Salon On Jaime Hernandez

Salon has a new review of "Ghost of Hoppers", the latest graphic novel from Jaime Hernandez. The article includes a nice tribute to the one of the finest of comic book artists:

Fortunately, the creamy grace of Hernandez's artwork makes it worthwhile to pause and stare. His drawings are pure eye candy -- a few simple, curvy lines and crisp geometries that economically communicate facial expressions, body language, the way clothing drapes. His sense of composition is one of the sharpest in comics; almost every panel in "Ghost of Hoppers" is balanced between exquisitely bold white and black areas. (A house illuminated by moonlight is blackness interrupted by four tiny white squares for a window, a white parallelogram separated by horizontal lines for the lit side of the roof, and a white squiggle for a tree cut off by the roof's other diagonal.) One of Hernandez's signature techniques is slicing scenes down to a few discontinuous panels with abrupt jump-cuts between them, because every image he draws is a very pregnant moment: You can look at it and intuit at least a few minutes' worth of what has just happened and what's about to happen.