appearance again, looking exactly like the slender, hard-living guy who’s still hanging around the scene and looks like he’s aged about 40 years in 20. Of course he still has the same mischievous troublemaker grin you can’t help but be drawn in by.

Hernandez’s art has been incredible in each volume, but it’s especially great here. The shadows in the sections with Izzy and her demons are a highlight, but every page here has such expressive faces and believably drawn bodies and amazing chiaroscuro.

“Give yourself a little credit, Perlita. A lot of people count on your kindness and generosity.”

“Gee, ain’t it funny when you go back home and all those little demons and bad habits that were supposed to be long gone out of your life just creep back in like they were awaiting your return?”

[Johanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is full of ghosts. a haunted house burns down, long-gone secondary characters play extras in crowd scenes, two ex-lovers circle each other while feeling like they're living other people's lives, and childhood selves appear to talk to their adults. aging punk Hopey and frogmouthed gangster's moll Vivian are the only characters fully present in this collection, and a little vivian goes a long way. almost-grown up Hopey, though, i can't get enough of, training to be a teacher's assistant, hitting on her optician, realizing her student's mother was a poser hopey beat up in high school.

[Acton Northrop · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-read a good chunk of this the other night. Jaime Hernandez's power as an artist and storyteller only grows with time. The chapters dealing with Ray D.'s strange, strained relationship with Vivian "Frogmouth" Solis is some the best writing I've ever come across, and the story morphs into a murder mystery so elegantly you barely notice that Frogmouth is possibly the most crazily sweet and hapless Femme Fatale in fiction.

[Mandel]

Sometimes, you just have to binge read Love and Rockets... In this fifth volume of Jaime Hernandez's Locas storyline, Maggie and Hopey are in their mid-30s, living the working class life in one of the worst places in America to be working class: Los Angeles. Hopey bartends while training to be a teacher's assistant, and Maggie manages an apartment complex in the San Fernando Valley. However, as usual, their lives constantly brush up against the remarkable, the strange, and the violent - this time, the lurid, liminal world at the margins of the Hollywood machine.

Suddenly one day, Maggie gets a fan: Vivian, a bombshell stripper and aspiring actress - messy, trashy, nothing but trouble, but at the same time a mesmerizing cipher. For reasons that Maggie can't fathom, Vivian acts as if Maggie is her best friend, entangling Maggie in Vivian's world of petty criminals, D-list celebrities, and men who routinely coerce women into sex at knifepoint. In many other stories, Vivian would nothing more than a hot body in the background of a noir that's mostly about men. But in Jaime's hands, she's a complex, astonishingly sympathetic character. She's a mean-spirited, manipulative racist and homophobe, a tramp who uses sex to get her way - shallow and vacant with a shrill, annoying voice. However, she's also a survivor - a woman whom men see only as a sex toy to be f*cked and slapped, but who manages to keep her head above water by raising hell and shoveling through all the bullsh*t. So when Vivian finds comfort in Maggie, tentatively reaching out to be held and kissed by her, she somehow becomes one of the most lovable characters Jaime has created.

As Jaime leads us through the world Vivian inhabits, full of sad, despicable people, we catch up with Ray Dominguez - man-child in his 40s who endlessly pines after Maggie and chases after Vivian trying to recreate glory days that are decades behind him. And, we witness the return of Doyle, who's become one of those burnouts who are so familiar in L.A. He still has his old charm, but now he walks with a cane as he boozes, hangs around strip clubs, and gets into fights. But he's running out of steam, and you know it won't end well.

There is a kind of melancholy that hangs over all these stories. Maggie, Hopey, and their contemporaries are all cut from the same cloth: folks who raised hell all through their aimless youths, but then find themselves in that mid-30s funk when you face the cold reality that you're about to enter middle age and are nowhere near where you dreamed of being when you were carousing through your 20s, high on life. "Is this all there is? Is all this my life?" they ask themselves as they stew on regrets that still don't prevent them from repeating the same old mistakes. And yet, Jaime makes these irremediable f*ck-ups so human and real that you can't help but love them for all their flaws.

