Blog Archives

Website

Love and Rockets: The First Fifty: The Classic 40th Anniversary Collection

(With apologies to Fantagraphics, as I stole…er, borrowed this image from their website)

Hell no, I’m not going to review Love and Rockets! Are you kidding me? This is instead going to be half “hey, did you know that this collection existed?” and half “story about how I got into comics.” As for you, gentle reader, you now know the first half of my intentions, basically. This exists, it’s amazing, if you have the money of course you should get it. The rest is going to be fairly self-indulgent, so continue at your own risk. Oh, one more thing before I start rambling: if you’ve never heard of Love and Rockets, it’s not too hyperbolic to say that it’s a foundational piece of just about every alternative comic going today. Sure, there was the underground stuff before that, and various newspaper strips and EC comics before that, but anybody who’s been doing comics since the 90’s on owes a hell of a lot to Jaime and Gilbert. When did you start reading Love and Rockets? I started reading this with Volume 2 of the collected editions, way back when they were just starting to put out collected editions. The image of Luba, always and forever a striking character, on the cover holding a hammer, was irresistable. That volume had Heartbreak Soup in it and, like anybody else who read that story, that was it for me. Instant fan for life, right there. This would have been maybe 1990 or 1991 (I got the book in a bargain bin, so it wasn’t brand new). Got caught up on the collections available at the time, got the rest of the issues of the magazine sized series, then kept going with the various issues/books since. I stopped reading them several years back for no good reason I can think of, but after reading this sucker I’m going back and filling in any holes; yes, you’d better believe I’m reading the whole thing again. So if anybody is left reading this, what about this collection? After all, at $400 it’s far from a casual purchase. If you already have the graphic novels from that era, do you need this? Highly recommended, still, and if you can afford it, yes, but I guess you could make do with those editions. Reading this again reminded me of one thing: my preferred way to read Love and Rockets is like this, when they’re taking turns. Odd, I know, and not something I enjoy doing with any other creators. I’m perfectly content to read 10 pages of Poison River (Gilbert), followed by 8 pages of a Locas story (Jaime), followed by 6 pages of X (Gilbert), with a short story mixed in here and there. Probably because that’s how I started reading them, but it’s still true. Both brothers (although mostly Gilbert) were also big fans of adding panels or pages to the collected editions, and those pages aren’t in this set, so if you’re looking for the whole thing you probably do need both. One of the main attractions of this set is the 8th volume, or the “extras.” There are plenty of reviews from when they first started and following them as they evolved, along with a few short interviews. Some of their comics are in here from various sources, including things I’d never seen, and more comics from Mario Hernandez than I’d ever seen in one place. It went a long ways towards my more greatly appreciating the third brother (from the first issue of the series, I mean). My only quibble, which means it’s my only quibble with the whole collection, was that it sure seemed like they could have included one of their interviews from The Comics Journal. They’re the gold standard for interviews, after all, and they’ve done a few with them over the years. Maybe it was a space issue? They’re all in a TCJ archive online, but it would have fit nicely here. Yep, that proves it: I can never be completely happy with anything. One other reason to recommend this: since this reprints the issues exactly (ads, letters pages and all), you can see Fantagraphics grow as a company in real time. This was the first series they published, but by the 90’s they had just a ridiculous number of quality series going. Should I go back and edit this “review” into a more coherent whole? Eh, probably, but I’m not gonna. Bottom line time, I guess: if you’ve managed to never hear of these two and have some disposable income, you are in for quite a treat. Hell, you can maybe even get this from your local library, if it still has funding where you live. Aw, just use your tax return if you’re broke. That’s what I did! $400