Don’t sleep on this chance to see amazing comic book creator Gilbert Hernandez! He’s reading from his new all-ages comic book Marble Season (here’s my article about it). Here’s a short Q&A that I didn’t cover in my piece—mostly about the fantastic, epic Palomar stories from Love and Rockets. Reading at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside, Sun April 21, 7:30 pm, free.
His favorite Palomar character: “It would probably be Luba, of course. Simply because her personality is just so intense. That kind of character is a lot of fun to write. If she wants to be indignant, she can be indignant. She doesn’t have to mask her true feelings the way we do. She lets it all out there and just really gives it to you, whether she’s right or wrong that’s how she is. She was really fun to write for a long time. But as it is with all people, she started to age and mellow out, so she’s no longer that voice. That’s why I haven’t emphasized her in the last few years.”
More after the jump.
Has he made a conscious effort to move away from his Palomar stories? “Yeah, only because I didn’t want to burn it out. When I was working on the Palomar stories, I had the sense that this was going to start repeating or going in directions… Palomar always needs to be home for the reader and me. Not destroyed by some kind of major upheaval or art styles or anything. It was created to be a home place, a place you go back there to go home. I want to keep doing that for Palomar whenever I return to it. I’ll do a little Palomar now, but it’s mostly about the new characters and the new things I want to do.”
On keeping track of his 100 Years of Solitude-like tangle of Palomar plots and characters: “I’m sure somebody could tell me more about my older stuff than I can, because it’s been 30 years and I have to reference my own stuff. Like with certain characters, I go, ‘Did they already do this? Did they do this yet?’ I don’t really keep notes that much. Once a project is done, I just put it away. I don’t even look at it anymore. They get lost.”
I tell Hernandez I’m not used to seeing his work in color, like on the cover of Marble Season: “Because I’m not great at shading, I can’t create the illusion of color when I’m doing black and white. Like the older brother looks like a blond in [Marble Season] but he’s got brown hair. And when I do a black character, if I were a good artist with shading I could shade the skin a little bit better and that would give them the look. As it is, it’s pretty much a black-and-white world. A clean-lined world.
And my favorite quote: “I really loved Archie comics.”