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.
From Booklist
An era in alternative comics ended this year when the Hernandez brothers published the last issue of Love and Rockets. Chester Square collected the last of Jaime's "Hoppers 13" stories from the magazine, and this volume rounds up the last of Gilbert's stories of the rural Latin American village of Palomar. A cataclysmic event brings many of the continuing characters back home; complementarily, a pivotal village figure departs. Yet life goes on much as it always has. In the Palomar saga, Gilbert brought magical realism to comics and, with it, a complexity that shattered the limitations of the medium. Over the course of the series, his illustrative style grew more expressive and assured, and he developed a masterful ability to juggle a huge cast, many plot lines, and various timelines, too--in all, a wealth of material that may hopelessly confuse those trying to come on board at this point. Those who have faithfully followed the series will cherish this final journey to Palomar and hope that Gilbert will someday return to it. Gordon Flagg
