Love & Rockets - classic or dud

god Blubber is some seriously sick and twisted shit

One alien phallus penetrating an alien orifice after another.

I'd be fascinated to know what Beto's actual views on sex are. One could certainly draw all kinds of conclusions based on his comics work.

creepy thing tho is that it seems to flirt ever so slightly w things like rape and pedophilia and it is so so so graphic

It gives me the sort of visceral reaction I get from Solondz

It does feel like Gilbert's work has become more blatantly fetish-y as the years have gone by.

Birdland almost feels quaint in comparison.

Anybody else ever watch the Naked Cosmos?

Fear of Comics is the best, but now there's a new book that has a lot of the same stuff. As someone who's been reading since issue 18 of the original run, I have to say I can't keep up and am pretty annoyed by all the reprinting and shuffling of stories and duplicating collections. I just can't keep up.

― dan selzer, Tuesday, June 28, 2016 9:18 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a problem and has kept me from buying Jaime stuff lately - that and the fact that it's hard to find individual issues

The Jaime stuff is really easy not to duplicate: buy either a thick digest every eight years, or a tall hardcover every 2-3 years.

The single issues have never been easier either, as they've just spent a decade only coming out once a year or less.

and you could buy them in both comic shops and bookshops, which wasn't the case in the first 25 years of the series

more helpful than it used to be: http://www.fantagraphics.com/howtoreadloveandrockets

Yes, from that link, I'd simply recommend new readers buy the Complete Love and Rockets collections (maybe starting with vol. 2 of Jaime's stuff if you want to skip the patchier material and returning to vol. 1 once you're in love with his work) and the annuals (of which I believe there are now eight). Or skip the annuals and wait for the Complete Love and Rockets collections of that material to trickle out over the next couple of years. I'd skip the hardcovers (particularly since at least one of the big ones bafflingly skipped some fairly pertinent material).

yeah otm, the Complete trade paperbacks are the way to go if you don't mind the pages being sliiiiightly smaller than the OG publishings

The jumbo compendium best-of hardcovers don't exist anymore. I would still recommend buying the single-story hardcovers for Jaime's 21st century stuff, because both Bros are much better larger.

sorry if I'm repeating myself but all the scrambling editing has really taken it's toll. Here's what I remember bugging me. The original comics version of Poison River jumped back and forth a lot and was hard to follow, but the collected Poison River simplified by consolidating the flashbacks in a way I thought worked great. But then I bought the big Palomar book and all of Poison River was left out of it...despite characters and events that take place towards the end really only making sense if you've read Poison River!

So re: Jaime and L&R hardcovers, I picked up something called "The Education of Hopey Glass" for $1 today.

Late-period collection of L+R v. 2 material, since recollected in the compact digest-y trades. Part of the OG series of trades/HCs (volume twenty-something). I have all of those up to the point where it became clear that they would be refocusing on the digests.

Again, the Jaime collections have not refocused on the digests: the magazine-size hardcovers have continued to collect his L&R material by storyline after vol 2 ended. He even started reworking the material for them, Beto-style.

(I think the latest digest is up to Education Of Hopey Glass - the next will likely cover all the vol 3 Locasverse material in four years or so; I'd guess ten years before there's enough for another Amor Y Cohetes. The Love Bunglers, the most recent hardcover, is one of his two best books ever.)

I dunno, I thought the whole deus/diabolus ex machina solution of introducing a previously unmentioned brother who plays a crucial part in the story felt weirdly extraneous. The brother's story was a well-done bit of soap opera in itself, but IMO it should've been a separate thing, and "Love Bunglers" should've focused on just Maggie and Ray.

Wait how is he reworking material for them??

and yeah the latest Jaime digest is Esperanza, which collects the latter half of v2 (I think Penny Century collected the first half). They're done with New Stories entirely though so I'm guessing it won't be long before they release a digest of all of it.

Jaime definitely has a weird habit of retconning in characters that dramatically revise the whole Locas storyline. The whole Maggie/Tony Chase story was a particularly bad example of this.

xpost

Both Bros have altered/added material in their collections (I think it was Love and Rockets X which added a huge amount of material to the original story). I think these guys are literally the only ones I give a pass to with that kind of stuff and am still willing to shell out $$$ for edition after edition. God knows they probably aren't getting rich off of it.

