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<\/a>The following conversation took place on April 19 at the Ray Stark Family Theater at USC during The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.<\/em><\/p>\n JORDAN CRANE: Good afternoon, everybody. Hello. This afternoon, we have the distinct pleasure and honor of speaking with the two greatest cartoonists to have ever worked in the medium. They’ve been publishing for about 45 years now. You can call it a legacy or a body of work, yet it maintains a vibrancy and immediacy that is unparalleled in many artists\u2019 history of working. It’s constantly challenging the reader with new things, changing and growing as artists. We as readers adapt and change with them. Which is an incredible relationship, authentic and beautiful.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n So we\u2019re very happy to be here with them today. Thanks to both of you for being here with us.<\/strong><\/p>\n Many artists working in any medium might get kind of attached to what works, what people like. It doesn’t seem like either one of you has that issue. Gilbert, you’re drawing comics at the rate of, like, the house is on fire. And Jaime, you know \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n JAIME HERNANDEZ:<\/strong> Slow.<\/p>\n You say you’re slow, but you’re still putting out comics at a faster rate than most of my generation.<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT HERNANDEZ:<\/strong> It\u2019s just avoiding yard work. If I work all the time \u2026 the dishes? Nah, I gotta go finish this graphic novel.<\/p>\n My brain is like a runaway train. It just won’t stop. I have that kind of brain, and it just keeps pumping out stuff. A lot of it’s probably not worth anything, but it does come out. It just keeps rolling out. I work seven days a week ’cause I can’t stop. I can’t stop. I get stuck, and I like to take breaks and hang out with my wife and daughter and go out and do stuff, but most of the time, if I’m home during the day, I’m just working constantly. Nothing gets finished. You’re just always going around in circles, doing stuff. But eventually it gets there.<\/p>\n You have several stories going at once?<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> I\u2019m usually doing three comics at once.<\/p>\n What happens is that if I stop one I could be there for days or weeks, just not knowing what to do next. So I’ll just jump into another comic, and your brain resets. But pretty soon, you’re doing three comics you can’t finish. So you have to emphasize one, but you have to stop. But what’s good about it is, you finish that one and you go back and look at the other two, and they’re half done.<\/p>\n It works out, but you have to slow down. I can’t just barrel through like that for the rest of my cartoon career.<\/p>\n Why not?<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> Burnout. We haven’t stopped writing and drawing for 45 years. We’ve never stopped, you know, we might have shifted to other comics or this and that. So think about that: \u201cOh, the legacy of Love and Rockets.” We, as human beings, haven’t stopped.<\/p>\n JAIME:<\/strong> What’s my question?<\/p>\n So you’re the slow one, right?<\/strong><\/p>\n JAIME:<\/strong> Yeah, yeah, right. I just don\u2019t have the thing he has. I wasn’t born with that runaway train thing. But if I get into what I’m doing, then it rolls and it rolls, and it creates in my head. I’m always surprising myself because I’m letting it write itself, but I’m trying to catch up to doing it. I’m still working in my head all the time, while I’m doing the dishes, that kind of thing.<\/p>\n Because I created these characters that I know so well I’m just thinking about what they’re up to today. And even if I’m not doing, let’s say, my character Maggie, I still know where she is while I’m doing some other characters. I still know where she lives. I know, \u201cOh, what’s going on? Oh, someone’s sick. Okay. All right. But I’ll get to that later because I’m working on these other characters.\u201d<\/p>\n So that helps me keep the ideas going. Just getting it to get to the page is harder for me than it is for him. But like I said, when it clicks, then I can go crazy and I can finish a comic really quickly. The rest of the time I’m just sitting there going, \u201cOh my God, this thing’s never gonna come out. I’ve got all these characters. Why don’t they write their own stories?