Over-the-top women and magic realism...it's Love and Rockets
Love and Rockets is the story of a fictional Latin American village, charting the lives of a group of its inhabitants starting from when they were teenagers, right up to the present day. It's a work of magic realism that Gabriel Garcia Marquez would be proud of, and if you've ever read 100 Years of Solitude you'll know what I mean by that when you read this graphic novel.
Created and written by Los Bros Hernandez - Gilbert Hernandez and Jamie Hernandez - Love and Rockets ran for fifty issues and was one of the key players in the alternative comic book movement in the eighties.
Love and Rockets excels with its cast of great characters, the best being the female of the species. Ask anyone who has read Love and Rockets which characters stick in their head, and they are bound to name one of of the Locas (crazy women) that Los Bros have drawn on the page.
The best things about reading Love and Rockets is that you can tell how much Los Bros Hernandez love their characters. They are drawn with so much detail, and developed so well, that you find yourself dying to find out how their stories go. Even the antagonists are given a fair shake in terms of their personalities, and no one is ever completely bad or completely good. As with all the top graphic novels, and with life in general, everything is coloured a different shade of grey rather than being black or white.
The stories presented can often start off small, with a character's normal, everyday desire, and balloon in to something larger-than-life fantastic. A good example would be the story of Maggie the Mechanic, who travels to Africa and winds up slap bang in the middle of a revolution. You're not dealing with a kitchen sink drama from the North of England here; in Love and Rockets anything can happen.
As for the book being turned into a movie, well it's an all too familiar story here. Love and Rockets has been stuck in Hollywood hell for the last fifteen years, with the movie rights to it being stuck in a litigation quagmire. Oh well.
Los Bros Hernandez have been writing and illustrating Love and Rockets for over twenty five years, so if you want a massive body of work to get stuck into, then this is your best bet. The graphical novel has also gone through a few changes, and has gone away for a while and then comeback in other incarnations. For being an epic and truly varied series, this one is worthy of a place in our top 100 graphic novels list.
Comic Books Magazine
