Growing up Mexican American in Oxnard, Jaime Hernandez and his siblings learned early not to mess with the status quo. "We were rock 'n' rollers in the middle of lowrider culture," recalls the critically acclaimed cartoonist. "That was unheard of." As a result, they kept certain passions to themselves. "There was enough of us, six kids, and we all shared the same interests," he recalls. "But we all knew that when we went out of the house, there were some people you didn't talk to about it, and some you could."

He wasn't afraid of a beatdown; it was more about wanting to belong. "I hung out with guys who didn't care about the music that I liked, people who didn't read comics," says Hernandez. Sitting in the living room of the Pasadena home he shares with his wife and six-year-old daughter, he's dressed in traditional punk-rock-vato black from head to toe. "But I would get drunk with them, and drive around and party and stuff like that, and it was a whole different thing." He found it easier not to mix the worlds inside and outside home. "It would kinda create this tension, or keep me further from them. And I like to keep certain types of friends as they are, 'cause I get the best out of them that way."

Besides, what would his drinking buddies have thought if they'd known that teenaged Jaime and older brother Gilbert were not only punk-rockers, but also busy creating their own comics - in which the main characters were ... girls? Beautiful, feisty, goofy, maddening, stoic, impulsive girls. Curvy, pouty-lipped girls who looked like classic pin-ups. But they weren't the vacant ornaments usually found in comics: These women had richly detailed inner and outer lives. They fixed rocketships, yearned to be superheroes, thumped each other in the Lucha Libre ring, and got their kicks hassling the local 5-0.

In 1981, the Hernandez Brothers, a.k.a. "Los Bros," put all these women into a little zine called Love and Rockets ... and comics were never the same again. Gorgeously penned in black-and-white, but with drama that was pure Technicolor, each brother's stories were vastly different, yet equally engaging. Gilbert's part of the book featured haunting tales from a fictional Central American town called Palomar, while Jaime's section hit closer to home with tales of Maggie Chascarrillo and Hopey Glass, two pint-sized punk chix from the fictional SoCal suburb of Hoppers.

The siblings had no idea what to do with their creations, but eldest brother Mario, an occasional contributor to the comic, said, "'Hey, let's do it,' and so we self-published the book," says Jaime. "Gilbert and I were trying to figure out where to put this stuff. We just thought the market was all Marvel and DC."

Back then, it kind of was. But it turned out that Los Bros were in the vanguard of the fabled '80s comics renaissance. By 1982, Love and Rockets had been snapped up by comics heavy Fantagraphics Books - publisher of such underground icons as R. Crumb, Peter Bagge, Charles Burns, and Dan Clowes. Both brothers garnered critical acclaim and rabid readerships for their addictive yarns, based on their observations of barrio life and immersion in the late-'70s punk explosion, and blended with magic realism, cultural anthropology, gay and straight sex, and a heaping dose of emotional authenticity. But it was Jaime who breezily showed readers a grittier Southern California existence, far removed from the stereotypical "I Love L.A." images of top-down cruising, catching waves, and chasing stardom.

Still, his work fairly exploded with the excitement of real life in all its complicated, multifaceted glory. This was where his tendency to compartmentalize friends came in handy. His stories are notable for rendering "alternative" subjects - punk, Mexican-American culture, polysexuality - in a style that evoked such classics as the striking lines of mainstream comics titan Alex Toth, the kinetic humor of Dennis the Menace's Hank Ketchum, and the cartoonish realism of Archie comics. Unlike the impish perennial brat or the Riverdale High teens, however, Maggie, Hopey, and their vast roster of pals aren't eternally young. Yet, over two action-packed decades, they've scarcely slowed down while wreaking hilarious-to-horrifying havoc on each other, their friends and relatives, and the world at large.

~ Los Bros and Sisters ~

The original Love and Rockets ran 50 issues, ending in 1996. Jaime and Gilbert continued their respective sagas in Fantagraphics titles like Penny Century and Luba, but these proved less successful. So, in 2000, Los Bros revived their original "brand" with Love and Rockets, Vol. II.

"No one wanted [the other titles] because it didn't say 'Love and Rockets.' We had to accept the fact that we live off this name," says Hernandez. He chuckles. "Our egos weren't blasted or anything; we just thought, 'Well, look, we're gonna do the same work anyway, so let's just do [Love and Rockets] again."

Showing his punk roots, Hernandez says he expected Vol. II to do better than the other books but was still surprised they weren't accused of selling out. "I thought people might think we were milking it for everything it's worth."

