Somewhere around the middle of the Reagan administration, a tiny handful of revolutionary comic-book series were heralded by both longtime geeks and surprised media outlets. “Comics Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore,” was the gist of most headlines: A new wave of serialized comics art was rolling out, so provocative and mature that grown-ups might hand the products off to one another. One object of adoration was Watchmen, the viciously deconstructionist take on superheroes by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons. The second was Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, the grim tale of an aging and bitter Caped Crusader by writer and artist Frank Miller. The third, spoken about in the same breathless conversations by comic aesthetes, has not turned out to be nearly as lucrative.
It was Love and Rockets, an ongoing series that boasts a panoramic scope and deep empathy, crafted in stark black and white by the three Hernandez brothers: Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario, often collectively referred to as Los Bros. The series was touted as a breakthrough for comics: The characters were nearly all Latinx, many of them were queer, and all of them existed in worlds so richly imagined that one couldn’t help but sink into them like quicksand.
Perhaps more importantly, the series wasn’t about superheroes. Los Bros bristled at being lumped in with those ostensible peers. “Watchmen and Dark Knight were money, man; the mainstream,” Jaime, 63, tells me over Zoom, no less suspicious of mainstream comics today than he was when he and his brothers debuted Love and Rockets in 1982. “They were how your regular comic fan thinks. We didn’t think that way anymore when we became adults.”
Los Bros were three autodidactic arch-nerds in their young adulthood when they launched the series. Mario (now aged 69) is the oldest, followed in the birth order by Gilbert, 65, then Jaime. Raised on the outskirts of Los Angeles, in the city of Oxnard, they had been reading comics nearly their whole lives. But with Love and Rockets, they wanted to build something that felt wholly original for the medium. “We were trying to create a new path,” Gilbert says. But, he laments, “Whenever there’s a change in the comics world, superheroes will come back and destroy that dream.”
Today’s pro-superhero polemicists might bristle at what sounds like snobbiness. But it feels like the Hernandez brothers were right. Even if Moore and Miller were performing delicate surgery on superheroes, they were still shackled to them. Love and Rockets imagines a world in which those chains were broken and the unique combination of words and pictures that is the comic book was allowed to fly to the stratosphere.
Ever since Love and Rockets formally launched four decades ago, the series has primarily focused on two ever-evolving and never-intersecting serial stories, each independently created by Gilbert and Jaime. Every issue features dips into the two sagas: Gilbert’s storyline, Palomar, orbits around the population of the village of the same name, equally blessed and cursed, in a never-named country somewhere south of the United States. Jaime’s narrative, Locas, centers on two sometimes-lovers from a fictional Los Angeles suburb, Maggie and Hopey—both women, an extremely unusual relationship in comics—as their quotidian desires and regrets pull them through life. (Mario has only been an occasional contributor, and never developed an anchoring epic.)
The Palomar stories owe much to the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez and the bold narrative swerves of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, all while featuring dazzling stylistic flourishes: A dialogue between two people in a room may begin with a panel of dialogue bubbles coming out of their mouths, then be followed by a panel with the bubbles coming out of their building, then shift to a panel where the bubbles are coming out of Planet Earth as seen from space. The Locas stories, on the other hand, often feel like a cross between a Robert Altman ensemble picture and Michael Apted’s Up documentary series, with its periodic checking-in on normal people as they age. Maggie and Hopey are lived-in beings, and their world of punk rockers, pro wrestlers, and assorted societal malcontents is among the most fully-realized emotional ecosystems in American comics. It’s rivaled only by, well, Palomar.
In both Palomar and Locas, the settings and narratives are as unsettling as they are surprising: You might read loquacious banter on one page, then flip to find a brutal murder on the next. The characters in both sagas, all of whom have aged in real time, show the full range of human experience, from naivete to nihilism, childhood to parenthood, passion to revulsion, and beyond.
Indie comics company Fantagraphics has been publishing Love and Rockets (with a few occasional breaks) as an ongoing series since its inception, and will issue a lavish box set this fall in celebration of its 40th anniversary, accompanied by a PBS documentary special. To date, the storylines have spanned more than 130 issues (which have come out at ever-changing intervals), all made by Gilbert, Jaime, and (to a lesser extent) Mario—a handful of superhero sagas have lasted that long, but never with the same creative team. It spans approximately 5,000 pages, which roughly accounts to five times War and Peace. Academics and theorists have written countless pages of analysis about it. It has put queer and Latinx characters in the spotlight as a default. It has arguably become the greatest and most ambitious work to ever emerge from the melange of poetry and design that is the American comic book.