[Rick Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Esperanza" is the fifth in the Love and Rockets Library collection of Jaime Hernández's "Locas" stories, with the title coming from one of Jaime's staple characters - Esperanza Leticia "Hopey" Glass. Though this volume is named after her, she isn't truly the main character of the stories in here, though her role is important in understanding a lot of what is happening here.

In this volume, Maggie gets in her own way a lot. With the "Ghost of Hoppers" story, Maggie tracks through her own past to relive some painful memories while her troubled pal Izzy compounds the problems with her ailing mental issues. Her ex, Ray Dominguez, makes his return and begins his attraction towards the attractive Vivian Solis, AKA "Frogmouth". Vivian carries a lot of similar characteristics to Penny and Maggie, but is undoubtedly more chaotic as she pulls Ray into a very strange situation.

Debuting in this volume is Angel Rivera, a polar opposite to Frogmouth due to her tender and sensible mannerisms. Angel is a gifted athlete who lives in the apartment complex where Maggie serves as a super, and in the "Angel of Tarzana" we are treated to Jaime's renditions of Angel's athletic feats.

Hopey's stories round out this volume as we follow her time as a kindergarten teacher and part time bartender. These fall more squarely into the slice-of-life aspect of "Locas", but feels doubly rewarding for those who have followed Hopey's progression as a character. The cultivation of long terms storytelling is truly one of the best aspects of Jaime's work, giving his entire body of comics the feeling of the "Great American novel" purely from scope alone.

The stories in here represent the absolute peak of Jaime's powers as a cartoonist. He still continues to make great comics from here, don't get me wrong. But it's at this point that his position on the pantheon of all time cartoonists is no longer debatable. He truly is an all-timer.

[Alex E · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this volume of Locas, we catch up with Maggie, who is now a super at an apartment building - and Hopey, who is a part time bartender starting her full time teacher's assistant gig. We also get introduced to a new character, Frogmouth, who is an explosive bimbo but who comes with a bunch of drama constantly. Her new guy is Maggie's old guy, so it's interesting following both parties around to see who they gravitate around each other.

One thing I really like about this series is that it moves along in semi real time. You see our cast aging and changing. Their views, their relationships, their environments... life is change and this series certainly reflects that. But people tend to slow down a bit with age, so Jaime Hernandez introduces new characters for that young energy that the series is known for.

Frogmouth is a bombastic bombshell who runs with a dangerous crowd and seems vapid yet sad at the same time. Maggie's ex is hanging around with her, and he is conflicted for his interest in her and his lingering feelings for Maggie, which he see's at a party. Angel is another new character that is young and full of energy. She is an athlete and looks kind of like Maggie, so its interesting seeing her interact with the cast - even though she is kind of more of a side character still.

This series is a great showcase of character development and characterization in general. Hernandez is someone who is able to meld and evolve his characters, taking them from that youthful malaise that most teenagers have, to the lower gears of middle age. I'm eager to see where we go from here, as it seems that Hopey and Maggie keep drifting away from each other, yet finally have said those three words to each other that have been lingering over the whole series. Highly recommended for fans of the series.

[Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

This volume held the weakest of the Locas stories. Too much focus on Ray, who is dull as dirt, and Vivian, who is equally boring. Hopey's story arc was interesting. She uses people badly, and it comes back to bite her. I will give Jaime Hernandez this: some people find the huge and rotating cast of characters confusing, but it's very realistic as he follows Maggie and Hopey through the years. People move in and out of their lives, just like in the real world.

[BeetleBlack · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love all of Jaime Hernandez's work, but I particularly love this book because of the Maggie/Izzie/return to Hoppers storyline. The combination of dread, melancholy, and creeping horror, the magical realism, the amazing illustration -- it's all so perfect. I think that alone is one of the biggest masterpieces in graphic novel history.
Technically a reread, but amazingly, I hadn't added this to my books on here before.

[John Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is almost my favorite book out of the Locas series, as we Ser the evolution of our beloved Hoppers girls and Vivian is something special. Once again I'm brought into a world full of characters that feel so familiar to me, that its like I'm reading a comic memoir of people I have known for years. I love love love love Love and Rockets.

