Review: Will Dubbeld
Love and Rockets was an elusive, legendary comic book in my younger days. Ads were prevalent in those old Fantagraphics comics, lauding the genius of Los Bros Hernandez and this Love and Rockets creation of theirs. I wanted it. Fantagraphics ALWAYS produces quality books and Young Will was certain Love and Rockets was no exception.
Unfortunately, my local comic shops were never hip enough to order the book. Nary a back issue to be found, my entire collecting career. Frustrating as hell is what it was . . .
I chalked it up to scarcity, believing that Jaime and Gilbert slavishly produced one issue annually and printed only as many copies at the local Kinkos as they could afford on freelancer pay.
The comic just felt that real, that underground.
Upon the announcement of a brand spankin' new ongoing series, I immediately pre-ordered. Finally, the esoteric mysteries of Love and Rockets would be revealed. When I picked up my weekly haul the first cover I cracked was this magazine-sized treasure whose contents I greedily devoured.
It did not disappoint.
Divided into a series of vignettes, the magazine runs the gamut from grounded realism (middle-aged women at a punk rock show, Indie publishers hawking a comic book at a convention) to downright bizarre (soap-operatic interactions with a family of gargantuan-breasted women, a sci-fi space vampire, maybe?, story). It was all amazing. Pacing, art, and plotting all indicate decades of experience honing the craft of graphic sequential storytelling. The only drawback I found in the book was no fault of Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez; it was solely at my feet. Love and Rockets has over seventy issues and graphic novels, and I was completely in the dark when it came to characters and plot continuations. Having zero frame of reference left me curious, a tad confused, and starving for more.
With that in mind, I cannot recommend this book enough. It's fueled the fire I've already got for Indie books and is a welcome change from the capes-and-cowls scene. Seeking out back issues of Love and Rockets has been at the forefront of my brain since my initial read. I want to know more, to get to know these characters, and to keep the torch burning for small-press.
Go buy this book, and then buy all of the prior work from Los Bros Hernandez whether it's Love and Rockets or other comics. These two have more than earned the respect and support of comicdom, and I eagerly await the next issue.
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