Love & Rockets Vol. 9: Flies on the Ceiling [Paperback]

Jaime Hernandez (Author), Gilbert Hernandez (Author), Los Bros. Hernandez (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 18, 2003

Three stories demonstrate Jaime's mastery, including a classic Maggie and Hopey story. Gilbert contributes an extraordinary comics biography of Frida Kahlo and a funny and very modern re-telling of a classic folk tale.

Included in this collection from two of the most brilliant cartoonists America are some of the finest achievements from Los. Bros! Jaime's classic stories "Izzy-in-Mexico" and "Spring 1982" demonstrate his narrative and graphic mastery, and his tongue-in-cheek soap opera "Ninety-Three Million Miles from the Sun... and Counting" is a classic Maggie and Hopey story. All this, plus "Li'l Ray" (done in the style of classic Dennis the Menace comics), "Below My Window Lurks My Head" (Ray vs. Danita's jealous and murderous ex-husband), and more. While Gilbert has only two major stories in this volume, they're some of his best: "Frida" is an extraordinary comics biography of the Mexican surrealist Frida Kahlo, and "A Folk Tale" is a funny and very modern re-telling of...well, a classic folk tale. Black-and-white comics throughout

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. 

Jaime Hernandez is a lifelong Los Angelean, where he continues to chronicle Maggie’s life in the pages of Love and Rockets: New Stories.

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books; 3rd ed. edition (February 18, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560970715
• ISBN-13: 978-1560970712
• Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 8.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,361,117 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Maggie and Hopey together again, July 3, 2004

By 

claire de lune (Bellevue, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love & Rockets Vol. 9: Flies on the Ceiling (Paperback)

This probably isn't the best place to start reading Love and Rockets, since it directly follows the events of Death of Speedy but otherwise, there's a lot to like in Flies on the Ceiling. A lot of details are filled in about many of the characters' lives. Flies on the Ceiling includes an account of Izzy's time in Mexico, which I thought was really well done. And also a brief "origin story" of Terry Downe. Those two were some of my favorites. The main body of the collection though is about Maggie and Hopey's reunion. After Hopey left to go on tour with her band, Maggie had no idea where she was. In the course of the story we also an account of what happened to Hopey after we last saw her in Death of Speedy. It's really amazing how Jaime Hernandez can put so much into a few panels, so that years or even decades of a person's life can be summed up in a few pages, but all the same you feel like you got a rich and satisfying story.