'Amor Y Cohetes - The Love and Rockets Library (2008)'

Fantagraphics Books, 2008, 289 pages

Los Bros. Hernandez - Gilbert, Jaime, Mario

To a very great extent, Love and Rockets is synonymous with Hoppers' Maggie & Hopey and Palomar's Luba & Carmen & Heraclio & Tonantzin... but there was always more to L&R than that. Amor Y Cohetes finally collects together in one convenient package all the non-Maggie and non-Palomar stories by all three Hernandez Brothers from that classic first, 50-issue Love and Rockets series — a dizzying array of styles and approaches that re-confirms these groundbreaking cartoonists' place in the history of comics.

The book leads off with Gilbert's original 40-page sci-fi epic “BEM” from 1981's very first issue of Love and Rockets, featuring a very different Luba and a much looser, Heavy Metal- and Marvel Comics-inspired way of storytelling.

Other stories include Jaime's charming “Rocky and Fumble” series starring a planet-hopping girl and her robot; stunning one-shots such as Gilbert's Frida Kahlo biography “Frida” and his shocking autobiographical fantasia “My Love Book”; Mario’s genre thrillers which take place “Somewhere in California”; Gilbert's brutally dystopian “Errata Stigmata” stories; the playful “Hernandez Satyricon,” with Gilbert drawing Jaime's characters, and “War Paint,” with Jaime trying out Palomar; Gilbert's light-hearted “Music for Monsters” starring Bang and Inez; and even a fantastical “non-continuity” Maggie and Hopey story “Easter Hunt” by Jaime that didn’t fit into the other books.

Amor Y Cohetes, the seventh (and concluding, for now) volume in the new “Complete Love and Rockets” shows a very different side of Los Bros Hernandez.