Love and Rockets (comics)
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Love and Rockets is a black and white comic book series by Gilbert Hernandez and Jaime Hernandez -- sometimes cited jointly as Los Bros. Hernandez. Their brother Mario Hernandez is an occasional contributor. It was one of the first comics in the alternative comics revolution of the 1980s. It has been published by Fantagraphics Books since it began in 1982. Love and Rockets temporarily ceased publication in 1996 after the release of issue #50, while Gilbert and Jaime went on to do separate series involving many of the same characters. However, in 2001 Los Bros. revived the series as Love and Rockets Volume 2.
Love and Rockets contains several ongoing serial narratives, the most prominent being Gilbert's "Palomar" stories and Jaime's "Hoppers 13" stories. It also contains one-offs, shorter stories, surrealist jokes, and more.
"Palomar" tells the story of a fictional village in Central America and its inhabitants. Its vibrant characters and sometimes-fantastic events are sometimes compared to the magical realism literary style of authors such as Gabriel García Márquez. The series is also sometimes referred to as "Heartbreak Soup", after the first story set in Palomar.
"Hoppers 13" follows the tangled lives of a group of primarily chicano characters, from their teenage years in the early days of the Los Angeles punk scene to the present day. (Hoppers, or Huerta, is a fictional city based on the Hernandezes' home town of Oxnard, California.) Two memorable members of Jaime's cast are Margarita "Maggie" Luisa Chascarrillo and Esperanza "Hopey" Leticia Glass, whose on-again, off-again romance is a focus for many "Hoppers 13" storylines. The series is also often called "Locas" (Spanish for "crazy women") because of the many female characters depicted.
One of the more interesting aspects of the Love and Rockets opus is the way Los Bros. Hernandez portray the passage of time in a relatively realistic manner despite the traditional constraints of the medium. For example, Maggie's character debuted as a slight yet curvy young adult mechanic living in a world both distinctly chicano and punk with a sci-fi twist. As Jaime developed her character in more detail, she started to gain weight slowly (due to depression and other factors). Over the years, Maggie and the other characters have evolved, growing more layered and complex as their stories develop. The present Maggie is now the manager of an apartment complex with bleached blonde hair and a penchant for wearing sexy bathing suits on her rubenesque figure.
External links
Love and Rockets at Fantagraphics Books (http://www.fantagraphics.com/artist/losbros/losbros.html)