Drawn to a dark side

He's the kind of storyteller who's not afraid to overreach or miss completely. Douglas Wolk, whose new book, "Reading Comics," considers the Hernandez brothers alongside other key figures, writes that Gilbert's comics "look like the work of an iconoclast -- he's got the rough, wobbly line and a pervasive interest in grotesqueries, he highlights the wrinkles and flaws in everything he draws, and he's fond of one-off experiments in which he lets his id run wild on paper."

"Growing up with him, he was a normal kid," said Jaime Hernandez, 47, who lives in Pasadena. "And he grew up to be a normal adult. But he's got certain demons. Gilbert's one of these artists who has to do what he does, or he'd die."

'On the high end of poor'

When Gilbert and his brothers were growing up in Oxnard in the '60s and '70s, comics were everywhere. They seemed to have the only mother in the nation's history who encouraged them to collect, and even revere, comic books rather than throwing them out. They developed a special fondness for adventure comics, Milton Caniff, "Dennis the Menace" and the superhero auteur Jack Kirby.

"We were poor, but just on the high end of poor," Hernandez recalled. "Poor enough to know it, and poor enough not to have things, but not enough for it to ruin our future selves."

The budding Bros. Hernandez -- including Mario, 54, who contributed to a few issues and brought an issue of Zap comics into the house -- were ravenous in their pursuit of visuals in all forms. "It got to the point where we'd look at a magazine, and if one of the pages was an advertisement for Uniroyal Tires, we'd try to figure out who the artist was."

The brothers got drawn into punk rock, playing in a few now-forgotten bands and designing fliers and album jackets for bands such as Dr. Know and Black Flag. They were also serious film fans: Gilbert today loves the visual storytelling of silent films, as well as directors including Fellini, Howard Hawks and Kurosawa, and he runs Turner Classic Movies in the background while he draws.

About the same time, the brothers started "Love and Rockets," which was, early on, a mix of science-fiction stories and tales of the SoCal punk scene. While their work appeared in the same issues, the brothers soon found their own directions, with Jaime developing stories of two punkettes and a female wrestler and Gilbert creating an extended family in Central America that's been compared to the works of García Márquez.