Sibling Rivalry in Los Bros Hernandez's Love and Rockets New Stories 6

Love and Rockets: New Stories 6 by Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez

Love and Rockets: New Stories #6
By Jaime Hernandez and Gilbert Hernandez
Fantagraphics, 2013

Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez have been producing their venerated anthology Love and Rockets for 32 years now. As is usually the case, Jaime's stories focus on the one, long epic work of love, life, family and friendship that he has been weaving for over three decades, the Locas cycle of graphic novels. Gilbert alternates between his own Palomar/Luba epic and many self-contained works. Each brother has a unique voice and unique visual style, and one could make the argument for either brother being this country's finest cartoonist. That both put out their work through this one, remarkable anthology makes each Love and Rockets installment a seismic literary event.

2013 has absolutely the year of Gilbert - between two Love and Rockets reprint collections, Julio's Day and Children of Palomar, and two new original graphic novels, Marble Season and the latest of his Lubaverse movie "adaptations" Maria M, Gilbert continues to cement his reputation as one of the most prolific and important voices in comics. No-one holds a candle to what he is able to accomplish year-in, year-out. Except for maybe Jaime, whose quantity of output doesn't come close to Gilbert's, but whose quality is nearly unmatched in comics.

Yeah, if someone put a gun to my head and told me to choose, I'm a Jaime guy, always have been. That isn't to discount Gilbert, but something about Jaime's stuff has always connected with me in a way that Gilbert's hasn't. But that's almost like being given two identical bars of platinum and being told to choose between the two. Or maybe ripping the baby in half with the bathwater (or something). Anyway, New Stories 6 is a great example of the strengths and differences in each creator's works.

Love and Rockets New Stories 6 is about family. With each brother always doing their own unconnected thing, it is rare to see a thematic commonality between their individual works, The obvious through-line in this year's volume between both creators' work is the unique relationship that adult siblings share. Your brother or sister will be the original and best frenemy you will ever have, and both Jaime and Gilbert play with that to different degrees in New Stories 6. I don't think the thematic overlap was a conscious decision between Los Bros, but a happy coincidence, and a natural extension of the stories each has been telling.

Some Gilbert

Gilbert continues his long, winding soap opera of Luba's descendants, popping between Palomar and Hollywood. The trials and tribulations of the Luba clan take center stage, with focus jumping around between various generations of sisters as they deal with the small dramas of life and celebrity. We get to visit current-day Palomar, with all of its associated phantoms, and we get movies-within-flashbacks as Gilbert traverses the labyrinth he has constructed for thirty years. But even longtime readers may have difficulty keeping track of what's going on and who's who without consulting the infinitely valuable resource of this year's Love and Rockets companion. I know these stories will work better when all is collected in some future hardcover, it just gets a little hard to follow at points. Gilbert's Lubaverse stuff is sadly impenetrable for the uninitiated.

Far more accessible are Jaime's stories. Despite never really veering from the established narrative he has set up in his decades-running Locas cycle, Jaime still manages to produce superb, almost stand-alone narratives that are vital architectural components to a very large building. The focus this time around is away from Maggie and Ray, but considering the emotional wreckage that occurs in New Stories 4, this is not surprising. With New Stories 5, Jaime turned the focus over to the new character Tonta, sister to recurring character Vivian (frogmouth!). Angel, from God and Science, also plays a minor role, but the main characters are Tonta and her four mostly adult half-sisters and brother. 

The first thing that jumps out about New Stories 6 is the sheer amount of short stories packed into the volume. Jaime alone uses 17 short chapters to tell his story (largely though variously titled Crimen, Spanish for Crime). But far from being interruptive, the vignettes that make up Crimen work to build an easily accessible larger narrative in intense bursts. As Jaime's story effortlessly glides forward, we are introduced and reintroduced to Tonta's extended clan of sisters from different misters (and a half-brother she never realized she had). Throughout Crimen, the siblings must come to a difficult decision to go after their own mother for the possible murder of their respective fathers, a decision that ignites a media firestorm and threatens to splinter each of their lives.