\u201d And they do, but if I let them it\u2019s like, \u201cYou’re gonna what, drive a tractor? I’m not gonna draw a tractor. Sorry.\u201d You know, I argue with them like I know them.<\/p>\n The thing that slows me down is I’m 66 years old, and I’ve been doing this for over 40 years. I’m just like, \u201cGod I’m so tired. I don’t want to draw that. Wait, haven’t I drawn that picture of someone walking in front of a store before?\u201d I think that everything that’s going on in my head, that the readers are doing it too. Like, \u201cOh, I’ve seen that. He already did that. 20 years ago, 30 years ago.\u201d But I have to get past that fear of repeating. Humans, really \u2026 their personalities make them repeat things. So it’s good. I go, \u201cWhy didn\u2019t I think of this two months ago?\u201d<\/p>\n It’s just an interesting dynamic I have with myself. My wife, Katie, she does her comics. I go, \u201cWhat are you doing tonight?\u201d She goes, \u201cYeah, I’m gonna draw.\u201d And then I turn away for two minutes, and I look, and she’s at the drawing board drawing. I\u2019m like, \u201cHow do you do that?\u201d So it’s funny. I can’t do that like they can.<\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> After a while, I figured out that I can start fast and do a bunch of stuff, but it takes me forever to finish. Jaime takes a long time to figure out what he’s gonna do, and once he knows, he finishes. So we’re the opposite.<\/p>\n It sounds like both of you, in your own way, it doesn’t shut off. You were saying, the burnout\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> Well burnout meaning physically burnt out, ’cause you did something exhausting. And then you just relax and then you come back to it later. Yeah, not that burnout, like, \u201cWhat shall I do? My body’s failing, my brain.\u201d It’s not a real burnout \u2014 it will be someday, you know \u2014 I’m 69. There will be a burnout someday, but I don’t feel it. I don’t think it, so … we’ll see.<\/p>\n So there’s all these quotes about comics by cartoonists that seem embittered in one way or another. From memory as best I can, I think Jack Kirby says, \u201cComics will break your heart.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> Yeah. The business will.<\/p>\n And then Schulz said something similar along the lines of, \u201cComics will destroy you.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> Hold up. Hold up there, Charles. You created Peanuts<\/em>. Come on, Charles. Don\u2019t give me that fucking … you created Peanuts<\/em>, dude.<\/p>\n Wally Wood famously said, \u201cIf I had it to do again, I would chop my hands off.\u201d And then shortly thereafter, he killed himself.<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> Yes. Well, Kirby and Wood basically reshaped comic books from the ’60s, and they got no money. That’s what that’s about. They were just not paid well.<\/p>\n And so there’s this thing. John Stanley said, \u201cComics is a young man’s game.\u201d And then he quit comics, and for the remainder of his years, he screen printed steel rulers for Fairgate. <\/strong>You can buy them. Look on eBay, you can get yourself a John Stanley-printed ruler.<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> John Stanley, actually, his most famous comics were Little Lulu comics. He didn’t create them, but he wrote them \u2014<\/p>\n Incredibly.<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> Some of the best comics for kids. Ever. A lot of times they say, \u201cOh, read this old comic,\u201d you know, \u201cit has interesting art or something.\u201d But it doesn’t really. These are just as good now. John Stanley wrote for the ages.<\/p>\n My children read them in stacks.<\/strong><\/p>\n JAIME:<\/strong> Mine too.<\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> And then John Stanley would do side projects, and they’d say he was fast, so he would edit science fiction horror comics that had no violence in them, but they’re some of the best horror comics I’ve ever seen. They’re great, but they\u2019re not violent at all. It’s all [within the comics] code.<\/p>\n So anyway, he was bitter.<\/p>\n JAIME:<\/strong> I hate to say it, but in a way, the difference between me and Gilbert and them, these great men that I hold way up high, is that they have someone bugging them, constantly. Editors. And we don’t have that so much.