Love Rockets Vol. 4: Tears from Heaven

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by Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez


Back for a fourth printing, Volume 4 of the Love & Rockets Collection contains all the essential elements of Los Bros. Hernandez: Starting off with Gilbert's epic "Errata Stigmata" title story, and continuing through many, many short stories by both Gilbert and Jaime, including "Penny Century: On the Road Ag'in," the entire "Rocky" saga, "The Reticent Heart," plus a bonus six-page story by Gilbert done for this volume, "The Many Faces of 'Big' Danny Chesterfield," Love & Rockets Volume 4 can't miss. With nearly all the collected volumes back in print, it's now easier than ever to see why Time magazine called this cartooning pair one of the Top 100 Innovators of the Century MATURE READERS. SC, 136pg, 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.