This book is to contemporary L.A. what Robert Altman's Nashville was to that city: a superbly observed portrait of a city in decline; a character study with a large, diverse cast; a comedy and a drama.
After ten years spent in Palomar and the fantasy worlds of BEM and Errata Stigmata, Gilbert Hernandez brought it all back home with this sharp contemporary tale. This story, which ran under the simple title "Love and Rockets" in Love and Rockets from 1990 to 1992, takes us from plush Beverly Hills to the dangerous East side and introduces us to a dizzyingly diverse cast of characters, including a lowlife rock 'n' roll band, a "posse" of black youths, a ditzy Hollywood mom and her spoiled son, a gay activist filmmaker and his rebellious, half-Iraqi daughter, and a group of racist thugs whose violent attack on an older woman sets the plot in motion — as well as bringing in several older characters, including Palomar expatriates (and lovers) Riri and Maricela, the surfers from Blood of Palomar, and some special surprise guests from Birdland. Love and Rockets X does for contemporary Los Angeles what Robert Altman's Nashville did for that metropolis in the '70s — it's a superbly observed portrait of a city in decline, a character study of over twenty men and women, girls and boys; it's a comedy and a drama; it's in short, Gilbert Hernandez at his very best! Black-and-white comics throughoutBook Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Fifty issues--collected into 15 volumes that total 2,000 pages--the Hernandez brothers' Love and Rockets is an enormous achievement that helped to create a new audience for comics. Notable for their strong female characters and their focus on relationships, rather than on traditional comic-book 'action', the stories collected in this volume, and the rest of the series, show how the comic format can be used to create characters and situations as detailed and compelling as in any novel.
Reviewers have compared Gilbert Hernandez's work--set in the fictional Latin American town of Palomar--with that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Robert Altman. Reading his brother Jaime's work--most of which focuses on a group of Southern California Mexican American women--is like reading Tolstoy, if only Tolstoy had written about twenty-something punk girls. Love and Rockets has certainly earned its legendary reputation among the comic-book cognoscenti, and deserves to be read by an even wider audience. Welcome to the world of Los Bros Hernandez.
About the Author
Gilbert Hernandez lives in Las Vegas, NV with his wife and daughter. He is co-creator of the long-running, award-winning, and critically-acclaimed series Love and Rockets. His books include Chance in Hell, The Troublemakers, Luba, Palomar, Speak of the Devil, Sloth, The High Soft Lisp, Love from the Shadows, Girl Crazy, Yeah! and many books in the Love and Rockets series.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
eh......,
By
This review is from: Love & Rockets Vol 10: Love and Rockets X (Paperback)
I'm a big L&R fan. I own the 15 original volume trade paperbacks. This one is my least favorite. If you're looking for an introduction into Beto Hernandez' work then check out Poison River. Otherwise, you're a fan like me who is trying to fill in the holes of his collection.
7 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A low point for Beto...,
By A Customer
This review is from: Love & Rockets Vol 10: Love and Rockets X (Paperback)
One of my least favorite of these 15 incredible volumes -- why? Basically, there's a fine line between letting your characters have strong opinions and proselytizing through your characters -- in LOVE & ROCKETS X, Senor Hernandez seems (unfortunately) rather too snug on the latter side of that boundary, and the work suffers for it. The diversity of the characters seems incredibly forced here -- he continually falls back on an extremely limited lexicon of cliches and racial stereotypes, the contrary result of which tends to be the obscuring and confounding of GH's own aims (namely, a noble, active tolerance and appreciation of the HUMAN, as opposed to the Caucasian or Latino or African-American or Gay/Lesbian, ad nauseum) -- but a little of that goes a very long way (likewise for overlong sociological Iggy Pop diatribes and the sort of musicological conversational asides which seem more like a vehicle for GH to brag about his record collection than anything else) and it times this book gets so supersaccharined with such unnecessities I had to restrain myself from hurling. The "All the World's Problems Would Be Solved If We'd All Just Embrace Our Inherent Bisexuality (Not To Mention the Nearest Available Member of Your Own Gender, Though Preferably One of a Different Race Just To Make Absolutely Certain That Beto Hernandez's Message Is Not Lost On Anyone) and Flesh Out Our Record Collections With Old Germs 45s, etc." message, presented with all the subtlety of Chick tract, ultimately estranges (read: nauseates) the reader. Crosby, Stills and Nash didn't convince me, and neither does this book -- when the Hernandez's stuff works, it really works; but when it doesn't, it's as smarmily insufferable as being forced to watch "The Big Chill" alongside some overtalkative person who counts it among her top ten favorite films of all time...Secondly, it seemed to me, reading this particular story, that something which ought to have been intrinsic to the story seemed instead to have been lost on the artist: i.e., the fact that the set of unspoken rules which govern human relationships (govern them as the moon governs the tides) is not the same set in Palomar and in Los Angeles. And this should have been central to Riri and Maricela's running-away experience, but was hardly explored (that was to be left up to Steve Erickson, who copped/altered/fleshed it out in his second novel "Rubicon Beach"). But -- more pertinently -- the story falls flat on its (admittedly quite attractive) face for the same reasons. Los Angeles ain't Palomar. Los Angeles is so apalomaric (sorry) it might as well be on another planet, populated by a different species. I sort of got the feeling that he was jumping into brother Jaime's territory. Later work based around the LA-Palomar pipeline (I'm thinking specifially of the unbelievable "Luba Conquers the World" and of last year's "New Love" series) juggles all of these themes, characters, plots and conflicts admirably and successfully, so I imagine Gilbert eventually found his way through to the same clarified butter as the sorely missed Mr. Coltrane.
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