High Soft Lisp (Love and Rockets) - Softcover

Hernandez, Gilbert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1606993186 ISBN 13: 9781606993187

Publisher: Fantagraphics, 2010

Synopsis

From the pages of Love and Rockets, the life of one of comics’ most seductive heroine.

“Five six. Hundred twenty-eight pounds. Forty-three twenty-two thirty-six. High soft lisp. Genius level I.Q.” That’s how motivational speaker Mark Herrera sums up Rosalba “Fritz” Martinez, bombshell, former punkette, former psychiatrist, “Z” movie star ― in this supremely sexy, constantly surprising graphic novel.

And Herrera should know, being only one of many to fall under Fritz’s “lithping” spell―others including slobbish rocker Scott “The Hog” and high school nerd turned obsessive bodybuilder Enrique Escobar (and that’s just her husbands).

Hernandez has taken this suite of stories (including the 48-page graphic novelette “High Soft Lisp”), originally serialized in the second volume of Love and Rockets, and fleshed them out with a dozen brand new pages, creating an original and inventive (and very steamy) volume that, through its connections to his main character Luba (Fritz is Luba’s half sister, and characters from the Luba stories pop up here), works both as a standalone graphic novel and a further exploration of Hernandez’s rich world. 144 pages of b/w comics

About this title

About the Author

Gilbert Hernandez was born in 1957 in Oxnard, California, and is considered one of the greatest living comics writer-artists in the world. In 1982, Hernandez co-created, along with his brothers Mario and Jaime, the ongoing, iconic, internationally acclaimed comic book series Love and Rockets, one of the greatest bodies of work the medium has ever seen. In addition to his work on Love and Rockets, its spinoffs, and side series, Hernandez has released a prodigious amount of original graphic novels and miniseries, such as Sloth, Bumperhead, and Marble Season. He also collaborated with Darwyn Cooke on The Twilight Children for DC. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2017 and is the recipient of a Fellow Award from United States Artists and a PEN Center USA’s Graphic Literature Award for Outstanding Body of Work. Hernandez lives in Ventura, CA, with his wife and daughter.

Reviews

From the pages of the venerable comics institution Love and Rockets come 11 stories that loosely revolve around the emotional and sexual misadventures of psychoanalyst, sci-fi fanatic, and heroically voluptuous grade-Z film star Rosalba Fritz Martinez. Originally a minor character in Hernandez's expansive Palomar universe, Fritz doesn't exactly take center stage in her own book, either. In fact, we're introduced to our ostensible heroine as merely the fourth of world-famous motivational speaker Mark Herrera's six wives. The ensuing leaps in chronology and POV can be jarring for those not familiar with Hernandez's episodic style (not to mention the daunting mythology built up over 25-plus years of Love and Rockets), but the stories' offbeat humor and manic sexual energy make the adjustment more than worthwhile. Fritz's hypersexuality, bizarre fetishes, rampant vanity, and burgeoning alcoholism provide many of the volume's finest comic moments, but the ample sex on view is rarely sexy. Rather, the characters' libidinous pursuits are tied into an affecting strain of loneliness and regret that pervades even the most outlandish panels. Add to that Hernandez's characteristically thick, expressive line and character design that owes an acknowledged debt to Archie comics, and the result is a charmingly incongruous, occasionally titillating collision of poignancy and pulp. (Apr.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Fantagraphics
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1606993186
• ISBN 13: 9781606993187
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144