Synopsis
Love and Rockets: New Stories #1 reboots the beloved ongoing "Love and Rockets" comic into a fat, all-new annual graphic novel length package.
Jaime launches the new format with a story that's unusual even for him... A full-on, pulse-pounding super-hero yarn! Maggie's longtime friend Penny Century has finally realized her longtime dream of acquiring super-powers, but at a terrible personal cost. Now she rampages through the galaxy, half mad with grief, and a motley group of super-heroes assembles to try to stop her -- led by Maggie's girlfriend Angel and her mysterious neighbor Alarma, and involving a number of characters longtime Love and Rockets fans will delight in recognizing.
The epic-length 50-page story (only the first half of the saga!) combines Jaime's razor sharp characterization and superlative art with wildly inventive, Kirby-style slam-bang super-hero action.
Then Gilbert Hernandez explodes with a similarly generous helping of his fantastically creative one-shot short stories: "Papa" (a turn-of-the-century story involving a traveling businessman); "The New Adventures of Duke and Sammy" (super-powered Martin and Lewis impostors in outer space); "Victory Dance" (Into the Wild as re-imagined by Beto); "Chiro el Indio" (written by third brother Mario Hernandez); "Never Say Never" (a kangaroo gets lucky in Las Vegas; and the mysterious wordless mood piece simply titled "?".
One hundred pages of Jaime, Gilbert and Mario Hernandez at the peak of their powers: this is a major graphic-novel event!
Love and Rockets, still some of the most fun you can have outside the bedroom. Female super-teams, as discovered by Maggie and Angel, in a quest to save the world from the newly empowered Penny Century, plus lots of snippets and side-stories, and an ever-weird decade spanning tragic tale from Gilbert in his distinctive style.
It's not just that it's silly, or that it's smart, it's that it manages to re-envision previously minor characters into new heights, as well as always dropping truffle-like traces of wisdom and sadness, that flavour the whole piece.
Plus, it looks good. Not many independents consistently manage that for nearly thirty years!
The new graphic novel format that they have switched to in their production meets the needs of an industry that now includes bookshops and other non-comicbook outlets, keeping their exposure high and presumably their job easier and perhaps more lucrative. Perhaps a death-knell for individual comics, which is sad coming from such die-hard indepedents, but a fact of life: adapt or die.