Hernandez has been praised for the physical beauty of his female characters as well as their complex personalities, [ citation needed] and for years he struggled to create comparably nuanced male characters. [ citation needed] Hernandez has often said that Maggie and Ray Dominguez both represent different aspects of his own personality. [ citation needed] In 2014, Jaime Hernandez's stories from volumes 3 and 4 of New Stories were collected into a single volume entitled The Love Bunglers. Maggie and Hopey continue into the night after their diner reunion breaks up. Both have gotten a bit banged up slam dancing at the punk show, but they feel confident, invigorated by the false mantle of remembered youth perhaps, and walk the dark A.M. streets of Huerta together alone. Here, Hernandez pays off on a slow note of menace that's thrummed gently under the surface of the story. Hernandez pushes his heroes to a climax that's frightening, unnerving, and eventually humorous and sweet. By their final panel together, we realize that Maggie and Hopey have deepened and enriched their relationship by taking it some place new, even as the events they've experienced in their home town reminds that that, to a certain extent, they will always be outsiders. But not outsiders to each other. Muñoz’s stories are peopled by furtive figures who grapple with survival and loss. His most stunning depiction, however, is of the Central Valley itself

Isabel Maria "Izzy" Ortiz Reubens: Friend/mentor to Maggie and a sister of Speedy. Izzy is a writer who suffers a nervous breakdown after a divorce/abortion, becoming a notorious "witch lady" in Hoppers. I also remember my first complete reading of this book, and how the stories in it blew me away. I remembered immediately wanting to read everything else from the series, as well as the stories from the other half of Los Bros (which are amazing and excellent in their own way). After that first foray, I understood how people could feel intimidated starting out reading these stories, but I also felt a sense of joy and relief that I’d taken the time and effort to read through them. I appreciated the comics medium more for being able to produce something like this; interwoven stories that are rich and dynamic, where one notices the passage of time, the process of maturation, the portrayal of people as fallible human beings. An extraordinary blend of deep yet familiar visuals, as well as a precision in writing, that ends up as a cohesive universe where one can become attached to characters and stories as if they were living next door.Theresa "Terry" Downe: talented, cold, pretty guitar player who still pines for ex-girlfriend Hopey. Jaime Hernandez keeps hitting home runs. It’s almost like he doesn’t know how to stop. … You don’t have to have ever read a Hernandez Bros. story before to appreciate the achievement, but for those who have, it’s impossible to reach the end without shedding serious tears. It’s that good, heartbreaking, and breathtaking in even measure. It’s just about perfect, and you can put that on the book flap.” — Tim O’Neil – The A.V. Club Gaiman, Neil (July 1995). "The Hernandez Brothers". The Comics Journal. Fantagraphics Books (178): 91–123. In 2006, Publishers Weekly ranked Hernandez' work Ghost of Hoppers second on its critics' poll of the best comic books of 2006. [9] Awards [ edit ]

Mechanics – the original "Maggie the mechanic" story, in which Maggie travels to Africa with a group of mechanics and becomes caught in the middle of a political revolution. Introduced Jaime's artwork and storytelling style. Punk came along and freed me, like, “I don’t have to answer to anyone.”…It made you see the world bigger and how things were, it also gave you permission to be stupid. I could be silly. I didn’t care anymore what people thought if I was silly. 2 Jaime does all this with such apparent ease that for many readers, myself included, the suddenness of his twists are actually physically affecting. Of course, that's in the pacing and the prose. But then there is the drawing: Jaime's line has passed out of mechanical perfection and into something that is personal, with the occasional wiggle. It's a lived-in line that now indicates ideas and emotions as much as it delineates forms. Nothing in his comics looks like anything in anyone else's comics. So, for example, this alleyway is not just any alleyway -- it's an alleyway constructed entirely from Jaime's lines, gestures, and pictorial vocabulary.

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Character index for Jaime's Hoppers/Locas stories - About 187 characters appear at least once in Jaime's work; 65 of these appear more than once. The Girl from HOPPERS is a] great, sprawling American novel… makes Gotham and Metropolis seem as bland as Scranton.” — GQ Moving out of the doubling effect of plot and internal history, this spread also impacts the reader in personal way. As I took it in, I realized that I remembered not just the moments Jaime was referring to, but also the narratives around those moments. And furthermore, I remembered where and how and what I was when I read those moments. I remembered like the characters remembered. That's an extraordinary thing to do to a reader. And that's the thing about Jaime's stories -- they work on you, and embed themselves in you like little else. Structurally it's because Jaime's characters have aged with us, but on a deeper level it's perhaps because, as Jaime has said, these characters are, in a sense, real to him; maybe his belief in them somehow allows us to believe in them too. It just works. They're real. I have to admit that with Hopey changing so much, it was hard writing her into this new story. I didn’t really like her. I thought, I don’t like her as a person. I don’t like what she’s doing. I don’t like how her life turned out. She is one of those friends you’re disappointed in.

I'm really running out of ways to heap praise on these books but they're great, both in story and art with some of the richest characters in comics. Jaime doesn't throw any softballs, either. It would have been easy for him to put Maggie and Hopey together volumes ago but the stories wouldn't have been as good as what we have now, with Maggie meandering through life and Hopey becoming responsible with a wife and kid. Harvey Awards". Harvey Awards. Archived from the original on 18 August 2015 . Retrieved 13 June 2015. Pipo, Gato, Sergio: beautiful, vain, successful Pipo; her angry but devoted (ex-)husband Gato, and her son (by Manuel) Sergio, a world-famous soccer star. The narrative loops in and out of the trajectory of their relationship, mostly chronological, but with some swerves in there that force you to pay attention. There's one dream-notadream-dream (?) sequence in particular late in the book that had me scratching my head, prompting my own BFF to say, "YOU DON'T QUESTION JAIME HERNANDEZ!" So just accept, at face value, that even when you think you understand, you probably don't (unless you've been living in this world for years, I'm guessing).Jaime's characters are so convincing and his stories so compelling that it is easy to overlook his greatest strength: the most economically handsome drawing style in comics." Booklist Jamie plays with readers' expectations, setting up Maggie and Hopey's reunion partway through the book (via the always delirious Penny Century!), only to have that reunion go completel awry and the girls go off on even more solo adventures. He builds strong emotional ties by showing us so many different sides to each girl that we constantly find ourselves thinking, "Yeah, I've been there. Maybe not exactly like that, but I understand where she's coming from." Maggie, particularly, is probably the single most believable, best developed character in the history of comics. Mostly from stories about the old country. From my mom and my grandma and my tías — like ghost stories and odd stories about the neighbor and this and that. Down the street there was a house with a huge palm tree and there was a white owl that lived in the fronds and my mom — I think it was my mom — she said, “You see that white owl? That white owl lives there because the old lady there is crippled because some witch has put a curse on her.” So if a white owl lives in the neighborhood it’s because someone has a curse. Esperanza Leticia "Hopey" Glass: sharp-tongued, wild and adventurous best friend of Maggie. A lesbian who plays bass in a series of punk bands, often touring and furthering her adventures/story. Harvey Awards". Harvey Awards. Archived from the original on 6 September 2015 . Retrieved 13 June 2015.