As Neil Gaiman put it a few years ago, “I don’t really understand why the material of Love and Rockets isn’t widely regarded as one of the finest pieces of fiction of the last 35 years. Because it is.” The creator of the hit Marvel streaming show She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Jessica Gao, concurs: “Love and Rockets is my all-time favorite comic,” she tells me. “The core magic of the series is these characters who feel so real and complex. And after all these years, the quality has never dipped. Protect Los Bros at all costs!”
And yet, despite all this literary respectability, the Hernandez brothers have not become mainstream geek touchstones like Moore, Miller, or Gaiman. This seems fine with Los Bros, who still live the ethos of the punk rock they were obsessed with in their youth. Although they’ve done occasional mainstream work here and there, they have rarely worked for the so-called Big Two, Warner Bros.-owned DC Comics and Disney’s Marvel. Los Bros stay relentlessly in control of their own vision.
They have to be punks, because they’re in one of the country’s lowest-paying and most unforgiving creative industries. As 40th-anniversary celebrations ramp up, they can’t afford to stop. Lucky for them and their readers, Los Bros aren’t out of ideas just yet.
Love and Rockets’ origin story can be traced back to materfamilias Aurora Hernandez. When the boys got into comics as kids in Oxnard—an ailing manufacturing town with a huge Latinx population that leaders and governments rarely invested in—their stay-at-home mother, who would often be cold and distant, came to them with a revelation: She, too, used to read the funny books, and she still had her old ones: everything from Classics Illustrated to Superman. What’s more, she had been inspired to draw in her youth. “She would draw pictures from comics,” says the amiable Mario. “She would draw the covers just in pencil, and they were beautiful; really beautiful stuff.”
The brothers gobbled up this material, learning about the pioneers of the medium and their mother’s mind. Their father, Santos—a stoic man who worked long hours on the production line at a General Motors plant—would occasionally buy them comics in an effort at fatherly love. He died when they were young.
There were five kids in the household, four boys and a girl. Mario was the easygoing and diplomatic older sibling, Gilbert was serious-minded and more prone to stress, and the two had long conversations in the bedroom they shared. Jaime, on the other hand, was the quiet youngster, always eager to impress his elder brothers, especially Gilbert. “I idolized Gilbert,” Jaime says. “Whatever he liked, I liked.”
To this day, the three brothers are extensions of what they were as kids: Mario is a humble charmer, Gilbert is matter-of-fact and bristles at stupid questions, and Jaime just seems happy and awed that he gets to create.
Comics were only one obsession. The boys also fell in love with trashy horror and sci-fi movies; they would work themselves into an excited froth over the unrespectability and audacity of forgotten films like The Giant Gila Monster and Robot Monster. They discovered girls and started daydreaming about what might be going on in their heads.
In the late 1960s, they got into the underground comix movement spearheaded by outré artists like Robert Crumb, which tossed off the chains of regulation (comics had been governed by the puritanical Comics Code Authority since the mid 1950s) and depicted graphic sex and envelope-pushing humor. Gilbert saw an issue of Crumb’s infamously obscene Zap Comix and instantly grew obsessed with the undergrounds. “They had a little bit of an edge to them, sexual and violent,” he recalls fondly. He and Mario felt their younger siblings weren’t ready for such glorious smut, so, as Jaime remembers, “they hid that stuff even from us, the little kids,” until Jaime was a few years older. Then he, too, fell in love with the edge.
So it’s little surprise that, as teenagers in 1978, the Hernandez brothers were seduced by the lure of punk rock. “Even if it was lagging behind in the smaller towns, ours, Oxnard, was still vital,” Gilbert recalls. “Kids still went crazy over it.”
Teenage Gilbert and Jaime frequented the mosh pits of Oxnard and greater Los Angeles, where they first started meeting punk-rock girls, and they immediately fell in love with the entire concept—Jaime, especially. He still fondly recalls “hanging out with all my punk friends, going to get drunk and going to see bands, being in bands, and stuff like that.”
As adulthood crept in, day jobs had to be found, and they were living pointedly unglamorous lives. “We were all working as janitors at one time,” Mario recalls. He got married and started working as a contractor, while Gilbert mopped the mall, Jaime cleaned a daycare, and the younger two still lived at home with their mother. When they weren’t cleaning, Gilbert and Jaime penned illustrations for comics magazines, both fan-made and professional; they were typically portraits of popular characters from Marvel and DC. They drew their own comics, too, which acted as genre-steeped prototypes of their more famous comics to come. Gilbert had been drawing “sexy science fiction stories,” as Mario puts it, while Jaime was doing little tales about a woman named Maggie, who lived in a futuristic world with “lots of ray guns and shooting of aliens.”
