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 GilbertHernandez'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.
i am being punk'd, right? knowing that there is a rabid fanbase for cartoons/comics out there, i thought i would give the genre a try. i read a bit about the subject & found that the LOVE AND ROCKETS series is highly regarded by many comic fanatics. So i got this book, the 1st in the series, and came to the conclusion that the universe likes to play jokes on me. certainly, nobody could actually like this book! there is no way! a complete waste of time, it is. pure crap. I hate it, i hate it, i hate it!!!!!!!!!!! so anyway, that's my thoughts about my first foray into the comic book genre. ick.
Pure wacky, graphic novel bliss... I got out - way out - of comic books several years before the debut of the Hernandez Bros. Love and Rockets books, but a friend of mine kept shoving the series under my nose, time after time. His persistence finally paid off; eventually, after a stategic, last-ditch attempt with a Christmas gift (thanks Brett!), I finally took notice.
I'm dang glad that I did. L&R couldn't rekindle my love affair with comics and draw me back into wanting to work in the medium, like I think my friend hoped, but the series did impress me. The Hernandez Bros. took the comic book in an entirely different direction than the medium had ever gone (even in the independents and graphic novels), and the Bros. and their work just got better with time. Music for Mechanics (Complete Love and Rockets, Book 1) Vol. 1 is the must see starting point for those just experiencing Los Bros. Hernandez' work.
Although I liked Gilbert's stuff well enough, my personal favorites here are the Mechanics stories by Jaime. I still dig his Dan DeCarlo/Archie's comics inspired drawing and the punk-rock madness of Maggie and her sci-fi exploits. Gilbert's artwork got a little too bizarre for my tastes. Or maybe it was due to my fond memories of Betty and Veronica... I don't know.
Hard to believe it's been more than two decades since I opened that Christmas gift, and I'm glad to say that, so far, Love and Rockets has weathered time's test. If you're new to the crew, I hope you enjoy your introduction. Have fun - the ride just gets better from here.
Brilliant Jaime and Gilbert drew and wrote their hearts out from the beginning of this series and onward. The characters will draw you in, befriend you, make fun of you, and keep you wanting more. THis series is still a rarity amongst "alternative" comics, in its smartly told and...expertly drawn tales. Much of what passes for alternative in either comics or music is either pure rubbish or promising ideas tapped by sophmoric artists. Love and Rockets were a real gem from the start, and continue to be so because of the craftmanship demonstrated time and time again, as well as the uninhibited vision of its creators.
'Love & Rockets' when it still HAD rockets... This volume of the L&R collection is, obviously, the beginning. This was Los Bros Hernandez finding their voices and experimenting with concepts and genres. A large part of these stories are sci-fi, a genre the authors essentially abandoned later in the run, in favor of more character-driven "realistic" stories (with some exceptions, such as the later 'Penny Century' material). This volume introduces Maggie, Hopey and Luba, three characters who form the nucleus of the Hernandez universe all the way up until today (in fact, Maggie is the star of a new strip being published weekly in the New York Times Magazine starting in April 2006). There are two main storylines in this volume, Mechanics (by Jaime)and BEM (by Gilbert). In Mechanics, Maggie leaves Hopey at home in Hoppers, their LA-area neighborhood/barrio, and goes off to work as a prosolar mechanic in the fictional country of Zhato, fixing robots, spaceships and other high-tech stuff. During her trip she falls for fellow mechanic Rand Race, gets involved in a civil war and gets lost in the jungle with former world champion wrestler Queen Rena Titanon. In BEM, Luba is shown as an ambitious would-be dictator, attempting to harness the power of the giant monster BEM, who has been released from his underground prison by greedy land developers trying to use it as the cheapest possible labor. In my personal opinion these stories are absurd, funny and beautiful, and while they don't necessarily reflect the characters' eventual 'reality', they are excellent nonetheless. In fact, the included short story Locas Tambien is a much better example of what the stories are like in the future run; no ray guns or creatures, just friends hanging out, going to clubs and worrying about getting beat up. So to sum up, I'll say that if you want to see what Love & Rockets is all about, this is a great place to start. If you're looking for the Hernandez Brothers at their very best, I would suggest their collections 'Locas' (by Jaime) and 'Palomar' (by Gilbert).
Overrated I'm writing just to warn people not to buy this book!
I don't know, people say that Love & Rockets get better after this one... But, in my humble opinion, it does never get any better. And I also bought that Palomar book and I can say this for sure. Sorry guys...
I really tried hard to read this book (and it was a great effort from my part) and I still gave up just 8 pages to the end...
What's is this? Read something because some "critic" guys told this is the supposed beginning of one of the "best works in the comics medium"? No, no, I gave up, and I should have given up earlier... I really couldn't feel attracted to read, I used to read before sleep, and I used to read only 3 pages a night and get tired... (it's a good medicine for insomnia... and a good torture technique too...).
One of the problems with these stories and others in L&R is because there's some deliberate (or maybe no... but let us believe that these artists are good enough to make things deliberate) crudeness everywhere!
The crudeness begins with the art! It's hard to get engaged with the visual in these stories and the page style. And the lettering? It isn't well arranged, there's lot of text sometimes (sometimes no text at all), and you feel uncomfortable to read. It's funny also the fact that the guys think that everybody knows spanish expressions!! Or the stories are so interesting that someone would bother to look for them in a dictionary!!!
Besides, now I arrived in one of the main problems in L&R... The Brothers Hernandes are supposing every time that people love what they are producing... I mean, when you play with the patience of you reader, or make some non-linear tricks in your stories, or you throw something in the air without further explanation (since it will be clear later - or not... - or there will be some implicit reflective meaning that will be noticed later) you have to make sure that your reader is attracted to your material, that things are very engaging, that your reader will really want to follow the stories to understand things...
On the other hand... Who said them that I'm interested? I mean, I begin to read a story because someone said it's interesting... But I didn't even begin to read and I'm not feeling attracted by the visual... then, I don't feel attracted by the beginning of the stories, then I begin to get tired to read, then I begin to hate things... Then, I wouldn't feel any interest to proceed just to see if in the end things get straight in my head, and I begin to see the lights of the story! And I'm sorry...
I still really don't know how I achieved the end of that Ben story!
It's like to go up a tibetan mountain, just because someone said that you will get 100 dollars!! Well, there are many easy, interesting, attractive, and personal enriching ways to get 100 dollars... I hope you get my meaning. The truth is that there are a lot of more satisfying comic book stories than L&R out there, and the truth is that L&R have been very overrated by "comic book critics".
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