Even if they were, so what? Lesser artists have pimped their work far more crassly. True, there's a lot of L&R stuff out there: Along with the 15 volumes of The Complete Love & Rockets Fantagraphics has put out since 1985, last year it published Palomar: The "Heartbreak Soup" Stories, a gigantic collection featuring all of Gilbert's Palomar stories from the original L&R. And this September, Jaime got the same treatment with Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories, a phonebook-sized volume anthologizing their entire Volume I saga.

Partners in crime and on-again/off-again lovers, Maggie and Hopey have had escapades both plausible and fantastic, but the meaningful moments have all been heart-rendingly true to life. Bisexual Maggie is always falling for some guy, then hating herself when it doesn't work out, and fleeing back to Hopey. She's tormented by her fluctuating weight and struggles with her Mexican-American identity. Plus, as a female mechanic, she deals with sexism a lot. Hopey's inner life is nowhere near as transparent as Maggie's, but her volatility and random sense of mischief give her a loudness that perhaps compensates for her small size and traumatic childhood. And she clearly adores Maggie.

These characters have been authentic enough to attract many actual women readers, yet more amazing is that they've not only survived but thrived in a market dominated by male readers. Published about three times a year now, Love and Rockets may not sell as many copies as Superman or X-Men titles, but Los Bros do make a living from their own little cottage empire of books, T-shirts, sketchbooks, even trading cards.

"People always ask, 'You're a heterosexual male. Why ... women?'" Hernandez laughs. "And I say, 'I don't know.' Maybe ´´ because I like drawing them, and I feel obligated to give them personality or something? It's just something I've never been able to answer." Both Jaime and Gilbert have lightly suggested they're simply giving female characters equal time in the man's man's man's man's world of comics. "But then someone will say, 'No, you have an insight; it's more than just writing a character and making it a woman.'" He shrugs. "Maybe it's observing - maybe 'cause our dad died when I was seven, and we were raised by our mom, by herself. She never remarried. So maybe we saw the world through her eyes."

~ The Archie Solution ~

And maybe by seeing through their mother's eyes, the brothers by extension saw women in general as fully formed personalities, and could therefore more deftly capture their humanity, along with characteristics of their gender. His upbringing left Jaime free to tap not only his own life but those of everyone around him, consistently resulting in vivid personalities.

Maggie is his punk self. Hopey is "like a friend you had when you were young," he says, "someone who was a great friend, but there was a lot you didn't know about that person, and maybe it's better that way." Gorgeous, tough Terry Downe is the mysterious ex-runaway who rarely lets anyone past her hard-won, icy façade. And the enigmatic Isabel "Izzy" Ortiz, a troubled woman Maggie's known since childhood, is the classic neighborhood "witch lady."

Yet, Jaime's male characters are just as fully formed, whether they're Maggie's vato brothers tinkering with truck engines and swigging cheap beer, or fish-out-of-water white boy Doyle, a stripper-hound with an overactive sense of justice. If Maggie is Jaime's female avatar in the book, then his male stand-in is Ray Dominguez, another of Maggie's longtime love interests, who experiences life outside the barrio early on but, rather than choosing a path, continues to drift among the separate spheres he occupies.

"He's kind of like me, if I never found my niche, my comics," says Hernandez. "Ray's a pretty talented guy, but he is kind of just swimming, looking. I just said, 'What if my life was this way instead of this way?' Because if I had a character who was just like me, it would be the most boring character in the world." He laughs.

"Boring" isn't a word you'd ever apply to the Maggie and Hopey stories, and not just because those girls are always into something that's going to spiral out of control. Hernandez crams his panels with details you can geek out on forever. He draws the best crowd scenes, filling a ballroom with disparate guests - masked wrestlers, costumed superheroes, black-clad artsy types, horned billionaires, scruffy punks, South American diplomats, robots, maybe a monster or two - who sip cocktails, chat, and occasionally throw each other through windows. He deftly employs sight gags and comic exaggeration, and he loves to slip in surprising little references to other bits of pop culture. Once or twice, you'll even catch a glimpse of a guy who looks a lot like ol' Carrot-Top himself, Archie.

"It's just playful," he says with a grin. "Stuff like that is like, I need a look for someone, and I'll go, 'Oh, what the hell, we'll give him Archie hair.'"

In a recent issue of Love and Rockets, Jaime inserted a character from Dan Clowes's Eightball into a scene at the bar where Hopey works. Such moves are at once affectionate homage and a hearty poke in the eye. "One time, I drew the artist Peter Bagge in the comic," he recalls. "I kinda made him a dorky character, just so he would maybe read it, and go, 'Oh, you fucker, I'll get you back for this!' It doesn't really mean anything, but it doesn't hurt the story."