Some Jaime

Despite the potential headiness of the subject matter, Jaime still tells the story with humor and a fiery visual joie de vivre. His mastery of the physical form he consistently shows in his work is breathtaking. The way he effectively mixes almost cartoony emotional sight-gags of character reactions with the visual, kinesiological poetry of the human form in movement in his wrestling sequences is stunning. Effortless is a such good word for Jaime's stuff. That isn't to say Jaime put no work into it or that it's sloppy, far from it. Jaime's stuff in New Stories 6 is so perfectly constructed, so beautifully and simply illustrated, that it is a pleasure, a joy, an ease to read. There are so few long-form works that are so consistently amazing as Jaime's, certainly nothing with Locas' length and depth. 

In Crimen, Jaime delivers a nearly stand-alone, accessible graphic novel about crime and brothers and sisters and the perils of memory and family, a beautiful, funny, fantastic work on par with everything else he has done. It's accessibility, especially compared to most of the intricately interconnected Locas run, is a happy accident.

But while Gilbert's stories are slightly more obtuse, he still manages to deliver one of the best short stories of the year. "Untitled" on page 59 is a stunning, visual feast of profanity and weirdness. No-one can do weird quite like Gilbert Hernandez, and sometimes you just need an injection of the bizarre into your life. Certainly Gilbert's weirdness can be overwhelming and is best served in small doses. "Untitled" presents just the right level of brevity and bizarreness.

Love and Rockets New Stories 6 is another great installment of the venerable anthology from Los Bros Hernandez. Love and Rockets continues to be a vital and important ongoing document of two creators at the absolute height of their powers, and the only venue to read new material from Jaime. The brothers' respective works, their respective worlds, stand alone - but in Love and Rockets we get the privilege of experiencing jolts of both, alternating between brother and brother, between greatness and greatness.

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For my definitive guide on all things Love and Rockets, click here. 

The Poetry of Childhood: Gilbert Hernandez's Marble Season

Marble Season by Gilbert Hernandez
Drawn & Quarterly, 2013

The Year of Beto continues. Marble Season by Gilbert Hernandez came out last week from Drawn & Quarterly, and it is another brilliant book from the Love and Rockets creator. Ostensibly an autobiographical work, the novel is not a comprehensive retelling of his life and career or even a specific short period from his life, but a plotless tone-poem about the little moments that represent the very experience of childhood.

Hernandez presents the novel as a roman a clef, with the central character Huey representing Gilbert (and his brothers Mario and Jaime represented by Junior and Chavo, respectively). His decision to give the proceedings a fictionalized veneer is more rooted in the work's grander purpose as a meditation about childhood rather than an autobiography about Gilbert's specific childhood (though it's that, too). Though rich in cultural and historical details from his childhood in Oxnard, California in the 1960s, fictionalizing the proceedings gives Hernandez free reign to tell the story without necessarily worrying about the specific factuality of the story (because how specific can anyone get about events from the time they were ten years old forty or fifty years after the fact?).

Hernandez's illustration style here is ever so slightly different from his previous work. Gilbert has drawn children many times before, notably throughout his Palomar-Luba cycle. But where the style there was reflective of the maturity of the work (even in the all-ages Venus comics), his style here seems to take cues from brother Jaime's almost whimsical flashback stories. To say that the work is "cute" seems to pigeonhole it into a category it doesn't belong, but there is definitely a quality of inspired charm to his cartooning.

There is no plot, no central conflict driving the story, though there are threads woven throughout that come along, drift away, and come back (or not). The story (such as it is) ambles and wanders among the moments and feelings of Hernandez's childhood, and by extension every childhood. There are comic books and games of marbles and neighbors on the stoop; big brothers helping make a Captain America shield, and little brothers never really talking but chilling out and meandering around; stickball and girls and secret clubs and more comics and fights in the alley; there are bullies and the "Beatos" on the radio and making muscles like the ads in the comics and dunking G.I. Joe in the sink; and more comics and plays about comics and teevee shows about comics; trading baseball cards for Mars Attacks cards and elaborate games of pretend and new neighbors fleeting in and out; and discussions about Captain Marvel and Godzilla and what it would be like to be grown up. So unlike Gilbert Hernandez, the work doesn't have a pervasive sense of dread or the weird, but a sense of wonder and the awesome power of the possible and the lack of responsibility where the toughest decision is what comic to read today.