<\/p>\n Crumb also said, \u201cComics is a young man’s game\u201d years ago. Back when he was a young man, I guess. But, when he thought he was old. Now he’s 82. He just put something out now.<\/strong><\/p>\n JAIME:<\/strong> I just came to a conclusion that Gilbert and I were very serious about doing this, and we were great self editors. So after a while, our editors at Fantagraphics just backed off and waited for it to be finished. That was it. And I think that was pretty cool, because I’m not a bitter cartoonist. I’m bitter at myself. (laughs)<\/p>\n Comic books are the best thing in the world because I didn’t get that grief. Or not as much as they did. I mean, guys like Kirby went from a publisher to publisher and they treated him like dirt. Even if he was the leader, the guy creating worlds.<\/p>\n \u00a0It was a pretty big money medium at the time. It was probably a lot like music where a lot of the people at the top of the company are making a bunch of money, and then the people who are actually making the art are kind of down there, like, \u201cOh \u2026\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> I was just going to say, the music business is the same thing. We met a guy in Texas who actually worked with Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Bo Diddley. And he said, \u201cThe reason those guys were pissed off and alcoholic druggies was because they never got paid.\u201d Chuck Berry toured until he was 90. He was terrible by then, but didn\u2019t have any money. Same with Little Richard. Every time he was interviewed, he was crying because they were playing his music, they were doing all this, and he got no money.<\/p>\n Anyway, that’s the hard reality of it. And that’s in comics, too. And you know, when you have bosses and the bosses check, that’s hard. So Jaime and I are just weird. We just kept doing it despite that problem, yeah.<\/p>\n I think that contributes to your vigorous longevity. The freedom that you have to choose what you’re doing.<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> It’s easy to take that for granted, let me tell you.<\/p>\n What do you mean, it’s easy?<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> Sometimes you just think, \u201cOh, I’m just doing my comics. I don\u2019t need to fucking worry about bills. I don’t need to worry about nothing.\u201d That was in the early days. Yeah, you do. You gotta worry about real life.<\/p>\n Going from this story to this story, you know, this story stops talking to you and you can go over and listen to this one for a while. That freedom wouldn’t come with an editor.<\/strong><\/p>\n Something I’m curious about is a ride-along. Would you show us what a week looks like? How do you do a week in terms of, \u201cI need to get this done.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n JAIME:<\/strong> Right. For me, it\u2019s kind of like, \u201cOkay, I’m gonna start on my comic today.\u201d And then I get breakfast out of the way, shower, whatever. And then I sit there and twiddle my thumbs with a blank paper, and I’m going, \u201cUm, okay, um\u2026\u201d And then you realize it’s getting dark. It’s like, \u201cOkay, I’ll do this tomorrow. I’ll start fresh tomorrow.\u201d Then two weeks go by. \u201cI think I’ll call Jordan and see what he\u2019s up to.\u201d<\/p>\n Like I said, it clicks, and just this past week, the new one I’m working on clicked. All of a sudden, this has a purpose. So, I’m on the downhill now. You know, just because for some reason, I believed in it. And so, when that happens, the week is, like, I can sit there for a few hours, and do a comic, and then not worry about getting up to eat lunch, or, you know, whatever. But then most of the time, I’m just like, \u201cOh, God, it’s five hours before dinner. What am I gonna do?\u201d<\/p>\n So what do you do? I mean, do you wander around? Do you just sit there? You said twiddling your thumbs, obviously, it’s\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n JAIME:<\/strong> Yeah. I channel surf. (laughs)<\/p>\n Oh, so you’re looking at other things.<\/strong><\/p>\n JAIME:<\/strong> I\u2019m looking at other things, I’m looking at a recent comic I bought, or a magazine, or I go ask Katie, \u201cDo you need anything from the grocery store?\u201d It’s so organic. Whatever helps, whatever works. The only part I’m guilty about is that it’ll happen for three weeks and I’ll go, \u201cOh, shit.\u201d<\/p>\n Did you say three or 30?