Love and Rockets: New Stories #1

The Hernandez Brothers

Fantagraphics Books 2008

Web: http://www.fantagraphics.com

The Hernandez Brothers are highly respected independent comic book artists who together developed the comic series Love and Rockets. These were highly successful and ran to issue 50 when each went on to develop individual projects. However, as time progressed they found that Love and Rockets had a special significance to their creative life and returned to releasing it.

It is amazing to think that Love and Rockets has been around for some 27 years - the first was magazine-sized and started in 1981 slowly moving to comic book style and then the second was the re-launch of the comic in 2001 for the twentieth anniversary. The New Stories of Love and Rockets are now being produced in a new format, an annual graphic novel.

Jaime launches the new format with a fantastic tale, a return to the origins of comics with a new twist on the super-hero story! Maggie's long time friend Penny Century has finally realized her dream of acquiring super-powers, but at a shocking personal cost. Now she rampages through the galaxy, half mad with grief, and a motley group of super-heroes assembles to try to stop her -- led by Maggie's girlfriend Angel and her mysterious neighbour Alarma, and involving a number of characters that readers of the original Love and Rockets fans will delight in recognizing. The epic-length 50-page story (only the first half of the saga!) combines Jaime's razor sharp characterization and superlative art with wildly inventive, Kirby-style slam-bang super-hero action. I especially like the way in which the superheros have both more than human powers and abilities and yet at the same time are emotionally “all too human”, this creative balance between science fiction and fantasy and real life concerns makes this story especially successful.

Then Gilbert Hernandez explodes with a similarly generous helping of his fantastically creative and innovative short stories, which seem to create a certain morality and then destroy it. These range from the fantastic to the cerebral, to the decidedly surreal in Never Say Never which reflects on sex and money through the medium of a tale about a kangaroo who gets lucky in Las Vegas.

This is a superbly produced volume is a great way to experience the brilliance of Jaime, Gilbert and Mario Hernandez, it will be a thrill for old fans who adored Love and Rockets and will introduce a new generation to their work in a new and exciting manner. While many comic book lovers focus on the underground comics of the Seventies this series which started in the Eighties and now is being continued today has a lot to offer and is well worth experiencing.