This is an enchanting, absorbing work, a window into the childhood experience. Build into this handsomely designed hardcover is a space-time machine, a portal to Gilbert's past and to all of our pasts and to the present of every kid who is, ever was, and ever will be.

For my definitive guide to Love and Rockets and all things Los Bros Hernandez, click here.

Gilbert's Year: Julio's Day Reviewed

Julio's Day by Gilbert Hernandez
A Love And Rockets Graphic Novel
Fantagraphics, 2013

Gilbert Hernandez is one of the most prolific cartoonists on the planet. The man seems to work at Jack Kirby levels of productivity, and the quality of the material he puts out is usually some of the best stuff being published in the comic medium. This year alone we get collections for Julio's Day, New Tales of Old Palomar, Fatima: The Blood Spinners, and the OGN Marble Season (his hotly anticipated autobiography) not to mention more Love and Rockets New Stories.

So Julio's Day, new last week from Fantagraphics, is just the first salvo in the Year of Gilbert. Collecting a bunch of material largely serialized in Love and Rockets, Julio's Day covers a man's life, one hundred years in one hundred pages. When going into reading this and thinking about whether or not I was going to review it here - because, honestly, if your last name is Hernandez of the Love and Rockets Hernandezes, at this point in your career you are review-proof - I was thinking of analyzing it along with Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library 20. More commonly know as the graphic novel Lint, Ware's Acme 20 focuses on the life of Jordan Lint (a minor character from his Rusty Brown cycle), with each page of the graphic novel representing one moment from one day of one year in Lint's life. Hearing about the 100 page/100 year concept made me think that Hernandez did something similar, but this is not remotely the case in Julio's Day - to appraise it with Acme 20 would do both an injustice. And damn the review-proofness of it, Julio's Day work certainly leaves an impression worth discussing.

Now, the story certainly covers a century in 100 pages, but by no means is it a page-per-year. The story is told in fits and jumps, covering events over a day or two for a few pages and then jumping forward a few months, or a few years, or a few decades. And the focus is not on just one character, but in flavor and tone so similar to his Palomar masterworks, the story encompasses Julio's family, his hometown, and society at large. In 1900, the titular Julio is born into a Mexican family in a poor town somewhere in the United States. We see his early upbringing, his large extended family, his hometown. The story's leaps are minor at first and easy to anchor in a point in time, but as the narrative drives forward, focusing on members of his family and the other residents of the town, the time of the story jumps forward. We are never told outright when we are, but must discern that from bits of dialogue, characters' dress, the apparent age of the people themselves. Exactly when is never as important as the who. This is a character piece that manages to weave in a lot of characters and in a very small amount of space tell volumes about them.

There is Julio, devoted to his mother, with his share of secrets - not dark secrets, just not easy ones. There is Uncle Juan, definitely hiding a dark secret, darker whispers surrounding him, whom none of the women trust. There is the "white trash" local boy Tommy, Julio's best friend who, like Julio, never leaves the town. There is Araceli, a school-mate of Julio's who volunteers to be a nurse in American war zones, a Florencia Nightengale of World War 2, Korea, Vietnam, The Gulf. There is Julio Juan, Julio's grand-nephew, unapologetically bounding forward in his life in ways that Julio could only dream of. It's easy to say that Julio is only a supporting player in the story - the title is of his day, the time period on this Earth that he inhabits and those that inhabit it with him, around him, after him. Julio says little in the work, but with so much narrative focus spotlighting others this is never a problem.

¡Viva 'Beto, viva Los Hermanos Hernandez!

The pacing of this work is unique, never stopping in any time period for very long, giving just enough of a picture of when we are to build the larger story. And our picture of the people, who they are, come in tiny bursts, and the reader infers details, builds existences for the characters, that Gilbert only delicately hints at. Like in any life, there are tragedies, small and large, from Juan's betrayal to an epic case of mistaken identity. The unexpected quest for deserved vengeance. And there are victories. Julio Juan, who breaks free of the small town, seems to have the fullest life, in ways that speak of an entire generation of people who could be themselves when so many of their forebears were driven into the shadows.

This is a Gilbert Hernandez work through and through. Gilbert revels in certain things like sex, sex, sex (not licentious or pornographic but a simple element of the human condition) and bizarre gross shit (sometimes combined). After some vignettes of Julio as a child, the focus shifts to his father, on some journey, walking a far way. He gets caught in a landslide but gets infected by a mud-borne parasite, the results very extreme and very unpleasant.

