Love & Rockets Vol. 12: Poison River

Gilbert Hernandez (Love and Rockets series) has produced some of the best comics work of the last ten years. Poison River is the story of one of his most engaging characters, Luba-self-possesed, intelligent an iconoclastically sexy- in the years before she arrived in Palomar, Hernandez's mythological Central American Village. We meet Maria, Luba's mother, beautiful, pampered and recklessly promiscuous. Maria's husband discovers that Luba is the result of a tool-shed trystwith Eduardo, a poor indian worker and kicks mother, child and lover out into poverty. Glamorous Maria abandons the other two in turn, and much later a teenage Luba meets her future husband Peter Rios, a conga player and small-time(soon to be big-time) gangster who takes her away to a life of privilege. But their meeting is not by chance and Rio's peculiar sexual obsessions (women's navels and well-hung chorus "girls") are driven by carnal memories of the exquisite Maria. Indeed Luba's new life (and the men in it) is much like her mother's - lavishly sheltered by violent anticommunist gangsters, who murder and terrorize the local "leftists" in the name of "business" and right-wing patriotism.

Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez's Love and Rockets is the most critically acclaimed, artistically rewarding alternative comics magazine of the past decade. The story offered in this twelfth L&R collection is a "prequel" to the ongoing chronicles of Palomar, the Latin American village in which most of Gilbert's work is set. This sprawling, complex tale of gangsters, revolutionaries, and transsexuals focuses on the early life of the pivotal character Luba, from her traumatic childhood through her teenage marriage to a musician turned mobster right up to her arrival in Palomar. The book presentation of this story adds many new pages to the magazine version as well as chapter breaks that improve the pacing. Hernandez's drawing style may strike traditional comics fans as inappropriately cartoonish for his serious subject matter, but its visual exaggeration provides an expressiveness that heightens emotional impact. The Hernandezes may have lost luster since they burst on the alternative comics scene in the early 1980s, but Gilbert's Palomar series and Jaime's "Locas" tales together remain the most significant sustained work in the genre. Gordon Flagg