Continuing their celebration of four decades of Love and Rockets, Fantagraphics presents this comprehensive overview of the first 50 issues by critic Marc Sobel. The new book is welcoming enough that newbies won’t be lost, but also provides plenty of fascinating details for long-time fans. It’s a perfect companion to Fantagraphics’ massive hardcover box set of the first 50 issues, while Sobel’s scholarly dissertations also make it an ideal college textbook candidate for multiple disciplines.
Buy Reading Love and Rockets by Marc SobelSobel has been kicking around the idea for this book for nearly two decades, but didn’t crack the puzzle of how best to proceed until the past few years. Rather than simply review each issue in progressive order, he opted instead to organize the series via each completed story arc, a genius approach considering the haphazard way the stories were doled out in the original issues. With each story, he provides a general overview, a bit of criticism, valuable insight from past interviews with Los Bros Hernandez and other notable figures, but also shines a light on influences that came into play. Those influences range from the legendary artists who inspired Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez while they honed their style, to the LA punk scene that shaped their worldview, to the impact of being Mexican-American in a predominantly white country and industry.
Before he gets into the story arcs, Sobel lays out an impressive smorgasbord of their life before Love and Rockets. This includes some history on the Hernandez parents, their other siblings (including occasional contributor Mario), and life in Oxnard, California. Skipping forward, he details their struggles with breaking into the industry and self-publishing, their immersion in the tight-knit lowrider culture and punk scene, and their rise to prominence via their initial and ongoing relationship with Fantagraphics. He also showcases some of their band flyer and comics before the creation of Love and Rockets, super rare work that shows their early promise. Even if you know their general history, it hasn’t been presented in such a full-featured manner before.
If you’ve read past interviews with Los Bros, you’ll be familiar with a fair amount of the information in this book. Where Sobel really succeeds is in how far-reaching he dug for rare past material originally published in little-seen fanzines and other shuttered publications, pulling it together in this skillfully organized and all-encompassing book. It’s also fun to see a few scattered side-by-side art comparisons of their work against the comics masters they emulated, including Moebius, Alex Raymond, Jack Kirby, Osamu Tezuka, and most surprising to me, Matt Baker’s Canteen Kate, with Jaime replicating a cover image for the cover of issue #15.
It’s mind-boggling to consider that a scrappy self-published comic from the early ‘80s turned into a world-renowned work of art inspiring this weighty new tome. Sobel’s work helps to make sense of it all, both Los Bros’ influences and their sprawling stories. It’s also peppered with plenty of imagery to ensure that it never feels like a dry, bland textbook, making it a joy to peruse even without earning college credit.
Reading Love and Rockets is now available from Fantagraphics, along with their continuing availability of the deluxe 40th anniversary box set and affordable paperback collections of all stories covered in the book.
