The Girl from HOPPERS (Love & Rockets) (v. 2) (Paperback)

~ Jaime Hernandez (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Love & Rockets has been American fiction's best-kept secret. -- Rolling Stone

A high point in the comics form, conventional in idiom, but not comparable to any strips before it. -- Washington Post

Hernandez is a national treasure. -- Douglas Wolk, Salon.com

If you've never heard of [Los Bros. Hernandez], you've been missing out on two hidden treasures of our impoverished culture. -- The Nation

Jaime Hernandez is comics' poet laureate of memory and meaning. -- Tom Spurgeon, author of Comics As Art

Jaime's Maggie and Gilbert's Luba are two of the great characters in contemporary American fiction. -- LA Weekly

The Hernandez Brothers are uncanny. No other man in or out of the field understands women the way they do. -- Trina Robbins, author of A Century of Women Cartoonists

Product Description

The legendary Love and Rockets comic book series continues in a comprehensive series of new paperbacks.

The 25th anniversary Love and Rockets celebration continues with this, the first of three volumes collecting the adventures of the spunky Maggie; her annoying, pixie-ish best friend and sometime lover Hopey; and their circle of intimates, including the blonde bombshell Penny Century, Maggie's weirdo mentor Izzy—as well as the ageing but still heroic wrestler Rena Titanon, and Maggie's handsome but mostly out-of-reach love interest, Rand Race.

Having abandoned the sci-fi trappings of the earliest Love & Rockets stories (as seen in Maggie the Mechanic, the first volume in this series) Hernandez refined his approach, settling on the more naturalistic environment of the fictional Los Angeles barrio, Hoppers, and the lives of the young Mexican-Americans and punk rockers who live there.

A central story and one of Jaime's absolute peaks is "The Death of Speedy." Such is Jaime's mastery that even though the end of the story is telegraphed from the very title, the downhill spiral of Speedy, the local heartthrob, is utterly compelling and ultimately quite surprising.

In this volume, Maggie also begins her on-again and off-again romance with Ray D., leading to friction and an eventual separation from Hopey (which will form the narrative backbone of "Wigwam Bam," as seen in the upcoming third volume that completes the "Locas trilogy").

A number of these stories—including a whole cycle of wrestling stories starring or co-starring Rena Tinanon, whose return was memorably chronicled in the New York Times serial "La Maggie La Loca," and the supremely unnerving "Izzy meets the Devil" story, "Flies on the Ceiling"—were not collected in the hardcover Locas.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books (July 4, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560978511
• ISBN-13: 978-1560978510
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #331,878 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I Just Couldn't Get Into It, August 1, 2009

By	Scott Allen (New York) - See all my reviews

I'm sure I'm one of a tiny minority that didn't enjoy this book. This is the first comic/graphic novel that I literally couldn't finish. I started and re-started 3 times and couldn't get into it. The "story" dragged on and never really went anywhere. I love comics and could read a graphic novel about nuclear fission, but this book just had no plot.

I never fell for the characters. Maybe my expectations were too high - I know Jaime Hernandez is an incredible talent and most people like his work. I almost never write negative reviews out of respect for the artists - I feel fine doing so here because Hernandez is so popular and my little review will have no impact on his sales.

Be sure to look at a few pages yourself before buying this book. Maybe it's just like an expensive Cabernet- totally wasted on someone that doesn't like wine.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Maggie Forever, January 28, 2008

By	Erin C. Griffin - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I fell for her hard. It was the kind of relationship you wanted to last forever, but all your sleepless nights only drew you to the end. I tried to quit her, or space our time so that we could be together forever, but I rushed it, and now I have to start all over.

This book kept me up nights when I wasn't reading it. That's how good it is.