Dig this scene! Low-life drug dealer Dewey Booth has $200,000 that even-lower-lifes want. BLING! Wes is a rock and roll loser that only wants to buy a club where nobody can tell him he can’t sing or perform. WAILIN’! He’s known Dewey for years, but that isn’t enough to get his dough. Wes needs help. Nala is an uber-stacked bombshell whose pleasure in life is to seduce and then humiliate men dumb enough to fall for her. HUSH HUSH! For half the dough, she agrees to help Wes get Dewey’s ill-gotten goods. Things don’t go so well when a wily grifter from Wes’s past shows up to complicate things. GULP! Vincene is another troublemaker who enjoys wrecking people’s plans and wants the Dewey dough, too. In the end, deadly fires ignite, heads literally roll, eyes are shot out — and all Wes wants to do is sing in a rock and roll club.

The Troublemakers is the second volume in a series of original graphic novels in which Gilbert Hernandez creates comics adaptations of movies starring or co-starring Luba’s half-sister Rosalba “Fritz” Martinez from Love and Rockets. The first, the dystopian Chance in Hell (in which Fritz has only a bit part), was released in 2007. This hard boiled, pulp graphic novel will delight longtime Hernandez fans as well as provide a perfect introduction to newcomers to Hernandez’s work.