For the first time ever, Gilbert Hernandez's Heartbreak Soup stories from Love & Rockets are collected in one 500-page deluxe hardcover edition, finally presenting the epic as the single novel it was always intended to be. Set in the mythical Central American town Palomar, the stories weave in and out of the town's entire population, crafting an intricate tapestry of Latin American experience. Luba, the guiding spirit of Palomar, has been universally hailed as one of the great characters of contemporary fiction. Ideal for fans and new readers alike.
A novel of a delightful eccentric on a search for truth, by the renowned author of Invisible Cities. In The New York Times Book Review, the poet Seamus Heaney praised Mr. Palomar as a series of “beautiful, nimble, solitary feats of imagination.” Throughout these twenty-seven intricately structured chapters, the musings of the crusty Mr. Palomar consistently render the world sublime and ridiculous. Like the telescope for which he is named, Mr. Palomar is a natural observer. “It is only after you have come to know the surface of things,” he believes, “that you can venture to seek what is underneath.” Whether contemplating a fine cheese, a hungry gecko, or a topless sunbather, he tends to let his meditations stray from the present moment to the great beyond. And though he may fail as an objective spectator, he is the best of company. “Each brief chapter reads like an exploded haiku,” wrote Time Out. A play on a world fragmented by our individual perceptions, this inventive and irresistible novel encapsulates the life’s work of an artist of the highest order, “the greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century” (The Guardian).
Volumes cover the Hernandez Brothers' work from the first Love & Rockets series, 1982-1996, calendar illustrations from 1989-1993, covers from the series, and hard to find drawings from various publications.
To a very great extent, Love and Rockets is synonymous with Hoppers' Maggie & Hopey and Palomar's Luba & Carmen & Heraclio & Tonantzin... but there was always more to L and R than that. Amor y Cohetes finally collects together in one convenient package all the non-Maggie and non-Palomar stories by all three Hernandez Brothers from that classic first, 50-issue Love and Rockets series—a dizzying array of styles and approaches that re-confirms these groundbreaking cartoonists' place in the history of comics.
Beyond the People develops a provocative, interdisciplinary, and meta-theoretical critique of the idea of popular sovereignty. It asks simple but far-reaching questions: Can 'imagined' communities, or 'invented' peoples, ever be theorized without, at the same time, being re-imagined and re-invented anew? Can polemical concepts, such as popular sovereignty or constituent power, be theorized objectively? If, as this book argues, the answer to these questions is no, theorists who approach the figure of a sovereign people must acknowledge that their activity is inseparable from the practice of constituent imagination. Though widely accepted as important, even vital, for the development of political concepts, the social practice of imagination is almost always presumed to operate either historically or impersonally, but seldom individually. Those who theorize the figures of popular sovereignty do not see that they are, in effect, 'conjurors' of peoplehood. This book invites constitutional, international, normative, and other political and legal theorists of sovereign peoplehood to embrace the conjuring-side of their professional identities, as a way of exploring the possibility of moving beyond eternally recurring, insolvable, and increasingly irrelevant questions. Instead of asking: Who is the people? What is the function of constituent power? Where may the people exercise its right to self-determination? Beyond the People asks the reader to consider the prospect of a riskier and more adventurous theoretical road, that opens with the question: What do I as a 'theorist-imaginer', or 'conjuror of peoplehood', assume, anticipate, and aspire to as I theorize the vehicles that mediate the assumptions, anticipations, and aspirations of others? This question is examined throughout the book as it interrogates the idea of peoplehood beyond disciplinary boundaries, showing how polemical, visual, affective, conceptual, and allegorical language critically shapes our idea of peoplehood. It offers a nuanced account of the contested relationship between the social imaginary of peoplehood on the ground, and the imaginative practices of the professional 'conjurors' of peoplehood in the academy.
Gilbert Hernandez’s sprawling family saga focuses on the United States, where newly immigrated Luba and her sisters, body-builder Petra and therapist/film star Fritz, find their families’ and friends’ lives becoming more and more intertwined. As the three sisters have “memories of sweet youth,” the next generation finds the spotlight: Luba’s adult daughter Doralís emcees the proceedings in her role as mischievous host of a children’s TV show, while Petra’s little girl, Venus, has adventures with her aunt Fritz and her best friend Yoshio. At her mother’s urging, Venus also writes missives to her fierce, one-armed cousin Casimira, who’s back in Palomar. In these stories ― never before collected together ― Venus tells it like it is!
In Ofelia, the sisters, the kids, and the cousins are all settled comfortably in California after leaving Palomar in Luba and Her Family. Luba and her cousin Ofelia’s relationship has always been fraught, but when Ofelia threatens to write a book about Luba, past memories, secrets, resentments, and pain resurface. Meanwhile, Luba’s children―genius Socorro, recently out-and-proud Doralis, and prickly Maricela―show that a talent for trouble may be hereditary. Luba’s sisters, Fritz and Petra, swap lovers (as usual), but . . . are Fritz and family friend Pipo sittin’ in a tree? These vividly drawn characters are charged with Hernandez’s trademark complexity; they live, love, age, fight― and die―in this sweeping, multi-generational saga.
"Human Diastrophism" is the only full graphic novel length "Palomar" story ever created by Gilbert. In it, a serial killer stalks Palomar―but his depredations, hideous as they are, only serve to exacerbate the cracks in the idyllic Central American town as the modern world begins to intrude. "Diastrophism" concludes with the death (the suicide, in fact) of one of Palomar's most beloved characters, and a postscript that provides one of the most hauntingly magical moments of the entire series as a rain of ashes drifts down upon Palomar. Also included are all the post-"Diastrophism" stories, in which Luba's past (as seen in the epic Poison River) comes back to haunt her, and the seeds are sown for the "Palomar diaspora" that ends this dense, enthralling book.
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.
In this batch of “Locas” stories by Jaime Hernandez from the pages of Love and Rockets Volume II (picking up where 2010’s Penny Century collection left off), an older and wiser Maggie faces down her old demons and the “Ghost of Hoppers” in a full-length graphic novel (which also introduces one of Jaime’s greatest recent characters, Vivian the “Frogmouth,” the near-psychotic bombshell). Meanwhile, the ever-feisty but maturing Hopey (her Spanish birth name giving this collection its title) transitions from tending bar to teaching kindergarten (while still juggling a complex love life), and the final quarter of the book shows Maggie’s lovable ex Ray Dominguez being dragged into the aftermath of a grisly murder thanks to his falling for the Frogmouth.