<\/strong><\/p>\n JAIME:<\/strong> Take your pick. [laughs]<\/p>\n I keep talking about this but if the creativity is there, I’m at the board, you know? And I’m writing and rewriting, ’cause when I started doing the comic back in ’81, ’82, it was, like, \u201cOkay, what am I gonna do on this page?\u201d And I would do a panel in the corner, and I’d go, \u201cHey, cool, I\u2019ll put a dinosaur in the background. Hey, cool.\u201d And then I’ll add another panel until the page is full.<\/p>\n Now, I write stuff, and then I’m gonna put it on the page, but I can’t picture all the images or the settings where they are. I know who the characters are, and I do the word balloons and the drawings of all the word balloons now. And so I\u2019m always like, \u201cOkay, how do I position them?\u201d Maggie’s got the first balloon, so she’s on this side of the page. Another person is answering her, and they’re on this side of the page. But the next panel is, like, \u201cOh, but Maggie’s interrupted.\u201d Okay, I gotta put a person here, and now Maggie’s on the other side of the scene, so I turn the room around.<\/p>\n And that’s how my comics are now. I’m following what the words are doing. And that didn’t used to be. And I kind of like it, ’cause it’s controlling, it helps me keep it in control. And they\u2019ll go, \u201cWow. Wow, that was a great panel, you did,\u201d and I go, \u201cWow, that was hard, because I had to put the person that was in the center, I had to turn it and make the person over there,\u201d and stuff like that. And that’s fun, actually, for me. But I just needed to find those basic rules to do my comic. I need that, someone telling me what I have to do. You know, even if it’s me telling me what to do.<\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> You know what’s heartbreaking is when you do that dinosaur, and then by the time you get to the end of the page, it doesn’t belong there.<\/p>\n Ugh!<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> What I’ve done before, I actually came up with an eight-page story to fit that dinosaur into. And that makes you create a story. See, that’s why I don’t fear it or make fun of myself. \u201cOh, you stupid idiot.\u201d Well, I am a stupid idiot, but the thing is that now you have a dinosaur story. Or you do the old photocopy it, snip it, and then stick it somewhere else. It’s heartbreaking, ’cause it’s like, \u201cThat’s the best dinosaur I ever drew!\u201d<\/p>\n Jaime, I think you write all of your story out on a legal pad, yeah? To work out scenes. And Gilbert, I don’t know how you do it now, but a while ago I read that you don’t want to know how it ends, because you want to find out.<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> That was back then.<\/p>\n Okay, that was then. How about now?<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> Now, okay, this is creepy. I just draw the things not knowing what they’re about. At all. Just drawing the characters moving here, moving there, moving there. So I pick a setting where I can just repeat what they’re doing, except change their clothes, or, you know, emphasize something else. But a lot of times, it’s just, like \u2026 what are they talking about?<\/p>\n Because I’ve written so much stuff that it comes slower now. Because there’s so much stuff to do. Because before, I was just doing the Palomar stories. Everything went in. And then a couple of side stories. But I didn’t worry about them because nobody was looking at them, scrutinizing like they do Palomar. Then after a while, I started doing it for everything. I started putting myself into everything, and I gotta slow that up, because I gotta use some of those ideas for this part, that part. Sometimes I’ll take whole sections out.<\/p>\n And now the way movies are, so many popular movies, especially the A24 ones, are so much influenced by indie comics from the \u201890s, because that’s where all the directors and screenwriters started reading comic books. So there’s so much of those crazy wacko Yorgos Lanthimos movies that they’re just like independent comics. Like, whoa, now what do we do? Because now you’re seeing Emma Stone do this stuff, you know?<\/p>\n So anyway, that’s a concern of mine. Not a worry, but like, I can’t just be wacky anymore because it’s in the films and it\u2019s winning Oscars. So I gotta think of new things.<\/p>\n JAIME:<\/strong> We always had that thing in our head, I don’t know if you still do, but where we always go, \u201cThis has got to be better than other entertainment.