[Shannon Appelcline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maggie and Hopey (and Ray) have all grown up. This is a magnificent look at how they're doing some years down the road, as they circle around each other but are barely able to even commit to friendships (and not in some cases). There's theft, attempted murder, and murder to spice things up, but this is really a slice of life, and it was addictively readable.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Watching Las Locas getting older and more (un)settled is one of my favorite parts of Jaime’s storylines, and this concluding volume to the Love and Rockets Vol. 2 stories is no disappointment on that front.

[Jake Nap · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s absolutely absurd how much better Love and Rockets keeps getting. Each volume makes the previous volumes retroactively better which is pretty astonishing, I already wanna go back and reread everything and I’m not even done.

[Bat Man · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not quite sure I totally vibed with Vivian as a focus character (and the increased emphasis on Ray’s sexual frustrations that come along with that) but I do end up really feeling for her by the end of the collection. Hopey becoming a teacher(‘s assistant) makes me cry 😭

[Kristina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love this series more and more with each book. Maggie + Hopey forever.

[Machteld · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5 stars

[Adrian Bloxham · Rating 5 out of 5]

The saga of Maggie and Hopey continues as they grow old with us, wonderful

[Max Goodin · Rating 4 out of 5]

too much ray and nasty vivian, but more maggie and especially hopey is appreciated. that haunting story was a really good slowburn too

[Keith Feltis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can it be? Is it possible? Is Hopey finally becoming a less shitty human being? Stay tuned, Michael, for the NEXT Locas volume (which will not come for a while) ...

[Bryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Think of my rating as a 3.5 rather than a 3.

Esperanza continues on with all Jaime Hernandez has built up in previous volumes, but strays a little too far from Maggie and Hopey and other familiar characters are all but absent, while other less interesting characters are featured more prominently.

For example, I like Ray Dominguez alright, but he's a relatively boring character. His story arc is really only saved by the presence of Vivian the Frogmouth.

I did like seeing more of Doyle Blackburn and find him far more interesting than Ray. I'd also like to see more of Daffy, Nami and Kiko or other satellite characters. Who knows, maybe they come back in further volumes.

Anyway, Esperanza has so far been the least compelling of the Love and Rockets books, which is especially surprising since you'd think, going by the title, it would be much more focussed on Hopey. Rather, the main character of this volume really seems to be Ray. Even Maggie sees more time than Hopey, and not much of her transition from punk girl to teacher's assistant is explored.

Also, Vivian is pretty clearly a replacement for Penny Century who is nowhere to be seen, as Jaime's excuse to draw a curvaceous naked woman in a variety of kinda whacky situations. Which is not a bad thing, exactly, just something worth pointing out.

[Brad Yowell · Rating 4 out of 5]

*sparks blunt*

I’ve been waiting on this.

Just kidding, I don’t smoke. Drugs are bad, kids.

The last set of Locas stories from L&R II!!

Page 12: Everyone gets old in the end. Kill me now.

17: Boring ladies talk show with a scantily-clad ring girl? The show makes no sense.

19: Does everyone get crazy in the end too?

126: staying cooped up in your house alone makes you crazy, I’d better jot that down.

183: I love that Jamie wrote Maggie as a comic nerd. What a great book.

What a ride. These wonderful characters seemed to get older every page. They’re more real than most real people. I’ve read their whole lives and now I feel like I’ve known them my whole life. Time is fleeting and now I’m super depressed. What a great book!

[Matt Sabonis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yet another fantastic volume. It's great to see Hopey get her life under control, for the most part, all while Ray D, probably the most "together" character of previous volumes, utterly dissolving. The new character who pins everything together, Vivian, is appropriately annoying, and yes, I still love Maggie. Angel's a great addition, too, and I look forward to seeing more of her in future stories.

[Brent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love this book, this series, and this life full of characters. I missed all these stories upon initial publication in Love & Rockets, and catching up with Maggie, Hopey, Izzy, and Ray is a joy. New characters Viv and Angel are just as joyful and full of contradictory behavior.
Some grown-up stuff, beautifully drawn.
Highly recommended.