Gilbert's cartooning throughout is magnificent. From pages of mood-defining storm clouds to extended sequences of walking or magnificently rendered dancing. His line is supremely confident, bold line is striking throughout.  Like life, characters flit in and out, sometimes only encountered decades apart, sometimes only seen once, briefly from a window.

This is a fantastic book, yet another example of a master cartoonist at work, an excellent representative Gilbert Hernandez for those unfamiliar with him, and a fine addition to the library of those who have grown with his work over 30 years.

For my definitive guide to Love and Rockets and all things Los Bros Hernandez, click here.

Reading Love and Rockets - The Definitive Guide to Comics' Supreme Masterpiece

Updated for Spring 2015.

The Definitive Love & Rockets Reading Guide and Full Bibliography

In 1981, brothers Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, spurred on by their brother Mario, self-published an independent comic anthology called Love and Rockets. Within a year, Fantagraphics began publishing their work, bringing to the world a seismic change in what comics as a storytelling medium were capable of. Featuring mature, character based stories, the quality in art and story of the work of Los Bros Hernandez continue to represent the high-water mark of independent, creator-owned comics. The importance of Love and Rockets and the stories contained therein can never be understated. Los Bros' work is required reading.

Each author's stories are independent of the other's, and should be approached separately. Jaime ("Xaime") has almost exclusively told one continuing story over the last 34 years, Locas, while the far more prolific Gilbert ("Beto") has serialized several different ongoing stories and many more short stories over the decades in Love & Rockets (the most prominent being the Palomar/Luba Cycle), plus numerous other works for other publishers.

The comics of Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez contained under the Love & Rockets umbrella of titles have been published across 124 issues over 34 years, in four distinct phases across four anthologies and seven mini-series; collected in 29 sequential hardcover & softcover albums, collections, and graphic novels; and eleven softcover omnibus (Love and Rockets Library) collections.

The easiest way to read Love & Rockets is in Fantagraphics' fantastic softcover omnibus editions - The Love and Rockets Library - which collect all of Jaime's work through 2007, and most of the Gilbert Palomar/Luba cycle. Below is the definitive reading order of all of both authors' Love & Rockets work to date, plus Gilbert's extensive non-Love & Rockets catalog of creator-owned material. At the bottom of the page I also list the full Love & Rockets bibliography, covering every issue and collection under the Love & Rockets umbrella of titles and graphic novels from 1981-present.

LOCAS, by Jaime Hernandez

The story of Perla Luisa Chascarillo ("Maggie") and her friends, Las Locas, the epic starts out as throwback sci-fi adventure stories and quickly segue into an extraordinary chronicle of the Los Angeles Barrio Punk-Rock scene of the 1980s (in a universe with superspy professional wrestlers and superhero women). Following Maggie and her paramours Ray and Hopie as they grow and age in real-time over more than 30 years of story and featuring Jaime's clean, clear art-style and astonishingly frank characterizations, Locas is simply the finest ongoing character drama being produced by anyone in any medium, the great American graphic novel, comics towering literary achievement.  

Most of the Locas material is collected in the softcover omnibus Love and Rockets Library editions from Fantagraphics:
1: Maggie the Mechanic
2: The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S.
3: Perla la Loca
4: Penny Century
5: Esperanza

Locas continues:
6: La Maggie La Loca (serialized in The New York Times Magazine and collected in The Secrets of Life and Death, see below)
7: God and Science, The Return of the Ti-Girls (hardcover)
8: The Love Bunglers (hardcover)
9: Untitled, Love & Rockets New Stories 5 and 6 (not yet collected)
10: Untitled, Love & Rockets New Stories 7 and 8 (ongoing, not yet collected)

There are also two oversized hardcover omnibus collections, LOCAS I and LOCAS II, but only LOCAS II is in-print. In 1988, Fantagraphics released The Lost Heart and Other Stories, reprinting various short stories for the bookstore market.

There is also an excellent Jaime Hernandez art book, The Secrets of Life and Death: The Art of Jaime Hernandez (Abrams Comic Arts, 2009), which also collects La Maggie La Loca and some of Las Locas' first fanzine appearances from 1978 and 1979.

