#Los bros Hernandez

[thebestcomicbookpanels]

Cheetah Torpeda in Love and Rockets by Jaime Hernandez

[thebristolboard]

Hard to believe that this book I started writing 17 years ago is finally coming out this March!

[theblackestofsuns]

Ten Years of Love & Rockets (September 1992)

Cover by Los Bros Hernandez

Fantagraphics Books

[cantsayidont]

July 1993. The first collected version of the story that I consider Gilbert Hernandez's magnum opus, originally serialized in LOVE & ROCKETS #31–#39 between 1989 and 1992. A dense multi-character drama set in Los Angeles in the period between the U.S. invasion of Panama and the first Gulf War, it has some ties to Hernandez's ongoing Palomar saga (for instance, one of its central characters is Luba's daughter Maricela, who has fled her mother's homophobia to eke out a marginal existence in L.A. with her girlfriend), but it's certainly the most accessible of his storylines, requiring no particular knowledge of the rest. (Fantagraphics now compiles it in Vol. 6 of its LOVE & ROCKETS collections, BEYOND PALOMAR, along with POISON RIVER, which was published roughly concurrently, but is a very different animal.) The story's exploration of sexuality, race, and racial conflicts stands comparison with the best films from and about that time, without exploitation, sentimentality, or melodrama. While the art is never as pretty as Jaime Hernandez's Locas saga, the storytelling is virtuosic: a master class in how to craft a modern comic book story set in vividly realized real places without ever becoming bogged down in photo-referenced detail, with characters whose most complex emotions are delineated with seemingly effortless precision.

[dinosaurgiantpenny]

[rustbeltjessie]

From my most recent trip to the library.

[radonx9]

something i've never understood is that, Love and Rockets is this legendary comic book, right? like we all know how influential and important it was to the art of comics making in general and how big a deal that was for like, inspiring alan moore and every other dude in the 80s/90s that made a comic or graphic novel that got huge because "it's not just superheroes" or w/e, yet like....

fucing no one talks about it? or at least no one outside of like old school comics dudes circles or w/e.

Love and Rockets (or at least Jaime's stuff in the 80's) is like the quintessential weird punk rock lesbian girl diy comic that inspired all your favorite, coolest shit and just....... no one is reading it??? or at least not anyone i know and that includes folks that make comics on the regular? i figured the tumblr girlies would love that shit!

i literally could not have made Rosetta Falls if i hadn't read Maggie the Mechanic and gone "oh fuck so THIS is where all this cool stuff i love came from???" shit is weird, man.

[lil-doodles]

More sketching. Not great but this is why we copy the masters so we can learn from them.

[edrake]

Composition Book Chronicles - R.I.P. Ed Piskor

[tourdefrancois]

I recently had the pleasure of chatting via video call with Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez to discuss the recent 40th anniversary of their seminal sci-fi/punk/indie/Latino/everything series Love & Rockets and the release of the massive Love & Rockets: The First Fifty box set from Fantagraphics. I’ve been reading Los Bros’ work for about three decades now, and they had a HUGE influence on my view of what comics could be and what kind of stories the medium can encompass. As a young punk (and comics nerd, and mixed-race kid) coming of age in Southern California, their modern, multi-cultural, multi-genre stories really spoke to me, and solidified my burgeoning desire to create my own work in the medium (I also eventually went on to write my undergrad thesis on Jaime’s Locas stories). It was a real delight and an honor to talk with these comic book giants, and our conversation touched on all kinds of subjects, from where to start with their sprawling narratives (“Just follow the girls”) to the Bros’ occasional frustrations with “small-minded nitwits out there that are running things.”

Below is a short excerpt from our conversation, for the full interview head on over to Broken Frontier!

Photograph by Carol Kovinick-Hernandez

GH: What I think is really special about what Jaime did, is Jaime started out with a lot of detail, a lot of just, likability of looking at a comic book. He just had that going on, and it was science fiction-y and this and that, with light humor. What I think is remarkable is that he didn’t go that way, to be a big famous artist. He went inside to the characters and used that skill that could’ve worked at Marvel or wherever else if he wanted to. But what he did was he used that skill to tell human stories. And that’s something that was not encouraged in comics. To have Jaime’s skill to draw, you know, as well as he did, and use it for humanistic stories and not be, you know, whoever’s doing the new Spider-Man or whatever. I think that that took a lot of strength in a way that he may not have been aware of at the time.

JH: Yeah. It always seemed more important to me, like he said, to use my strengths to tell what I wanted to tell. I never thought of really using it for someone else, you know? It was always for me, like, “Oh, okay, I have this gift of drawing pretty well, so I get to draw what I want.” So it was always, for me, my stories. It’s something I had never really thought about, ‘til he brought that up. It’s almost like I didn’t know that “I coulda been somebody!” you know?

GH: But you would’ve been miserable though.

JH: Oh, I can imagine. Yeah.

FV: It’s a cliche to say it this way, but it’s very much, like “Don’t sell out,” right? We all wanna make some money, but both of you have been true to your artistic vision, for 40 years, you know, straight up doing what you want to do, no matter where that takes you. If that’s popular or not, you’re following your muse as it were, wherever it might go. To me that seems very connected with the DIY ethos, the artistic ethos, the punk ethos.

JH: And here’s another funny side note. The few times I did try to sell out to make money, they didn’t want me.

GH: Yeah. That’s the truth of it.

JH: I was like, “Oh, okay. When I’m outside of my Love & Rockets world, I’ll just be used for something.” You know, it’ll be, “Go over there and draw three straight lines,” and stuff like that.

And I go, “Oh, I thought you wanted my ‘genius!’” Apparently not, you know?

Read the full interview on Broken Frontier!

[chasedbybuildings]

Every once in a while I check on my comics collection - mind you, the only one I have in any great amount is Love and Rockets. The first issue I bought was #19 via mail order from a comics shop in 1987, and at that time I just ordered it sight unseen just because I wondered if it had anything to do with the band Love and Rockets. In my defence, V For Vendetta from Warrior magazine a few years before was connected to the band via David J, the bass player, so I thought it was another crossover. Anyway, I was immediately hooked as it was a completely unexpected surprise. That said, Jaime Hernandez's 'Locas' stories were and are still my absolute favourite. I never really got into his brother Beto's work, as the obsession it seemed to have with giant boobs was very weird. More than that, Jaime's artwork and the stories about punks, gigs, and various other things very much related to my life at that time. In 1988 Jaime and Beto were guests at the UK Comic Art Convention in London, so I managed to get some things autographed despite there being no time to talk to them.

And perhaps also of interest, as I keep them in the same box, is an almost complete run of Yummy Fur, which I started buying at the same time as Love and Rockets.

[thebestcomicbookpanels]

A Love and Rockets Calendar pin-up by Xaime

[thebristolboard]

I have some copies of this ‘zine for sale. This was a chapter that got cut from Reading Love and Rockets about the four issues the Brothers did in the early ‘80s. I expanded it to include the whole history of Mister X. Message me if you want to buy one. It’s 44 pages full color.

[theblackestofsuns]

"Stuff"

Ten Years of Love & Rockets (September 1992)

Los Bros Hernandez

Fantagraphics Books

[cantsayidont]

All-purpose reaction image.

[nfcomics]

Love & Rockets: House of Raging Women Vol 5 • Los Bros. Hernandez [1986]