\u201d We gotta do it, even if it’s our little drawings in our little comic. We still gotta be, somehow, ahead of the curve. And I’m starting to get to, like, \u201cAh, forget that.\u201d [laughs)]<\/p>\n But there was always a thing pushing us like, okay, so TV’s catching up. Movies are catching up.<\/p>\n Do you think so? I hear you about the A24.<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> I think Dan Clowes\u2019s graphic novel Monica<\/em> had just come out, and it had the scenes in it where they’re in a cult place, and they have to wait to go inside this, I don’t know, a men’s room or something like that. And so I watched Kinds of Kindness<\/em> and that has the exact same scene! Maybe a lot of people enjoying these films don’t recognize it, but I do because I\u2019m close to it.<\/p>\n Oh, especially FX channel. There’s the guy Ryan Murphy. He swiped so much shit from me for American Horror Story.<\/em> Literally the dialogue and scenes that I’m like, my head spun. Okay, he reads my comics. You know, and then I’m thinking like, I don’t read a lot of comics now. How much more are they taking from?<\/p>\n We don’t think about it so much anymore because, you know, we’ve been doing it for so long, but when we first started doing it, and our comics started catching on, it’s about Latinos, and nobody else is doing it like this, and nobody else is bringing it home the way we did. So that was what we were talking about. Well, we’re gonna do it. ‘Cause TV’s not gonna do it. Or you couldn\u2019t do it at the time. You can do it now. Because things have changed, because of streaming and all that shit, but back then, it was like, no, they’re not doing it right. And they weren’t.<\/p>\n You watch, let\u2019s have some Latinos on a TV show, ha ha ha, they’re idiots, they\u2019re gang guys. Okay. And then there’s this, or else they’re poor, and they have to struggle, and this and that. Yeah, fine, that’s reality, but there’s also people just living lives. It’s kind of what we wanted to emphasize, you know?<\/p>\n JAIME:<\/strong> One of the advantages we had early on was to just tell an old story and put Latinos in it. And they think it\u2019s the newest thing!<\/p>\n That was one of the things that I really appreciate in the way you tell stories is that it feels like it\u2019s coming from your direct experience, in a real way.<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> This is who we are, and it’s just easier to think of what our cousin did when we were 10 years old. It’s just more fun. To just think about the adventures we had with a lot of our high school friends, I used to hang out with low riders and stuff. They were wild nights, man, let me tell you. That kind of stuff. And that ended up in our comic. And then, we would hang out with our uncle one night, or one day he drove us around because our parents were busy. And, you know, we come back with just nice stories, or hanging out with your cousins. That was why so much of that was in our comics, that’s why it came out as original, because they’re not stories. They\u2019re stuff that we experienced.<\/p>\n And then you change it. And you don’t do the exact story. So that’s, like I said, the runaway train brain. It just slides through and takes all the victims with it, you know?<\/p>\n Did you ever see that show This Fool<\/em>?<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> Oh, yeah.<\/p>\n You know, he’s a big fan, obviously.<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> Yeah, yeah. Chris [Estrada] is a good guy.<\/p>\n There’s not many things like that on TV. They only had two seasons, and they were strong seasons, but that\u2019s it. Do you really think TV is catching up?<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> Hollywood’s going through that right now, where they just merge and dump projects that are better than the shit they put out, you know? Whoops, I’m in Hollywood. Sorry! [laughs]<\/p>\n Gilbert, there’s a wide variety to the stories you do, and definitely some of them aren’t gonna be on TV, for sure. The stories themselves, but more the vast relationships and the communities in your stories. It\u2019s not something we see, especially in movies, they don’t have that scope.<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> It’s not normal. It’s not the normal person’s brain. It’s his brains or her brains or my brains just got that lump that\u2019s just gonna do this stuff, but it doesn’t know when to quit. There\u2019ll be a time I slow down. But we\u2019ll see.