The Palomar/Luba cycle, by Gilbert Hernandez

Initially the extraordinary character drama following the inhabitants of Palomar, a financially poor yet socially rich central American town, over time the story follows several of the inhabitants and their decedents as their lives take them to America and through the world of organized crime, B-movies and beyond. Featuring Gilbert's dense and fearless art, complex in story and structure, fiercely political and unblinkingly sexual, a unique and original vision that stands as the medium's second finest ongoing work behind only Jaime's Locas.

There are five of the Fantagraphics omnibus The Love and Rockets Library volumes:
1: Heartbreak Soup
2: Human Diastrophism
3: Beyond Palomar
4. Luba and Her Family  
5. Ofelia

There are two hardcover omnibus collections covering the above material: Palomar, out of print; and LUBA, in-print. In 1988, Fantagraphics released The Reticent Heart and Other Stories, reprinting various short stories for the bookstore market.

Palomar/Luba continues:
6: High, Soft Lisp
7: Children of Palomar (New Tales of Old Palomar)
8: The Adventures of Venus
9: Untitled, Love & Rockets New Stories 5-8 (ongoing, not yet collected)

There are four spin-off original graphic novels from Fantagraphics, essentially in-universe presentations of movies mentioned throughout the post-Palomar/Luba cycle, in Graphic Novel form:
A: Chance In Hell (2007)
B: The Troublemakers (2009)
C: Love From the Shadows (2011)
D. Maria M. Book 1 (2013)
E. Maria M. Book 2 (2015)

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Julio's Day (2013) collects his non-Palomar/Luba story serialized throughout Love & Rockets Volume II.


Significant Non-Love & Rockets material by Gilbert Hernandez

Gilbert Hernandez is one of the most prolific cartoonists on the planet, and has produced a significant amount of other material outside of the Love & Rockets auspice (most of which are in-print), including:

Birdland (Eros, 1992; out of print)
Girl Crazy (Dark Horse, 1996)
Yeah!, with Peter Bagge (DC, 2000)
Grip: The Strange World of Men (Vertigo, 2002; Dark Horse, 2014)
Sloth (Vertigo, 2006)
Speak of the Devil (Dark Horse, 2008)
Citizen Rex, with Mario Hernandez (Dark Horse, 2009)
Fatima: The Blood Spinners (Dark Horse, 2012; 2014)
Marble Season (Drawn & Quarterly, 2013)
Loverboys (Dark Horse, 2014)
Bumperhead (Drawn & Quarterly, 2015)

Gilbert also worked with Jaime and Mario on Dean Motter's The Return of Mister X (Vortex 1984-1985); the series has been collected numerous times (Vortex, 1986; Warner Books, 1987; iBooks, 2004; Dark Horse, 2006 - all out of print).

From Los Bros Hernandez:

There is one softcover Fantagraphics omnibus focusing on both the brothers' work, also containing contributions from Love and Rockets founder, Mario Hernandez:
-Amor y Cohetes

For the series' 30th anniversary, Fantagraphics released several books about Love & Rockets:
-The Love and Rockets Companion: 30 Years of Love and Rockets 
-Love and Rockets: The Covers
-The Love and Rockets Reader: From Hoppers to Palomar

There are two Love & Rockets Sketchbooks focusing on both brothers' works (only Volume Two is in-print). A retrospective, Ten Years of Love and Rockets was released in 1992.

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The Full Love and Rockets Bibliography (1981-Present)
Below is the comprehensive list of anthologies, mini-series, collections and graphic novels that make up the entirety of the Love & Rockets oeuvre from Los Bros Hernandez.

