Customer Reviews

Love & Rockets Vol 10: Love and Rockets X

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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.

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.