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Product Description
This book is to contemporary L.A. what Robert Altman's Nashville was to that city: a superbly observed portrait of a city in decline; a character study with a large, diverse cast; a comedy and a drama. After ten years spent in Palomar and the fantasy worlds of BEM and Errata Stigmata, Gilbert Hernandez brought it all back home with this sharp contemporary tale. This story, which ran under the simple title "Love and Rockets" in Love and Rockets from 1990 to 1992, takes us from plush Beverly Hills to the dangerous East side and introduces us to a dizzyingly diverse cast of characters, including a lowlife rock 'n' roll band, a "posse" of black youths, a ditzy Hollywood mom and her spoiled son, a gay activist filmmaker and his rebellious, half-Iraqi daughter, and a group of racist thugs whose violent attack on an older woman sets the plot in motion — as well as bringing in several older characters, including Palomar expatriates (and lovers) Riri and Maricela, the surfers from Blood of Palomar, and some special surprise guests from Birdland. Love and Rockets X does for contemporary Los Angeles what Robert Altman's Nashville did for that metropolis in the '70s — it's a superbly observed portrait of a city in decline, a character study of over twenty men and women, girls and boys; it's a comedy and a drama; it's in short, Gilbert Hernandez at his very best! Black-and-white comics throughout
Amazon.com Review
Fifty issues--collected into 15 volumes that total 2,000 pages--the Hernandez brothers' Love and Rockets is an enormous achievement that helped to create a new audience for comics. Notable for their strong female characters and their focus on relationships, rather than on traditional comic-book 'action', the stories collected in this volume, and the rest of the series, show how the comic format can be used to create characters and situations as detailed and compelling as in any novel.
Reviewers have compared Gilbert Hernandez's work--set in the fictional Latin American town of Palomar--with that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Robert Altman. Reading his brother Jaime's work--most of which focuses on a group of Southern California Mexican American women--is like reading Tolstoy, if only Tolstoy had written about twenty-something punk girls. Love and Rockets has certainly earned its legendary reputation among the comic-book cognoscenti, and deserves to be read by an even wider audience. Welcome to the world of Los Bros Hernandez.
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