Love and Rockets, phase one (51 issues between 1981-1996)
By Los Bros:
Love & Rockets (self-published one-shot, 1981; reprinted as the first Fantagraphics issue)
Love & Rockets (Volume 1: Numbers 1-50, 1982-1996)
Love & Rockets Bonanza (One-shot, 1989)

Love and Rockets, phase two (30 issues between 1996-2000)
By Jaime:
Whoa, Nellie! (1-3, 1996)
Maggie & Hopie Color Special (One-shot, 1997)
Penny Century (1-7, 1997-2000)
By Gilbert:
New Love (1-6, 1996-1997)
Luba (1-5, 1998-2000)
By Los Bros:
Measles (all-ages anthology prominently featuring work from Los Bros, 1-8, 1998-2000)

Love & Rockets, phase three (36 issues between 2000-2007)
By Los Bros:
Love & Rockets Volume II (1-20, 2000-2007)
By Gilbert:
Luba (6-10, 2002-2004)
Luba's Comics and Stories (1-8, 2000-2006)
New Tales of Old Palomar (1-3, 2006-2007) 

Love & Rockets, phase four (7 issues, 2008-present)
By Los Bros:
Love & Rockets New Stories (1-7, 2008-Present)

Sequential Collections and Graphic Novels:

In 1985, Fantagraphics began publishing sequential albums in hardcover and softcover of the all Love & Rockets material, containing stories from both brothers in each volume. Beginning with Volume 7, Fantagraphics alternated between brothers for each volume. Volumes 1 through 15 are numbered. Starting with Volume sixteen, Fantagraphics presented the stories as unnumbered graphic novels in varying formats.

1: Music for Mechanics (Los Bros, 1985)
2: Chelo’s Burden (Los Bros, 1986)
3: Las Mujeres Perdidas (Los Bros, 1987)
4: Tears from Heaven (Los Bros, 1988)
5: House of Raging Women (Los Bros, 1988)
6: Duck Feet (Los Bros, 1988)
7: The Death of Speedy (Jaime, 1989)
8: Blood of Palomar (Gilbert, 1989)
9: Flies on the Ceiling (Jaime, 1991)
10: Love & Rockets X (Gilbert, 1993)
11: Wigwam Bam (Jaime, 1994)
12: Poison River (Gilbert, 1994)
13: Chester Square (Jaime, 1996)
14: Luba Conquers the World (Gilbert, 1996)
15: The Hernandez Satyricon (Los Bros, 1997)
16: Whoa Nellie! (Jaime, 2000)
17: Fear of Comics (Gilbert, 2000)
18: Locas in Love (Jaime, 2000)
19: Luba in America (Gilbert, 2001)
20: Dicks and Deedees (Jaime, 2003)
21: The Book of Ofelia (Gilbert, 2005)
22: Ghost of Hoppers (Jaime, 2005)
23: Three Daughters (Gilbert, 2006)
24: The Education of Hopey Glass (Jaime, 2008)
25: High Soft Lisp (Gilbert, 2010)
26: God and Science: Return of the Ti-Girls (Jaime, 2012)
27: Julio's Day (Gilbert, 2013)
28: Children of Palomar (Gilbert, 2013)
29: The Love Bunglers (Jaime, 2014)

The Love and Rockets omnibus softcovers already noted above were released sequentially as The Love and Rockets Library.

1: Maggie The Mechanic (Jaime, 2007)
2: Heartbreak Soup (Gilbert, 2007)
3: The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. (Jaime, 2007)
4: Human Diastrophism (Gilbert, 2007)
5: Perla La Loca (Jaime, 2007)
6: Beyond Palomar (Gilbert, 2007)
7: Amor y Cohetes (Los Bros, 2008)
8: Penny Century (Jaime, 2010)
9: Esperanza (Jaime, 2011)
10. Luba and Her Family (Gilbert, 2014)
11: Ofelia (Gilbert, 2015)

Outside of Love & Rockets and Gilbert's major non-L&R creator-owned material noted above, both brothers have also had short stories and contributions as writers, artists, and cover artists featured in many work-for-hire and anthology projects since 1980, as well as a handful of scarce mini-comics published at various conventions over the years. For a comprehensive index of every single work by Los Bros through 2013, as well as timelines, character guides, interviews, and more, see the utterly indispensable resource The Love and Rockets Companion: 30 Years of Love and Rockets by Mark Sobel & Kristy Valenti.

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Version 3.0, 03/15. A version of this article originally appeared on JHU Online in February 2013.  

More Love and Rockets from The Comic Pusher:
Gilbert's Year: Julio's Day Reviewed
The Poetry of Childhood: Gilbert Hernandez's Marble Season
Sibling Rivalry in Los Bros Hernandez's Love and Rockets New Stories 6
The Best Comics of 2013

Further reading, from Fantagraphics: 
How to Read Love and Rockets