They harbored few illusions about their artistic futures—they mostly made comics for their enjoyment and their friends. As Jaime puts it, “I had no concept of the way the comics business worked.” But although they were janitors, they were also punqueros with all the DIY ethos that infused the lifestyle. “We did it ourselves because it was the punk ethic,” Jaime says. “It’s like, ‘Oh, you don’t like what’s being done? Make your own records.’ If you don’t like the way the business is, draw your own comics.”
In 1981, Mario was approaching 30 and loved his younger brothers’ inventive sci-fi yarns. He had a friend who operated a local college’s printing press, so he declared they should make their own comic. Gilbert and Jaime drew the stories, and Mario drew the cover.
That first self-published issue held seeds of what was to come, in the form of characters like Maggie, Hopey, and an eventual Palomar star, the well-endowed woman of mystery known as Luba. But the tones and settings were quite unlike the realism that was to come: Maggie lived in a futuristic world where she worked as a “prosolar mechanic,” taking jobs that led her to uncontacted tribes and mysterious dinosaurs; Luba, in her own story, fomented a revolution by attempting to summon an all-powerful monster known only as BEM.
Now, Gary Groth enters the story. Groth—a bold man who did much to get comics recognized as a legitimate art form—was and is co-owner of Fantagraphics, which, in addition to printing comics, published a monthly magazine of reporting and criticism called The Comics Journal.
“I was single-handedly championing comics as art,” Groth tells me. “I had an understanding of what I meant by that…. [but] we expressed that mostly through negative reviews of what was then being published.” Groth saw the comics industry as barren, devoid of works that were “achieving the potential of the medium’s expression.” He’d developed a reputation as something of a crank.
The brothers decided to send him their self-published issue. Mario recalls telling his siblings, “If we give it to Gary and if he likes it, then, shit, we’re in.” Not that they weren’t prepared for the likely pan. “Gilbert sent him the copy because he expected him to hate it,” Jaime says. “We thought it was punk; it was cool. If they hate us, it’s cool—we’re punk.”
But Groth was entranced. “It was so fresh,” he says of that first issue. “I probably didn’t quite grasp how revolutionary it was at the time, but I did understand how artistically fresh it was.” Almost immediately, he penned an ecstatic review: “Only a handful of American comic book artists actually think,” Groth wrote in the Journal, “and to the ranks of thinking artists we can add ’Bert and Jaime Hernandez. Their minor but superb effort is cause for celebration.”
Fantagraphics began publishing Love and Rockets in the summer of 1982 with a touched-up reprint of that self-published first comic, and the every-other-month series quickly became an indie darling.
The sci-fi trappings soon fell away, replaced by the small-town chaos of Palomar and the quotidian longings of Locas. Jaime’s thick, sturdy lines and uncanny grasp of physical pantomime allowed him to make the Locas’ little disappointments and minor revelations into thrill rides. Gilbert’s own lines were deliberately grittier, just barely stable as they attempted to contain his characters’ massive personalities. Both brothers’ dialogue and narration were melodious and carefully chosen. Even if you were having a hard time following the story, the art and words washed over you in a cascade of deceptively simple inventions.
Aside from a brief early side-project with a Canadian comics publisher called Vortex (which the brothers say never paid them in full) and rare dips into projects at Marvel or DC, Los Bros Hernandez have stayed at Fantagraphics. Groth’s company might not have the resources of a Disney or Warner Bros., but on the other hand—unlike Joe Shuster, who first drew Superman and died penniless, or Jack Kirby, who was cheated out of credits on Marvel artwork and characters—the brothers get to own their creations and keep their artwork. No small achievement in a rapacious industry.
Love and Rockets is still both Gilbert and Jaime’s full-time job, but the two of them aren’t in close touch anymore. It’s not out of malice; their lives have just diverged, both geographically and emotionally.
“When we were drawing the comic at first, we were really close, and then Gilbert got married,” Jaime says. “So, there was still that relationship, but he had someone else there. Then I got married, and that changed and we started doing separate things. So, it was the life stuff that was basically either taking us apart or bringing us back together.”
