In the October edition of Graphic Novel Review, I interviewed Love & Rockets' co-creator Jaime Hernandez, who has been creating comics about the same cast of characters for nearly a quarter of a century. Fantagraphics has just released a 700+ page book, Locas, which anthologizes most of Jaime's work from the comic book.
Now that you are in your 40s and your characters have aged along with you, have the things that have happened to you as you've grown older played a large part in the way you look at the world?
I do really pay attention [to] how life is in the mid-40s and how it affects them. Even if we try not to live life by this timeline, we do. You're at a certain age where you say, "Where do I go from here? Do I want a family? By the time I'm this old, do I want a house?" Things like that. When you're younger, you don't think about that stuff, and some people are forced to think about it. It doesn't work out that well for some people. And so, so that's what I think about a lot. I think about which of my characters are going to slide into old age gracefully and which ones are going to go in kicking and screaming. That's an important point in my work right now. That's one of the things I think about a lot. "Ok, I'm doing a character here, where are they going? They're this age, they should be at this point, or maybe not, why aren't they? Why aren't they married and have kids?"