Wonder Stories

The year: 1985. A not-so-distant past. Our most pressing document of the future, 1984, was already a year ago. The one that still looked forward (Prince's 1999) happened a year before that.

Living in the '80s, no matter how much current nostalgic revisionism deludes, was an exercise in the grim realization that so many of our worst predictions for the future were coming true. We were programmed to view the present as a future past: The Day After. Star Wars (the movie). Star Wars (the defense initiative). Back to the Future. Beyond Thunderdome. Reagan. Bleak. I had no patience for cuddly mainstream shit like Battlestar Galactica. Who had time for fantasy? Reality was harrowing enough.

The first Philip K. Dick novel I read was Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, dismissed in many circles as one of his weaker wallowings into paranoia and alienation. But the secondary storyline of "policeman" Felix Buckman and his incestuous and bisexual twin sister Alys, who lead lead character Jason Taverner into a "sex grid" through a time-shifting drug called KR-3, intrigued the hell out of me. It still does: Dick predicted the pervasive and addictive nature of Internet porn. Whoa.

Around the same time, and with a similarly twisted talent for disjointed tale-telling, the Hernandez Brothers were raising the brain bar on comic books with Love & Rockets. Los Bros' confoundingly lifelike portrayals of women (especially lezzies) and sticky forays into mystical realism hooked me. Characters Hopey and Maggie were lovers. Both were punk rock girls in Hoppers, Calif. They looked and acted like me and my friends, except Maggie happened to be a mechanic. A rocket mechanic. Oh, and a lady wrestler. And, eventually, a building supervisor. But none of these were Maggie's most noted trait.

Margarita Luisa Chascarrillo, one of the most well-rounded and interesting women in comics, with a backstory that makes Bruce Wayne look like a guano pusher, gained her fame in the alt-comic world not for her sexuality, her talents, nor her adventures. And this may be why I love her most of all: Maggie became known throughout comic geekdom for getting fat.