The Love Bunglers
Jaime Hernandez’s graphic novel brings family, memory, and reunion back into focus.
Work Information
In a short span, the book layers temporal jumps with lasting emotional resonance.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Fantagraphics Books
- Published
- 2014-05-17
- Pages
- 110 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 22.86 x 2.54 x 27.94 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781606997291
- ISBN-10
- 9781606997291
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/United States/Hispanic
Featuring Jaime Hernandez's longtime Love and Rockets heroine Maggie, The Love Bunglers explores the suppression of her family history. Because these secrets can't be dealt with openly, they weigh heavily on her mind. But Maggie's ability to navigate and find meaning in her life — despite losing her culture, her brother, her profession, and her friends — is what's made her a compelling character. After a lifetime of losses, Maggie finds, in the second half, her longtime off-and-on lover, Ray Dominguez. In taking us through lives, deaths, and near-fatalities, The Love Bunglers encapsulates Maggie's emotional history as it moves from resignation to memories of loss, to sudden violence (a theme in this story) and eventually to love and contentment. Hernandez has been following his longtime character, Maggie, around for several decades, which lends this book a powerful emotional resonance.
Jaime Hernandez was one of six siblings born and raised in Oxnard, California. His mother passed down a love of comics, which for Jaime became a passion rivaled only by his interest in the burgeoning punk rock scene of 1970s Southern California. Together with his brothers Gilbert and Mario, Jaime co-created the ongoing comic book series Love and Rockets in 1981, which Gilbert and Jaime continue to both write and draw to this day. Jaime's work began as a perfect (if unlikely) synthesis of the anarchistic, do-it-yourself aesthetic of the punk scene and an elegant cartooning style that recalled masters such as Charles M. Schulz and Alex Toth. Love and Rockets has evolved into one of the great bodies of American literary fiction, spanning five decades and countless high-water marks in the medium's history. In 2016, Hernandez won the prestigious Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his graphic novel, The Love Bunglers . In 2017, he (along with Gilbert) was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame, and, in 2018, he released his first children's book, the Aesop Book Prize-winning The Dragon Slayer: Folktales from Latin America . He is a lifelong Angeleno.
Reviews
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One more time a beautifully drawn story, witty, clever, touchy. Another episode in Maggie's life, and maybe the last one - as it sounds like like a conclusion to a long story which from 'Music for Mechanics' (#1) up to this album, has to be definitively considered as a masterpiece in its entirety.
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I am a forever fan of Jaime & Love & Rockets.. this may definitely help to get a sense of the characters & their intertwined histories. If you are not familiar with them, you may relish in the charming art that displays emotions without the use of words..or in the dialogue itself, sometimes brash, sometimes reserved, always authentic. For me, this story brought up a lot of feelings not only being able to relate to Maggie & her upbringing/family, or her relationship with Ray & others, but also for the violence thread mentioned in the description. Without giving much away, it could be a trigger for anyone who has had a similar experience, but is important & crucial in highlighting the possibly devastating effects of not properly addressing these sorts of occurrences (ie. family secrets being "swept under the rug"). It is like a brief exposé of who Maggie is & all that has shaped her life over time.
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Love and Rockets is the best series ever. Love Bunglers is one of the truly great tales of our time. Genuinely heartwarming and genuinely disturbing. Top notch story telling and art from one the greatest artists working today. I can't recommend this book enough.
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We all know and love Maggie Chascarillo, but everyone has secrets. This graphic novel covers Maggie in the present day - overweight, managing an apartment block and trying to reboot her career as a mechanic. It also gives us some poignant insights into a chapter of Maggie's past, when she went to live in Cadezza (the 'brown town') with her family. Pre-teen Maggie is familiar from the earlier books, but we also get to meet an adorable, opinionated toddler version of her sister Esther, and find out more about her brothers, including Calvin. Always seen as 'weird,' he falls in with some local boys and submits to some terrible things, thinking he is protecting his family, but when the ringleader of the group starts looking at Maggie, Calvin snaps... The family's life is broken apart by revelations of Maggie's father's infidelity (her mother knew, but chooses to blame her daughter rather than her husband). Maggie and her family return to Hoppers and try to re-integrate, in a chapter told by Maggie's best friend, Letty Chavez, whose life is cut short in three of the saddest, most beautiful frames Jaime has ever created. He really has lost none of his power. In the present, Maggie and her ex-boyfriend Ray struggle to reconnect, and Ray disappears - but why? Can these two outrun the past and be together? One of the strongest and subtlest books in the series.
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Wunderbar. Fast hätte Jaime mir das Herz gebrochen, und stellenweise fürchtete ich mich vor dem Umblättern. Aber es geschehen auch Dinge, auf die ich Jahrzehnte lang gewartet habe. Als Einstieg in Love and Rockets ist The Love Bunglers nur bedingt geeignet, man hat viel mehr davon, wenn man bereits einen Bezug zu den Figuren hat. Aber jedem, dem Maggie und Ray vertraut sind, kann ich diesen Band nur empfehlen.