Amor Y Cohetes: A Love and Rockets Book

To a very great extent, Love and Rockets is synonymous with the Locas and Palomar storylines and characters … but there was always more to L&R than that. This volume of The Complete Love and Rockets Library, written and drawn by all three Hernandez brothers, collects all the stories that didn’t fit into the Locas and Palomar storylines from that classic first, 50-issue run. It’s a dizzying array of styles, genres, and approaches that re-confirms these groundbreaking cartoonists’ place in the history of comics. It begins with Gilbert’s original 40-page sci-fi epic “BEM” from 1981’s self-published first issue of Love and Rockets, featuring a very different Luba and a much looser, Heavy Metal and Marvel Comics-inspired way of storytelling. Other stories include Jaime’s charming “Rocky and Fumble” series starring a planet-hopping girl and her robot; stunning one-shots such as Gilbert’s Frida Kahlo biography and his shocking autobiographical fantasia “My Love Book”; Mario’s genre thrillers which take place “Somewhere in California”; Gilbert’s brutally dystopian “Errata Stigmata”; the playful “Hernandez Satyricon,” with Gilbert drawing Jaime’s characters, and “War Paint,” with Jaime trying out Palomar; Gilbert’s light-hearted “Music for Monsters” starring Bang and Inez; and even a fantastical “non-continuity” Maggie and Hopey story “Easter Hunt” by Jaime that didn’t fit into the other books.