Yeah, wasn't it revealed that she was married to him only at the point she was applying for a divorce? And then it was retconned that she and Hopey had known him since they were all teens?

(xpost)

exactly, it's strange to me that we are supposed to accept that this dramatic relationship has been going on for years and we've just never heard about it

It's valid to complain that Ray and Maggie's relaysh didn't have as much gravitas because we didn't see the full scope of their relationship until late in the game, but it's hardly a retcon. Besides, Ray has been around for a long time at this point, and we've seen him and Maggie's off and on thing since, what, at least the '90s.

We weren't talking about Ray, but T.C, the guy Maggie divorced from... And his brother (forget the name) who was only introduced in Love Bunglers.

Her brother, not his, sorry.

They're done with New Stories entirely though so I'm guessing it won't be long before they release a digest of all of it.

nah because there's still at least one, probably two mag-sized hardcovers of Jaime material to collect (depending on whether the space adventure stuff gets skipped) first

Both Bros have altered/added material in their collections (I think it was Love and Rockets X which added a huge amount of material to the original story).

Jaime never added new material until God & Science, but Beto has been at it for decades. Poison River and "X" are the most significant culprits: with Poison River, he reordered the story from the serialisation, then added pages and rewrote chunks as an unplanned further part of the revision.

Love & Rockets (X) got expanded twice because of the formats: the first collection was done as a 10" to better sell to record shops, and he had to add panels and tiers throughout to keep the impact of new-page-reveals and specific bits of panel-to-panel timing. Then when they let that version go out of print and put the story into the magazine-size TPB line, he didn't want to throw out the new material, so had to expand once more to make it work at a rectangular page layout again.

The best expansion he ever did, which never gets heralded, was adding pages for the first Birdland collection just so it would end on p. 69

Just read God and Science, loved it

I stopped after Penny Century (years ago) bcz Esperanza was out of print for so long, so I have to finish V2 so that I can start New Stories so that I can get to Love Bunglers, which everyone is raving abt.

I don't really sweat continuity and consistency with Jamie's stories - there are so many characters I've usually forgotten all the relationships by the time I read a new one.

But all that "retconning" (seems kind of gross to use that word here) seems to me part of the point, i.e. Jamie has always been clear we are never seeing the whole story all the time

*Jaime

I'd agree, and given the drastic shifts in tone and genre from Jaime's earliest pulp-sf parodies to his more characteristic Hoppers stories, it's hard for me to complain if he keeps revising his charaters' world.

Yeah i dont consider continuity or linearity important w Jaime's work. I'm familiar with enough major chatacters to be comfortable just dropping in anywhere.

Stevie there's 20% off everything on fanta's website all week

Cool news:

http://fantagraphics.com/flog/love-rockets-magazine-returns/

I just picked up a bunch of back issues from the original run this weekend. My local comic store was having a 50% off sale for Labor Day.

along those lines:
http://www.tcj.com/i-dont-think-about-it-i-just-do-it-catching-up-with-gilbert-hernandez/
i mean wtf here

lol

glad he stuck to black and white for that one

pretty stylish tho'

i really should have clicked on that second link at work huh

still, before i clear out my desk and join the unemployment line, i don't think i ever told the story about how i was in san francisco last year wearing a bootleg l&r t-shirt and some guy yelled 'nice shirt' at me across the street before running over and trying to strike up a conversation about los bros hernandez. when he realised i was scottish he was nonplussed that i knew about, let alone read and enjoyed, love and rockets, despite my protestations to the contrary

there's no point to this story really i just thought it was funny

okay bye

er, should not have clicked on that link at work

TBF I would probably be surprised if I met someone from San Francisco with an intimate knowledge of The Broons

true, true

I often get puzzled looks when I parade about town in my Rab C. Nesbitt Underoos.

i think you're mistaking overpowering sexual arousal for puzzlement

I fear that I often do.

It doesn't sound like it from the TCJ interview, but I wonder if there are going to be any changes of narrative direction with the switch in format. I respect Beto's commitment to the saga of Fritz and her doubles, but most of my favorite Beto stories this century (like Julio's Day, Marble Season, or Bumperhead) have been outside that continuity.

Like, the current Fritz storyline recalls "Poison River" or "Love and Rockets X" in its density, but so far it feels much more meandering than those arcs.

I'm hoping that going back to the old format with more frequent issues will help give them a bit more narrative focus and drive, which has been missing from both bros stories in recent years