Love & Rockets Vol. 11: Wigwam Bam

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by Jaime Hernandez


From one of the Top 100 Innovators (according to Time magazine) comes the graphic novel that The Comics Journal called "one of the best stories in any medium" and named as the 13th best comic book of all time! Beautifully drawn, "Wigwam Bam" is an amazingly rich meditation on the power memory has over one's everyday life, as presented through juxtaposition of the reality and idealization of the relationship between Jaime's best-loved characters, Maggie and Hopey. Praised by the likes of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, don't you miss out on one of the true comics geniuses of the 20th Century if you aren't reading Jaime Hernandez's work.


SC, 8x11, 132pg, b&w

Fifty issues--collected into 15 volumes that total 2,000 pages--the Hernandez brothers' Love and Rockets is an enormous achievement that helped to create a new audience for comics. Notable for their strong female characters and their focus on relationships, rather than on traditional comic-book 'action', the stories collected in this volume, and the rest of the series, show how the comic format can be used to create characters and situations as detailed and compelling as in any novel.

Reviewers have compared Gilbert Hernandez's work--set in the fictional Latin American town of Palomar--with that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Robert Altman. Reading his brother Jaime's work--most of which focuses on a group of Southern California Mexican American women--is like reading Tolstoy, if only Tolstoy had written about twenty-something punk girls. Love and Rockets has certainly earned its legendary reputation among the comic-book cognoscenti, and deserves to be read by an even wider audience. Welcome to the world of Los Bros Hernandez.