For 21 years, Gilbert lived with his wife and daughter in Las Vegas, making it hard to hang out with the LA–based Jaime. Jaime recently went through a divorce, which took up much of his brain-space for a while (he’s now dating a Millennial cartoonist). Gilbert and his family recently moved to Ventura, California, making it slightly easier to see his brother, but he says they only meet up at conventions and at reunions with their mother.
But when the two do communicate (Jaime only recently was able to convince semi-luddite Gilbert to text), it can take them in unexpected directions. “A lot of times when we’re having trouble with our comic,” Jaime says, “we don’t ask each other, ‘What do you think? What should I do?’ It’s more like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m having a hard time with the comic.’ ‘Oh, yeah?’ ‘Oh, yeah. I saw a movie the other night.’ ‘Oh, yeah.’ ‘Okay.’ And then I say, ‘Bye,’ and then I’ll have my problem figured out just by talking to him, even if it’s not about that.”
Both brothers are in their mid-60s, but have no intention of retiring. The first reason is creative: They’re still brimming with ideas. The latest issue just came out in August, and it’s as dynamic as always: the Palomar story is a surreal look at the filming of a trashy B-movie, the likes of which the brothers used to watch when they were young; the Locas story is about Maggie (now in her sixties) attending an ill-fated wedding.
The other reason retirement remains out of reach is far more practical. There’s no pension plan for cartoonists, no employer-provided health insurance. “I’m always working,” Gilbert says in his typically straightforward, faintly curmudgeonly tone. “That’s the trouble with cartooning, especially when you have your own book, your own stuff—you have to be on it every day.” He adds, bluntly, “There’s not a lot of money in making comic books.” Los Bros are legends, but you can’t eat acclaim.
Even though Gilbert and Jaime haven’t lost the passion for their own book, the enthusiasm they used to have for the comic world beyond has faded. “At my age, I’ve just lost the will to look for things,” Gilbert says. “I used to want to know, to be up on everything: ‘Who’s the new artist and what’s the new style and what’s this?’ I just got burned out on it because there’s so much of it out there.”
It’s Mario, the one who instigated that fateful first Love and Rockets issue but only ended up writing and drawing a handful of stories, who remains enthusiastic about the larger comics world. He speaks of his love of the hit series Saga (“until they ran out of ideas”), and says he still heads to the comic book store regularly.
And since he retired from contracting with a nest egg a few years ago, he’s been getting back into drawing. “I’ve done work in cut paper and colored paper and different stuff,” Mario says. “And I’ve been doing a lot of illustrations—big illustrations of [Wizard of Oz] characters. I just think the characters are really cool to draw and put in different situations.”
“The business aspect has never been the best, and it’s part of why I just gave it up,” Mario continues. “I’ve never felt right about selling my art, about using art for money. I’ve always been weird like that. I have no idea why. And that’s why a lot of my work has hardly ever been sold. And it’s not for lack of interest. It’s like I’m selling my kid.”
Fantagraphics’ 40th-birthday box set contains eight bound volumes: Seven reprint the first 50 issues of Love and Rockets as they originally appeared from 1982 to 1996 (the last volume is a rich collection of odds, ends, and praise). To read these initial issues is to watch a kind of metatextual bildungsroman emerge: a story of three geeky punks who got serious about their art and grew alongside their characters. The echo of punk rock still reverberates throughout the work, most explicitly in Jaime’s Locas stories: Many of the lead characters were kids at rock shows once, and now, well into middle age, they wonder what it all meant to them.
There’s hope for comics, and the underground influence Love and Rockets has had on the medium. If you ask any librarian or bookseller, they’ll tell you that interest in comics among American youth has spiked over the past decade. But they’re not the ones reading superhero comics: The most popular books among young readers are slice-of-life memoir, with the occasional dip into grounded fantasy or magical realism. For the new generation, superheroes are for movies, but comics are for humanism. Perhaps some of those kids will grow up and graduate to Love and Rockets.
Even Dave Gibbons, artist and co-creator of Watchmen, would hope for such a future, despite Los Bros’ disdain for his most famous book. “You see, it’s just a chunk of plain, common-or-garden love,” he once wrote of Love and Rockets. “This love is a love of the comics medium, with all its most grotesquely inbred characteristics.” Despite the occasionally “hard-edged style” of the stories, one thing becomes clear as you read issue after issue, Gibbons wrote: “It is affection and goodwill that emanates from them, softening the hardness of the machinery. Love can, indeed, overcome rockets.”