Love & Rockets - classic or dud

There’s also no “whole shebang” yet, the series is still going

I also maintain at the individual trades (which I resumed buying with Whoa Nellie! are the best way to read it. The problem is that all the early ones are OOP, I think

I'm strongly thinking of buying this. It's very expensive, but I've been reading this on and off since the 80s, I own maybe ¼ of the original run and would love to read it all in its original format instead of rejiggered into tpb form. It would be great if they did something similar with vol 2.

Threw a spreadsheet together to check morris’ maths (except aHEM, is your name Old Lunch, young man???!) and I get: buying the hardcovers from 1985-1997: $525 ($540 if you didn’t start until the Complete Love & Rockets editions). Buying the paperbacks from 1985: $209 if you stick with the EP version of X. Buying in-print paperbacks in the late ‘90s: over $270.

($540 1997 = $962 today. And that’s without a slipcase, color covers, letters pages, sketchbooks, dozens of essays, interviews and press clippings, restored versions of some pages, never-collected original versions of stories, 100+ pages of bonus comics (some never reprinted, some not for thirty years), and possibly an entire separate book with densely-illustrated annotations for every story from the fifty main issues. Not suggesting that anyone should buy it if they’re not interested, and I certainly couldn’t afford it, but morris’ estimate of on par or even a "steal"? seems reasonable imo!)

rejiggered into tpb form

Rejg’d/Rejugged (Pronounced “ReJigged”)

Now that's something else entirely

lols

For one thing, the title “The First Fifty” would be pretty mental to put on a book containing The First One Hundred And Forty-Seven.

I wasn't onboard at first but u finally sold me with this salient point.

I loved Jaime's early stuff, certainly up through "The Death of Speedy." I kind of dropped it for no other reason than life got in the way. I feel like I'd be hopelessly behind now.

if you want to crank through Jaime's stuff, the TPBs make it pretty manageable

Yeah, I may give it a go, although the aging of the characters really reminds me of how old I've become.

as mentioned elsewhere it was all going for a song on comixology(uk) before amazon messed that all up. luckily it's drm free so downloadable and readable anywhere. grabbed the first 14 tpbs for about £20.

Jaime is pretty consistent up through the last trade. It moved in a super hero direction that I wasn’t nuts about, but it ended really nicely. Maggie is my #1 comic crush, so any time with her is good.

The span of the Library editions means that “the superhero direction” was only in two issues of the comic, 14 years ago (and Jaime followed it with his greatest down-to-earth novel ever).

Is the Hoppers series still ongoing? I think Love Bunglers was the last I read.

I finally got a Love & Rockets tee a few montsh back - with the cover of the issue with the band onstage - and I treasure it.

xp

yes it is, in volume 4, which is a return to the large size format of the original run. There's been about 11 issues so far.

(There have been two Jaime trade collections since Love Bunglers)

Crikey! I need to get a wriggle on...

Maggie is my #1 comic crush, so any time with her is good.

The Maggie/Hopey duality reminds me, appropriately, of the Betty/Veronica divide.

#teamhopey

Middle aged Hopey has mellowed a lot

Shit, middle aged me has mellowed a lot.

I don't really "like" middle-aged Hopey, as a person (and I have a sense/recollection that Jaime doesn't, either)

Love Bunglers is so good, but This How You See Me might be even better imo

Not there's any need to choose!

The whole "actually $400 is highly reasonable" line of throught is making me reevaluate my previously held "no way!" position

as mentioned elsewhere it was all going for a song on comixology(uk) before amazon messed that all up. luckily it's drm free so downloadable and readable anywhere. grabbed the first 14 tpbs for about £20.

me too -- quite possibly on your recommendation! -- are the drm free versions still accessible? would much rather read on chunky

to download you need to go here (your uk account is valid even though it's .com)
http://amazon.com/comixology/account

hit the "View your Comixology books" link at the bottom and then the "Backup" tab.

the main site is here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/comixology/

awesome thank you!

guys this is dumb

like you can buy all of this content in the form of L&R Library tpbs for less than $100, it’s in a diff order and slightly smaller but I cannot imagine that the original order + slightly bigger is worth an extra $300

The letter columns alone are worth $400

Ha, I don't think "But you're buying exactly the same thing in a different format!!!" is a water-holding argument for comics types

I don’t know if I could put a dollar value on it, but full size is a big deal. Just compare the (small) New Stories volumes to the larger-format trade reprints of the same material.

Crikey! I need to get a wriggle on...

Stevie: here are the two post-Love-Bunglers Xaime HCs:

Is This How You See Me?
Tonta

- these are material that overlapped with each other in the issues, and with Love Bunglers, and with another lite-SF-adventure series that Jaime has on the go these days.

Facsimile editions of the L&R issues themselves probably still the best way to read this material imho, where the separate worlds are rubbing up against each other rather than kept apart.

― Ward Fowler, Monday, March 28, 2022 11:42 PM (one week ago)

I wouldn't say best - if nothing else, the expanded Poison River is a massive upgrade to that story, and it's easier to track the timeline in book form - but having read the Complete/Collection books first, it's definitely both fascinating and enlightening to see the way they piecemealed out the stories, and get a better impression of how much they were working on the fly and reacting to other things in the world or in comics.

And yeah, you get no idea in the books the various ways they play off each other - grabbing a topic or theme or character from the other Bro's work and riffing on it. Izzy appearing as a Poison River background extra in the same issue as she's in Mexico for Flies On The Ceiling! Plus the non-Locas and non-Palomarverse shorts & series feel more essential in situ, letting each artist play out ideas that don't fit in their ongoing work, or the way Beto takes months out from his regular characters to retrench between novels.

hm ok damn now I want to re-read L&R in like original comic book/Collection form and see what it's like

oh man do I have some good news for you!

This will get me chased out of this thread, but the earliest stuff is hard for me to roll with - as artists they evolved so much over the years.

I’m more of a Jaime stan and his more “cartoonish) stuff from circa 2000 forward is just magical.

(I do read the Gilbert stories in the new issues as they come out, though from issue to issue I couldn’t summarize whatever through line plots exist if my life depended on it.)

Jaime has some odd superhero sideline serial going on which, whatever - I keep thinking that space could better serve Maggie, Ray, Tonta, Frogmouth, etc. (Hopey’s been MIA for a minute, hasn’t she?)

I did consider buying some hardbacks of recent-ish stuff at my LCS but abstained - money is tight and I have this content as single issues already. Someday!

Keep meaning to reread by softcover of Wigwam Bam but then remember how much that story freaks me out.

certainly the early Jaime stories with tons of cross hatching and walls of text were on the weak side, but it was pretty amazing once he ditched the sci fi elements and started digging into the Locas storyline

Yeah - the sci-fi stuff did nothing for me.

The Mechanics stories are wonderful!

A new PBS doc is coming this fall: https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/love-rockets

woah

^This doc premiers tonight - 9pm on KCET in SoCal (no idea if it's national too, or what).

Two-minute preview here (looks like a lot of "flipping through pages" close-ups, but I guess that comes with the territory):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7XbhStOHjs

It’s not national broadcast, but will be available on the PBS app.

better they flip through than "animating" bits.

I keep getting faked out and thinking this thread is about the band, which, fwiw: classic.

yeah, i'll watch this

I refer the honorable member for Beaux to the front cover of issue #26.

I'm watching this right now on the PBS app