<\/p>\n Right now, how do you feed it? How do you feed it and take care of it so that it can do its thing and not railroad the rest of your life?<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> I guess I\u2019ve backed off on the destructive \u2026 the hard part about it. That you get confused, you get angry, and don\u2019t know where to go and the existential crap \u2014 I dropped that a long time ago.<\/p>\n What was the hard part and how did you drop it?<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> This was years ago when I was doing the story Poison River,<\/em> and that is so dense. I couldn\u2019t even put splash pages. The page would just start with a nine panel grid and so much dialogue that I just overloaded with this stuff because as I was writing it, it would edit itself. I would go through the whole story because it was done in chapters in Love and Rockets,<\/em> and so I\u2019d go through this 16-page story and there\u2019d be no room. But that was just how the story worked out for me.<\/p>\n What Jaime used to do, I don\u2019t know if he still does, was write dialogue out on legal pads just to get them talking, and then you edit it. I didn\u2019t do that. I would just write, this is what I want them to say, but I would put it in the panel, I wouldn\u2019t write it on a sheet of paper or whatever. And pretty soon I would just get so clogged, I go, \u201cI gotta do it Jaime style.\u201d Let it happen and just take what you need and spread out the panels. Do a nine panel grid instead of 59 words in a balloon, that three panel sequence can be a page. That\u2019s all. Things like that. I learned the hard way. It was so hard and so crazy. I\u2019m surprised I finished it and people liked it.<\/p>\n So that was the worst of it. I learned to back down after that. Just take the same ideas and don\u2019t crowd it.<\/p>\n For some reason, people love crowded underground comics. When they like underground comics, the more detailed the better. Just overly rendered goo. [laughs] And that\u2019s kind of where I was at the time, so I had to stop. Birdland<\/em> was like that too.<\/p>\n So to a more enjoyable way of working. A way of working that feels more comfortable. Friendly.<\/strong><\/p>\n GILBERT:<\/strong> I look at old EC comics and skip half the balloons. They just talk so much. And then I go, I\u2019ve done this. I used to do this.<\/p>\n Jaime, what about you, how do you feed it? How do you take care of yourself through the difficult parts? I\u2019ve talked to you where you\u2019re like, \u201cThat\u2019s it! Guess I\u2019m done. No more comics in here.\u201d But you get through that. How do you do it?<\/strong><\/p>\n JAIME:<\/strong> I think the bottom line is I\u2019m here to do a job. I\u2019ve gotta do this, one after the other. When I\u2019m done with one, I\u2019m onto the next, no matter how much trouble it\u2019s gonna be. The bottom line is, I love these characters so much. Or, some characters better than others.<\/p>\n I\u2019m here also because I wanna know how this turns out. I\u2019m still doing it 44 years later because I want to know what happens. I\u2019m outside of me, I\u2019m inside of me. I have five people arguing constantly inside my head to see what\u2019s the right move. And sometimes when it\u2019s done it\u2019s like, I don\u2019t remember the last three weeks. How did this end up like this? I like it, and it works and everything, but I don\u2019t know how it started.<\/p>\n I think about my older stories like The Death of Speedy,<\/em> one of my first real coveted pieces. And every once in awhile, I\u2019ll think back and go, \u201cOh yeah, that was gonna be in Death of Speedy.<\/em>\u201d I forgot and it just became something else. So every story I tell wasn\u2019t supposed to be that, it just became that. For the better, hopefully.<\/p>\n So you\u2019re moving through it basically in a fugue state.<\/strong><\/p>\n JAIME:<\/strong> I let it take over me. But that\u2019s when I have an idea. The other couple of months is just blank. \u201cI\u2019m over, it\u2019s over!\u201d<\/p>\n And then I\u2019ll write a balloon, and it will just be a thought I wrote on a Post-It note, like, I\u2019m never gonna use this. And I put it in, and it just blew up. Now it\u2019s becoming a big thing. Boy, has that saved me.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>