Love and Rockets: New Stories

All-new stories featuring Jaime’s Maggie and Ray, plus Gilbert’s Fritz and the “Sad Girl.”

After Jaime’s two-part super-hero epic from Love and Rockets: New Stories #1 and #2, we return to the enthralling minutiae of the “Locas” cast’s lives for the first time in three years. In the main story Ray finally gets his date with Maggie: The couple goes to an art opening and to dinner, they discuss the crazy world of dreams, and Maggie asks Ray for a huge favor. Also in this volume, “Brown Town, Blue Sun,” a new installment in Jaime’s beloved “little kids” flashback series: A ten-year-old Maggie and her family move away from Hoppers to a desert ghost town…

And on the Gilbert side of the ledger, “Scarlet by Starlight” is a story starring Fritz (of High Soft Lisp fame) that (in contrast to #2’s silent masterpiece “Hypnotwist”) consists entirely of a 14-page dialogue scene. “Killer/Sad Girl/Star” picks up the “Sad Girl” character from LRNS #2, and how no one in her family takes her budding film career seriously. 104 pages of black-and-white comics

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.

Jaime Hernandez was one of six siblings born and raised in Oxnard, California. His mother passed down a love of comics, which for Jaime became a passion rivaled only by his interest in the burgeoning punk rock scene of 1970s Southern California. Together with his brothers Gilbert and Mario, Jaime co-created the ongoing comic book series Love and Rockets in 1981, which Gilbert and Jaime continue to both write and draw to this day. Jaime’s work began as a perfect (if unlikely) synthesis of the anarchistic, do-it-yourself aesthetic of the punk scene and an elegant cartooning style that recalled masters such as Charles M. Schulz and Alex Toth. Love and Rockets has evolved into one of the great bodies of American literary fiction, spanning five decades and countless high-water marks in the medium’s history. In 2016, Hernandez won the prestigious Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his graphic novel, The Love Bunglers. In 2017, he (along with Gilbert) was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame, and, in 2018, he released his first children’s book, the Aesop Book Prize-winning The Dragon Slayer: Folktales from Latin America. He is a lifelong Angeleno.