Customer Reviews

Love & Rockets Vol. 11: Wigwam Bam

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Wigwam Bam has to be Jaime Hernandez' most compelling comic book ever. It mainly focus on Hopey and the residents of Hoppers, as Maggie (Hopey's girlfriend) leaves Hopey after a snooty party. From then on Maggie doesn't turn up again. In wigwam Bam, we find out more about Hopey and that she actually does love Maggie and has a heart. We also get to delve deeper into Isobel's twisted psyche as she goes and looks for Maggie and Hopey. I honestly admit that I had never had such an emotional involvement with any comic characters as I did with Wigwam Bam. Even if you haven't read the other volumes of the Love and Rockets series, Wigwam Bam is most definately worth a look.

Wigwam Bam is a change of pace in the Love and Rockets saga. Hopey and Maggie are stranded somewhere out East after H.R. Costigan kicked them out of his mansion. Meanwhile, they've fallen in with an arty, gay crowd. Early into the book, Maggie and Hopey split up. And so, much of Wigwam Bam is really all about Hopey.
There is definitely a greater sense of the surreal in this collection than there have been in others. One of the reasons, I think, is that Hopey and Maggie are both sort of out of their element in this collection. There's a sense of weirdness and dislocation that wasn't present in earlier collections. Especially in the beginning, several characters bring up the fact that Hopey and Maggie are from California, and in the case of Maggie, that they are Mexican. In this collection, Hernandez raises questions of ethnicity that he hadn't before.

Wigwam Bam definitely isn't as lighthearted as some of the other collections. Hopey rapidly falls in over her head. One wonders whether this has something to do with the fact that she has lost Maggie, seemingly for good. And the collection does end on a dark note. In this collection the characters in it are tested and a lot of the things they counted as sure things are lost.

My two cents: starting reading L&R with this collection is muy loco.

The sense of dislocation present in this collection is palpable. With classic visual authority, these comics pose questions: where are we? where are our heroines? what does all of this mean? These panels are crowded with figures and faces and pieces of plot. Sensory overload.

Ultimately, I am glad I read this but found it to have more than a little narrative wheel-spinning. I wanted more traction.

Great Jaime Hernandez artwork, as you'd expect. But in this collection it's mostly in service of some pointless and fairly humourless lampoon of some LA clique that may or may not still exist - if it ever did in the first place. And Jaime's perennial problem with the creation of believable women undermines the plot still more. Sure, we love Hopey and Maggie, but if we're supposed to take them seriously now, how come they still act like complete whack jobs? Other female characters featured (i.e. Aging Media Lesbians Who Keep Young Women As Pets - of which there are apparently so many, they have their own club) are so out-there and stupid that you wonder if maybe Jaime is having a joke at our (the readers) expense (fifteen dollars plus shipping). It's not coincidence, I think, that the sexual content was ratcheted up in the stories of this collection - a good indicator of narrative bankruptcy.