Indeed, his peripheral flights of fancy don't derail the emotional impact, and all the silly things he sketches in never diminish the subtle expressions, sweeping gestures, and dramatic reactions that make his work so affecting.

He's happy to have moved so many readers, but he maintains a certain bemusement about his work's appeal. "People tell me how much they love the comic," he says, "and I go, yeah, well, it's just a guy sitting there for hours, going over and over" - he makes motions of filling in a picture with a pen. "And then he takes a break for lunch, goes to pick up his daughter at school, comes home, and goes back to work."

Maggie, Hopey, et al. have settled into their niches too, but they've hardly become dull. Instead, they're developing even deeper personalities, as their grand experiences have given way to more intimate revelations.

"It's kind of like the characters are growing old with me," says Hernandez, who's 45. "I watch how my life is changing, and how the people around me are changing. People disappear, people come back. Then you find out they had a whole life when you weren't lookin'."

Maggie in particular struggles to define herself as she ages. When she visits her family, she privately acknowledges feeling uncomfortable in the barrio, then berates herself in the rearview mirror: "You're white!" Worse, perhaps, her punk identity isn't serving her so well anymore. She comes to a startling revelation: "I-I'm normal."

"I had gone through it, too," says Hernandez. "I lived off a punk ego for a long time, where you just feel you're indestructible, and you have all the answers: 'You may think you know, but I was punk, so I know.'"

But punk was by its nature transient. Yeah, yeah - it's still a marketable youth subculture. But the movement that gave otherwise outcast young people a secret club of sorts, a way to belong when they didn't fit into the larger culture, has long been co-opted. Yet, even if it hadn't been, it would be hard to stay connected to a seat-of-the-pants existence based largely on protesting the system, when the demands of the adult world make rebellion sort of pointless and inconvenient.

"After a while, you find you're no different from anybody else, and you're like, 'Oh, my God! I'm one of them!' Heaven forbid," Hernandez says. "That's what gets Maggie in that scene: 'I can't live off that anymore.'"

~ Learning from Punk Rock ~

After spending his first 30 years in Oxnard, Hernandez married and moved to Studio City, where he spent another decade, eventually getting divorced. He ended up in Pasadena about five years ago, after reconnecting with and then marrying a friend he knew from his punk days. "It was never romantic [before]. We just stayed friends, and one day she called me and said she was back in Pasadena. I came over here, and I met her daughter, who is now my daughter. She's wonderful, they're wonderful, and I'm a happily boring dad."

Hernandez may be content with his transition to real adulthood, but his characters - although not really smashing it up anymore - exude a palpable angst as they marry and divorce, search for a mate, reexamine relationships long taken for granted, and simply reminisce.

Sometimes the reverie can be lighthearted, if still bittersweet and revealing. When Maggie remembers her now-dead childhood friend Letty, Jaime distills into one single panel his own long-ago experiences of keeping his musical obsessions from his Oxnard homeboys: Maggie, having discovered rock 'n' roll through Letty's older brother, stands amid her teenage homegirls, looking like a bad-ass lowriderette, but thinking of the opening line from KISS's "Deuce": "Get up, and get your grandma out of here."

Music is one big thing that makes Locas three-dimensional, often manifested in song lyrics wafting through the scenes. A punk tune blasts through a house party, a sad old ballad weaves out of a lonely radio, drunk Maggie gurgles a few lines from some silly jingle.

"Punk was a real big point in my life," Hernandez says, "and it all revolved around music. I thought music rules which paths people take."

Music has lost some of its immediacy for him - he doesn't keep up with bands like he used to - but it still floats through his SoCal landscapes, places where a lot has happened over two decades. "With L.A. constantly knocking down and building, it makes time move pretty fast," he says. "So 'the past' is not even 20 years ago."

Just as the characters reflect the changes in Jaime's life and the lives of those around him, so does the environment the Locas inhabit reflect shifts in his world. Twenty years of telling the same people's stories have almost inadvertently captured the transience of Southern California's terrain - something that's happening all around us, all the time, and which Angelenos comment on every day, even though the rest of the planet sees nothing ´´ but permanent icons like the Hollywood sign or the Capitol Records building.

"Now that so much time has passed, a lot of the places they went to when they were young, and didn't care about them, became these kind of monuments," Hernandez says. "There are a lot of skeletons in the closet. I like going back."

