The first of three volumes chronicles the globe-trotting adventures and exploits of Maggie, her best friend and occasional lover Hopey, and their companions, Peggy Century, her weirdo mentor Izzy, aging wrestler Rena Titanon, and Maggie's new love interest, Rand Race. Original.
This volume collects the adventures of the spunky Maggie; her annoying, pixie-ish best friend and sometime lover Hopey; and their circle of friends, including their bombshell friend Penny Century, Maggie's weirdo mentor Izzy―as well as the aging but still heroic wrestler Rena Titanon and Maggie's handsome love interest, Rand Race. After the sci-fi trappings of his earliest stories (as seen in Maggie the Mechanic, the first volume in this series), Hernandez refined his approach, settling on the more naturalistic environment of the fictional Los Angeles barrio, Hoppers, and the lives of the young Mexican-Americans and punk rockers who live there. A central story and one of Jaime's absolute peaks is "The Death of Speedy." Such is Jaime's mastery that even though the end of the story is telegraphed from the very title, the downhill spiral of Speedy, the local heartthrob, is utterly compelling and ultimately quite surprising. Also in this volume, Maggie begins her on-again off-again romance with Ray D., leading to friction and an eventual separation from Hopey.
When Mexican-American rock girl Maggie Chascarrillo and feisty anti-authoritarian punkette Hopey Glass first meet, a turbulent yet enduring relationship is born.
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.
The Love and Rockets Companion: 30 Years (and Counting) contains three incredibly in-depth and candid interviews with creators Gilbert, Jaime and Mario Hernandez: one conducted by writer Neil Gaiman (Coraline); one conducted some six years into the comic’s run by longtime L&R publisher Gary Groth; and one conducted by the book’s author, spanning Gilbert’s, Jaime’s and Mario’s careers, and looking to the future of the ongoing series, with a follow-up conversation with Groth. This book has foldout family trees for both Gilbert’s Palomar and Jaime’s Locas storylines; unpublished art; a character glossary (which is handy, considering that Gilbert alone has created 50+ characters!); highlights from the original series’ anarchic letters columns; timelines; and the most wide-ranging Hernandez Brothers bibliography ever compiled, including album and DVD covers, posters and more.
The suppression of family history is the initial thread that ties together The Love Bunglers, featuring Hernandez's longtime Love and Rockets heroine Maggie. Because these secrets can't be dealt with openly, their lingering effect is even more powerful. But Maggie's ability to navigate and find meaning in her life - despite losing her culture, her brother, her profession, and her friends - is what's made her a compelling character. After a lifetime of losses, Maggie finds, in the second half, her longtime off and on lover, Ray Dominguez. Much like John Updike in his four Rabbitnovels, Jaime Hernandez has been following his longtime character Maggie around for several decades, all of which has seemed to be building towards this book in particular.
Picking up right after Perla La Loca, the third volume of the definitive “Maggie” series repackaging, this compilation of stories from Jaime Hernandez’s solo comic Penny Century and his subsequent return to Love and Rockets (Volume II) charts the further lives of his beloved “Locas.” But first... wrestling! Penny Century starts off with a blast with “Whoa, Nellie!,” a unique graphic novelette in which Maggie, who has settled in with her pro-wrestler aunt for a while, experiences that wild and woolly world first-hand.
Five women stand in a police lineup; four of them are garishly dressed, impressively endowed superwomen ― perfectly normal, because this is, after all, the cover of a comic book. A closer look, however, reveals a fifth woman who seems thoroughly out of place ― mousy, in bathrobe and curlers, smoking a cigarette, she appears to have been suddenly yanked from her breakfast table. Surely, this diminutive, dowdy woman is here by mistake ― or is she? From the very first cover of the very first issue of Love and Rockets in 1982, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez have created artwork that has subverted, contradicted and celebrated the history of the comic book medium, inverting familiar tropes and creating some of the most iconic images in comics over the past three and a half decades, inviting fans and readers into their world. Amazingly, many of the covers created by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez for the various iterations of Love and Rockets over the past 35 years have never been collected or have only been reprinted in black-and-white. Love and Rockets: The Covers will not only rectify this problem, but present them without trade dress (logos, marketing hype, etc.), allowing the original cover illustrations to communicate on their own.
Now in its sixth printing, this is a collection that contains the legendary first two issues of the renowned series Love and Rockets. Described by the New Musical Express as 'a devastating realisation of the potential of the comic book medium', Love and Rockets is a saga spanning nearly 20 books, which places Los Bros Hernandez on a par with a modern day Zola.