Love & Rockets - classic or dud

Also, the first L&R fans I knew were the kinds of people who make you want to never like the things they like, which unfairly biased me against it.

Wasn't the 1st book more a sci-fi romp than the sort of thing that L&R became known for?

http://69.26.135.130/comic/150/a/anglluv-001.gif

... which had a "... COCAINE?" bit in its advertisements, which made me think it was going to be some lame Don't Do Drugs romantic comedy. Which it might've been, but it wasn't Love & Rockets after all.

with gilbert you'd probably better just start at the beginning; it's hard enough figuring out what's going on without having to read everything out of order!

By the time I get back from work today I want an Angel Love thread with 50 answers. (btw it was rubbish Tep.)

Love And Rockets is grebt but I've not read it in 10 years. I wonder if Morrissey has read it.

My favorite Jaime book is "Wigwam Bam"; favorite Gilbert book is probably "Love & Rockets X," though I'm not in agreement w/ many people on that one. Maybe just go for "Palomar."

soundtrack: The Pixies' cover of "I can't forget"

It was high and fine and free, oh you should have seen us

OK. so should I just give up on "Music For Mechanics" and throw good money after bad acquiring a copy of "The Death Of Speedy"?

then they got phased out.

(3) Post LOCAS. After LOVE AND ROCKETS VOLUME 1 ended, Jaime first did an all-wrestling "Locasverse" spinoff called WHOA, NELLIE! (available as a $9.95 graphic novel). If you love the LOCAS wrestling stories, get it; if not, don't -- at least not as your first pick. Instead, move onto LOCAS IN LOVE and DICKS AND DEEDEES, which pick up the continuity threads right where LOCAS left off. (These stories originally appeared in MAGGIE AND HOPEY COLOR FUN and PENNY CENTURY.) After that, you can either wait for the next volume (coming in December), GHOST OF HOPPERS, or collect all that material in the first 10 issues of LOVE AND ROCKETS VOL. II.

Beginning with LOVE AND ROCKETS VOL. II #11, all the Jaime stories are as yet uncollected, and probably won't appear between book covers until 2008 or 2009 at the earliest.

Beto guide here.

An aside: I think I love Beto's Fear of Comics almost as much as Locas or Palomar.

and

Therefore, if you've purchased and enjoyed PALOMAR, your first stops will be LOVE AND ROCKETS VOL. 12: "POISON RIVER" (the early story of Luba) and LOVE AND ROCKETS X (a story set in then-contemporary L.A. which featured one of Luba's daughters and has since worked its way into post-Palomar continuity).

and

LOVE AND ROCKETS VOLUME 1 has about 60 pages of stories such as "BEM," "Music for Monsters," et al. (Also available much cheaper --five bucks total!-- as LOVE AND ROCKETS #1 and #2.)

and

There are four very early "Locasverse" stories in LOVE AND ROCKETS (Vol. 1) #1 which were not included in LOCAS because they were comparatively crude. As it happens, you can still buy the original 64-page LOVE AND ROCKETS #1 for only $2.50 through the Fantagraphics catalog -- or you can buy LOVE AND ROCKETS VOL. 1: MUSIC FOR MECHANICS, which reprints #1 and #2. Although this latter ploy will give you a duplicate copy of the 40-page "Mechanics" story which leads off LOCAS, the other 80 or 90 pages of comics are not collected in either LOCAS or PALOMAR, and well worth the price (especially Gilbert Hernandez's "BEM," featuring a pre-Palomar Luba.

and

There's about 100 pages of "Locasverse" stories that were cut from LOCAS because they focused on peripheral characters -- Rena Titañon wrestling stories, Penny Century larks, etc.; unfortunately for collectors, they're scattered in Volumes 2, 4, 5, and 6, which otherwise contain mostly stories collected in LOCAS and PALOMAR. (Volumes 7, 11, and 13 are COMPLETELY collected in LOCAS -- well, except for one 3-page story in Vol. 13 that didn't make the cut -- so you can ignore them.)

and

However, LOVE AND ROCKETS VOLUME 9: FLIES ON THE CEILING, while it does contain a number of pages collected in LOCAS, is a relative bonanza in this regard, with 37 pages of non-LOCAS "Locasverse" stories, including two of the very, very best: "Flies on the Ceiling" (the story of Izzy in Mexico) and "Spring 1982" (a haunting flashback to the early days of the Doyle character). Volume 9 also contains Gilbert's stunning "Frida."