For example, Maggie - now managing an apartment building in the Valley - returns to Hoppers and finds the barrio so changed, she's not even sure which house she used to live in. Some places don't really even register with the gang until they're gone - like Maddog's, an old punk hangout that burns down. Other spots have history spanning generations in the story, like the haunted Galindo house in Hoppers, which Izzy finally obtains after coveting it for a lifetime.

That house also recently burned down, but it didn't go out like any ordinary domicile. After all, a staggering array of spirits lived there. When Maggie dives into the conflagration to search for Izzy, she's pulled into a disorienting reverie, reliving different moments the house has witnessed. But this flashback is a two-way street: As various scenes from the Locas' past go by, present-day Maggie appears as a ghost to the specters she sees through doorways and windows of the burning house. In one such mirage, a party with Maggie and Hopey's girlfriends, Penny perceives the more matronly modern Maggie as a spirit who looks like "someone's mom." Magic realism, indeed.

"Growing up Mexican American, you bring the old superstitious stuff from the old country," says Hernandez. "It's handed down from generations, because it's basically fun storytelling. And the older I get - and the characters get older, and so much has happened - I start to find a symbol for everything: 'This is because of this, this house had this ghost, yet this also happened here, so why don't I tie that together?' And it just all becomes this big what's-reality-and-what's-not kind of thing."

Even these more far-out bits of storytelling have roots in regular old real life. "For instance, my mother just sold the house I was raised in and got a new house," he says. "We [kids] were kinda, in a silent way, sorta freaking out, like [affects a thunderstruck tone], 'You mean it's gone, it's over? We can never go back?' I think about that stuff a lot. I just have ties to images from when I'm three, just seeing certain furniture or something that happened in part of the house. That stuff stays with me, and I like to put that in the comic."

As longtime readers have noticed, Hernandez is now more apt to use the real names of SoCal locales, even getting as specific as identifying the parking hassles at the Kinko's on Ventura and Laurel Canyon. In the Locas' earlier days, he might let out real-world references (like, say, to the mighty Oki-Dog) that only Angelenos would get, but he was more likely to fictionalize familiar worlds, à la making Oxnard into Hoppers.

"I've always liked watching some Raymond Chandler movie version of [L.A.], where someone's saying, 'I gave her a lift to the corner of Vermont and Franklin.' And I'm going, 'That's where House of Pies is!'" He laughs. "So now I like to name names, for people who know where [a place] is, or people who would want to see it if they come to L.A."

Still, it's not just a desire to let readers in Timbuktu know they really could go to the Forrest Ackerman Museum if they traveled to our town. "Early on, I wasn't 100 percent sure what time frame these people lived in," he says. "I didn't want to name anything specific, because then it's like, 'Well, that means they live in 1987 right now.' Now, I have a better idea, and I have learned to put stuff down so that it doesn't hurt the time frame."

Whether he's specific about locations or not, however, Locas retains a surprising timelessness, considering the stories so vividly evoke, not just the early-'80s SoCal punk scene - complete with hippie-haters, wall-taggers, skateboarders, spiky-haired freaks, hardcore skinheads, scuzzy scenesters, and overzealous cops - but also how the sound of the underground, and the culture surrounding it, changed through the '90s and into the present. These things aren't overanalyzed or pontificated on, just reflected in what people wear - Hopey's hardcore-band tees giving way to a Shonen Knife shirt - or in their passing disdain for "bad punk bands in the Top 40," or even in how the newly longhaired Maggie and Hopey, running into each other again after a long separation, simultaneously grab each other's locks and bellow incredulously, "You're a hippie!"

~ Drawing a Salary ~

Hernandez, whose own look hasn't changed much since his punk days, finds his priorities have shifted ... a little. Where once he shunned such ideas as making a Maggie and Hopey movie, for example, now he admits he wouldn't mind seeing his creations get such exposure.

"I have a home and a small family to help support, and so I do think about the rewards here, you know, like how much money I'm gonna get." He laughs. "If Hollywood calls, now I do listen, if they really have something to say. I have to think about art and surviving at the same time. When I was young, I just had to think about art. Now it's the balance of, how do I keep my integrity and make a comfortable living?"

Still, the idea of delivering his creations into the hands of another gives him pause. "I'm just so close to these girls," he says. "Anybody else being them would be really scary." Then again, he allows, "I haven't seen it done, so I don't know. Seeing stuff like Ghost World, I can see how it could be ... and I do think the material can translate, without being held up by this comic/fantasy backdrop. I would like to get a film out of it, at least once." He chuckles. "And then I could say I did it, and never do it again."