LOVE AND ROCKETS #5

Los Bros getting up to speed in revived L&R; Fritzi and Penny Century origin stories featured

By Mike Whybark     September 01, 2002

As legions of reviewers have noted, it's good to have the world in order. A hated Republican leads us once again, and Los Bros are back at work publishing under the same cover. This issue of LOVE AND ROCKETS is the fifth in the new incarnation of the beloved book. Thus far, from my perspective, this issue comes closest to recapturing the magnificent experience that L&R offered a decade or more ago. Key to that experience, and I believe beginning to rear its head here, was a kind of refractory competition between Beto and Jaime, where the work of each would borrow and adapt themes from the other, as if to say, "Oh yeah? Here's how a man does it, buddy! Stick that in your pipe and smoke it!" This spirit of exploration and competition clearly prodded the creators to the heights they achieved back then; let's hope it gooses them now as well.

In this issue, the common theme is origins, and specifically, high school and the adolescent transition into maturity. Jaime leads off with the definitive Penny Century origin tale; Beto ripostes (or, since he began the story previously, perhaps it's Jaime who ripostes) with "The High Soft Lisp," covering Fritzi's bumpy high-school days. As is often the case, Beto is reaching for a bigger topic here than Jaime appears to be. The central narrative concern in "Lisp" is Fritzi's promiscuity.

However, Jaime's work should not be overlooked; in conjunction with #4's two "Maggie" episodes, he's looking at his super women as closely as Beto is; however, since his work has been less wildly experimental than Beto's over the past decade, he is working in subtler shades. It's no accident that "Maggie" may feature a real superheroine, in contrast with Penny's never-realized ambition.
In the past, when Beto has depicted Fritzi and her sister Petra's promiscuity, it was with a distinctly unrealistic approach. By deliberately assigning an aggressive, independent sexuality to these women, Beto was both inverting a traditional male role and at the same time creating or extending a media fantasy figure traditional to comic books: the super-endowed wonder woman who is always ready for action. Beto launched his post L&R career with these characters in the sorta-porn miniseries BIRDLAND. That series read like an artist's attempt to force depicting sex and sexuality into his range of skills, successfully, by most accounts.

Since then all of his work has incorporated frank, graphic, and fantastically exaggerated depictions of sex and sexuality; yet these depictions never quite gelled with his otherwise realistically depicted characters. In "Lisp," we meet a very young, very sexy, and very sad Fritzi, who experiences the brunt of social double standards and negative personal experiences applied to young women who are as sexually available as young men. It seems clear to me that Fritzi's promiscuity as depicted in "Lisp" is no longer an expression of fantasy, and that Beto is struggling to reconcile this central aspect of Fritzi's character with his desire for honesty as a story teller.

There is plenty of other material here as well. Among others, Beto's EC-style short "Our Return" (possibly a wee joke about the revenance of L&R) and the next installment in Mario and Beto's serial "Me for the Unknown," which carries with it a whiff of Caniff's pre-war TERRY AND THE PIRATES are seen here. Despite all of these, it's "The High Sweet Lisp" which remains the high-wire act in center ring.