He doesn't cover Mario at all, but didn't he disappear from L&R almost entirely after the first few, siphoned off into anthologies and Brain Capers and so forth? I don't remember anything non-Locasverse by Xaime at all, so he's covered. What else is there, maybe a five-page short by Beto every three books, if that? (nb: if at home I would actually check this, no belligerence intended in question!)

three volumes each for Locas and Palomar characters, then one at the end for Mario and Rocky & Fumble* and BEM and Errata Stigmata and all the other oddments. All from v1 #1-50, none of the subsequent series covered.

*(which I totally forgot about in my really-kinda-belligerent post up above)

Anyway I'm not sure what I think of it.

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

so this was pretty well done, but it could have easily been twice as long. I would like to have seen more about Gilbert and Palomar, and just more about some of their most famous storylines over the years

Definitely could have been longer! Felt kinda rushed. There are some cool/interesting bits… particularly the Bros going panel by panel through a few old favorites (Dennis the Menace and Little Archie). It’s also fun watching Jaime draw & ink.

I haven't watched this yet, but I just noticed it's on YouTube on KCET's channel here.

Amazing! Thank you ernest

Thank you!

It can be watched at the PBS website also.

This YouTube link works for all us non-Americans, tho!

thanks for that link!

I don’t like this writer, but in case of interest…

https://www.gq.com/story/love-and-rockets-hernandez-brothers

Gosh, it manages to work “Comics Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore,” Watchmen, and TDKR into the opening paragraph…

In Ep. 5 of Hulu sitcom This Fool, the main character wears an L&R #24 T-shirt. (I see Fanta has it in stock… maybe I’ll try to pick it up for myself in their Black Friday sale)

there's also a L&R #29 shirt! (with L&R40 logo...)

I got a cheap bootleg of that tee off Redbubble as postage for the Fanta one to the UK was like $50. It's p bad, all the audience are peeling off, but I wore it to a comics convention I took my daughter to last weekend and I got many compliments (and everyone asked if it was vintage, and I replied, 'No, it's just shit')

and here’s the creator / star of This Fool interviewing all three Brothers last month:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNuf67jzL4s

love that #24 shirt, incredibly iconic image. that said I'm wondering it's too obvious to wear or should I just say fuck it

xp Thanks, sic – will check that out.

Yeah, I'm not traditionally a big wearer of shirts w/indicia... but lately (maybe as a "getting older" thing), I've been into the idea... searching online for band T-shirts and stuff. (Pretty sure this is my actual shirt that was stolen from a college dorm locker room c. 1994, lol)

i own and wear the #24 shirt on the regular

"This Fool" is pretty great btw

I also have a version of that shirt that I wear all the time

New York Times 40th anniversary profile:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/19/books/love-and-rockets-hernandez-bros.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/11/10/books/00Hernandezbrothers-topart/00Hernandezbrothers-topart-superJumbo.jpg

...and the First Fifty box is $80 off plus free US shipping today

The cartoonist Adrian Tomine discovered the series in 1987, after reading “Death of Speedy Ortiz,” a story by Jaime about a Hoppers local who becomes embroiled in a gang war. “I thought it was the greatest comic I’d ever seen,” he said.

Me too!

(well, actually a few years later, when I came across Vol. 7 of the collections)

I'd love to have that box but I have almost all of the first 50 in floppies, not sure I can justify it for the last volume.

i feel like i have the first volume in like three different formats already but i wouldn't turn down that box set if anyone wants to get it for me

It’s nice to see L&R get this round of 40th Anniversary props. If they do pack it in after another 10 years (as they say in that article), I’m sure there’ll be more of the same… then probably a movie, five years later.

Sale on the box is over, but 40% off just about every other L&R book, magazine or floppy today only

(same goes for any Fanta author)

Just bought some Peanutz

ooh thx

finally got the new woodring

A third sale: 20% off all pre-orders today, which includes the next digest/Library collection (the first in five years!), the next Psychodrama Illustrated, and a Fritz b-movie triple-feature.

Now this I like: https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/love-and-rockets-tote-bag

Fantabucks sale in two weeks: plan accordingly