Creativity Quote by Gilbert Hernandez

Gilbert Hernandez is doing that rare creator move: admitting, almost offhandedly, that “character” isn’t a costume you dress on for plot, it’s a life you keep returning to until it starts to feel stubbornly real. The phrase “I’ve sort of dealt” is telling. It’s modest, even evasive, like he’s downplaying something radical: choosing ongoing interiority over tidy narrative payoffs. In comics, where action and punchlines can dominate, “dealt with” suggests a longer, messier commitment to consequences, history, and the way people change when nobody’s watching.

The second half sharpens the intent. “Particularly the women characters” reads like both an aesthetic focus and a quiet corrective. Hernandez came up in an alternative-comics scene that often fetishized rebellion but still defaulted to male attention as the organizing lens. His work in Love and Rockets pushed against that by giving women not just “strong roles” but full bandwidth: desire, boredom, ambition, cruelty, humor, aging. That “particularly” implies deliberateness, as if he’s naming a craft decision: the women aren’t supporting cast to a male protagonist’s arc; they are the social fabric, the engine of the world.

There’s subtext, too, about who gets granted narrative patience. Saying he’s dealt more with their lives is a claim about time: women characters are allowed to accumulate it. They get continuity, not just moments. It’s an artistic ethic disguised as casual talk, and that’s why it lands: the humility of the phrasing masks the scale of the re-centering.