We’re celebrating Floating World Comics’ 20-year anniversary with a very special event and send off to our Lloyd Center location. On Sunday July 12, join Katie Skelly and Jaime Hernandez for a book launch party and signing.
Four young women investigate a vanishing strip club in Skelly’s supernatural, surreal graphic novel, Heaven.
Created over 15 years from 1981-96 in the pages of the legendary comic book series Love and Rockets, Locas is one of the great American novels of the last 40+ years, graphic or otherwise.
Out past the edge of town, there exists a strip club called Heaven that only some can find. Some say it’s a mirage. Others say you can’t miss the giant neon heels lighting up the desert night skies. Dolly can’t find a place to belong. After losing her identity as a gymnast and?navigating family turbulence, she’s adrift from school and friends. When a mysterious presence beckons her to Heaven, she wonders if she may just have found her place — but just what does it want in return?
Katie Skelly’s first graphic novel since her acclaimed Maids in 2020, Heaven finds out what happens when the artist’s quintessential cool girl characters let their guards down and let the world in. With a supernatural strip club backdrop and an eye-popping sense of color that would make Dario Argento proud, Heaven reinforces Skelly’s place as one of the most distinctive voices working in contemporary comics today.
Jaime Hernandez is one of the most humane, graceful, and imaginatively inexhaustible artists in American popular culture. Locas tells the story of Maggie Chascarrillo, a bisexual, Mexican-American woman attempting to define herself in a community rife with class, race, and gender issues.
Maggie’s story begins in the early-1980s Southern California rock scene, when it was shifting from the excesses of the 1970s to the gritty basics of punk and new wave. Hardcore punk rock came to the fore, and the teenage Maggie finds herself drawn to the anarchy, energy, and diversity of the scene, which in Jaime’s hands becomes a very real, habitable place populated with authentic human beings rather than stereotypes. She quickly befriends Hopey Glass, a feisty anti-authoritarian punkette who quickly becomes Maggie’s on-again, off-again lover and a constant presence in her life as they navigate a devastatingly naturalistic world.
WHO: Katie Skelly, Jaime Hernandez
WHAT: Heaven + Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories book signing and 20-year anniversary celebration
WHEN: Sunday July 12, 4-6pm
WHERE: Floating World Comics, 1223 Lloyd Center
Katie Skelly is a Los Angeles-based cartoonist whose books include My Pretty Vampire (2017), Maids (2020), and The Agency (2023). She is the co-host of the comics podcast Thick Lines, editor of the Viscere horror comics anthology series, and creator of the Bad Girl Tarot and Oracle decks. She holds a B.A. in Art History from Syracuse University and was awarded the Emerging Artist Prize at Cartoon Crossroads Columbus in 2015.
Jaime Hernandez was one of six siblings born and raised in Oxnard, California. His mother passed down a love of comics, which for Jaime became a passion rivaled only by his interest in the burgeoning punk rock scene of 1970s Southern California. Together with his brothers Gilbert and Mario, Jaime co-created the ongoing comic book series Love and Rockets in 1981, which Gilbert and Jaime continue to both write and draw to this day. Jaime’s work began as a perfect (if unlikely) synthesis of the anarchistic, do-it-yourself aesthetic of the punk scene and an elegant cartooning style that recalled masters such as Charles M. Schulz and Alex Toth. Love and Rockets has evolved into one of the great bodies of American literary fiction, spanning five decades and countless high-water marks in the medium’s history. In 2016, Hernandez won the prestigious Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his graphic novel, The Love Bunglers. In 2017, he (along with Gilbert) was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame, and, in 2018, he released his first children’s book, the Aesop Book Prize-winning The Dragon Slayer: Folktales from Latin America. He is a lifelong Angeleno.
Tags: FantagraphicsJaime HernandezKatie Skelly
