Love and Rockets – serie

Featuring Hernandez's longtime Love and Rockets heroine Maggie, the suppression of family history is the initial thread that ties The Love Bunglers together. Because these secrets can't be dealt with openly, their lingering effect is even more powerful. But Maggie's ability to navigate and find meaning in her life is what's made her a compelling character. This story encapsulates Maggie's emotional history as it moves from resignation to memories of loss, to sudden violence (a theme in this story) and eventually to love and contentment.

Tonta is staying for the weekend with her half-sister, the self-absorbed Vivian. At home, Tonta's stepfather is shot during a botched burglary, which leads to the discovery of family secrets that require Tonta to confront some unpleasant truths that she previously managed to suppress or remain ignorant of. Meanwhile, back at school, Tonta and Gomez discover that Coach Angel harbours a secret of her own (can you say, 'lucha libre?') while local punk band Ooot provides the soundtrack for a summer not soon to be forgotten.

In this eighth annual volume of New Stories, Jaime takes us to the punk reunion that Maggie & Hopey were road-tripping to in the last issue. Will Hopey actually show up, or will Maggie have to go it alone? Hell, will anybody show up? Lots of old friends and enemies make appearances in the second chapter of this latest Locas epic. Meanwhile, Gilbert serves up the second and concluding part of 'The Magic Voyage of Aladdin', which establishes the rivalry of its two stars, Fritz and Mila.

Maggie and Hopey leave their significant others at home and take a weekend road trip to go to a punk scene reunion in their old neighborhood. Threaded throughout are flashbacks to 1979, during the formative stages in their lifelong relationship, as the perceived invincibility of youth is juxtaposed against all of the love, heartbreak, and self-awareness that comes with lives actually lived. Serialized over the past four years in Love and Rockets: New Stories and the new comic book series, Is This How You See Me? collects Hernandez's unsentimental, long-form masterpiece together for the first time.

The first story collection in Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar saga to take place after the events of 2010's High Soft Lisp is torn from the pages of Love and Rockets: New Stories, Love and Rockets Vol. IV, and Psychodrama Illustrated - and expanded with 14 new pages! In Lovers and Haters, 50-year-old cult movie actress Fritz, in addition to her alcoholism and the ups and downs of her career, must also contend with a controlling lover, Danny; a jealous rival, Mila; a score of younger Fritz imitators, a sex cult; and mad scientists. Also in her orbit is her niece, Killer (sometimes literally, as seen in a Doctor Who-inspired TV show), a teen actress trying to launch a singing career while solving math problems. The spectre of Fritz's mother, Maria - also a cult movie actress - haunts them all with her beauty from beyond the grave. With a sprawling cast, Lovers and Haters is about mothers and daughters, aunts and nieces, complex and often toxic relationships, artists and exploiters, personas and obsessions. It reads like an X-rated The Substance mixed with Mommy Dearest and Performance, with an added dash of giallo.