Ghost of Hoppers collects for the first time the new adventures of Maggie Chascarrillo, as serialized in the Love and Rockets comic book, and represents Jaime Hernandez's much-anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed 2004 magnum opus Locas, which Entertainment Weekly gave an 'A' for its "innovative technique and complex, character-driven stories about Mexican-American life." Ghost of Hoppers begins with the newly divorced Maggie now working as the resident building-manager of the notorious Capri Apartments deep in the heart of the San Fernando Valley, where imaginary dogs roam its walkways at night, all the air conditioners are broken, and the empty swimming pool is covered with flies. As if the eccentric, oddball tenants weren't weird enough, Maggie's houseguest and old friend Izzy Ortiz shakes things up with her usual nervous breakdowns, nocturnal screaming, and obsessive fly-swatting (sometimes with a knife!). When Izzy makes a guest appearance on a local cable access talk show to promote her book, Maggie meets the voluptuous Vivian the "Frogmouth," a curvaceous, hapless bombshell with a foghorn voice who is despised by Hopey (Maggie's long time on-again-off-again girlfriend, now a bartender sporting an eye patch after one of Vivian's previous bottle-breaking altercations). Maggie finds herself swept up in Vivian's life of random catfights, her mob-connected, knife-wielding stalker ex-boyfriend, and his violently jealous fiancée. Maggie and Vivian eventually strike up a reluctant and awkward romance, and when they set out for Hoppers to retrieve a stolen art object from Izzy, they get a lot more than they bargained for!
2007 Harvey Award nominee: Best Graphic Album — Previously Published
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"Jaime's characters are so convincing and his stories so compelling that it is easy to overlook his greatest strength: the most economically handsome drawing style in comics." – Booklist
"American fiction's best kept secret." – Rolling Stone
"Hernandez's 'Locas' plunged me into a comics ecstasy I hadn't known since I was 10." – The Nation
"A high point in the comics form, conventional in idiom, but not comparable to any strips before it." – The Washington Post
"No other man in or out of the field understands women the way [Hernandez] does. Love & Rockets is the one book I always recommend to my female friends who've never read a comic before." – Trina Robbins, author of A Century of Women Cartoonists
"Jaime's Maggie is one of the great characters in contemporary American fiction." – L.A. Weekly
"Jaime's art balances big white and black spaces to create a world of nuance in between, just as his writing balances our big human feelings and our small human trivias to generate its incredible emotional power. Quite simply, this is one of the twentieth century's most significant comics creators at the peak of his form, with every line a wedding of classicism and cool." – Alan Moore
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