This book is to contemporary L.A. what Robert Altman's Nashville was to that city: a superbly observed portrait of a city in decline; a character study with a large, diverse cast; a comedy and a drama.

The Love and Rockets Companion: 30 Years (and Counting) contains three incredibly in-depth and candid interviews with creators Gilbert, Jaime and Mario Hernandez: one conducted by writer Neil Gaiman (Coraline); one conducted some six years into the comic’s run by longtime L&R publisher Gary Groth; and one conducted by the book’s author, spanning Gilbert’s, Jaime’s and Mario’s careers, and looking to the future of the ongoing series, with a follow-up conversation with Groth. This book has foldout family trees for both Gilbert’s Palomar and Jaime’s Locas storylines; unpublished art; a character glossary (which is handy, considering that Gilbert alone has created 50+ characters!); highlights from the original series’ anarchic letters columns; timelines; and the most wide-ranging Hernandez Brothers bibliography ever compiled, including album and DVD covers, posters and more.

This volume collects the adventures of the spunky Maggie; her annoying, pixie-ish best friend and sometime lover Hopey; and their circle of friends, including their bombshell friend Penny Century, Maggie's weirdo mentor Izzy―as well as the aging but still heroic wrestler Rena Titanon and Maggie's handsome love interest, Rand Race. After the sci-fi trappings of his earliest stories (as seen in Maggie the Mechanic, the first volume in this series), Hernandez refined his approach, settling on the more naturalistic environment of the fictional Los Angeles barrio, Hoppers, and the lives of the young Mexican-Americans and punk rockers who live there. A central story and one of Jaime's absolute peaks is "The Death of Speedy." Such is Jaime's mastery that even though the end of the story is telegraphed from the very title, the downhill spiral of Speedy, the local heartthrob, is utterly compelling and ultimately quite surprising. Also in this volume, Maggie begins her on-again off-again romance with Ray D., leading to friction and an eventual separation from Hopey.

Love and Rockets: New Stories #1 reboots the ongoing "Love and Rockets" comic to a fat, all-new annual graphic-novel length package that will be available in bookstores. Jaime launches the new format with a superhero yarn: Penny Century has acquired superpowers, but is half-mad with grief and rampaging through the galaxy. A motley group of superheroes assemble to try to stop her. Only the first half of the saga, it combines Jaime's razor-sharp characterization and superlative art with wildly inventive, Kirby-style action. Gilbert Hernandez has these stories: "Tamanny" (rookie cop vs. demonic drug users); "Papa" (a turn-of-the-century story involving a traveling businessman); "The New Adventures of Duke and Sammy" (superpowered Martin and Lewis impostors in outer space); "The Tender Room" (Into the Wild as re-imagined by Beto); "Chiro el Indio" (written by third brother Mario Hernandez); and "Never Say Never" (a kangaroo gets lucky in Las Vegas).

To a very great extent, Love and Rockets is synonymous with Hoppers' Maggie & Hopey and Palomar's Luba & Carmen & Heraclio & Tonantzin... but there was always more to L and R than that. Amor y Cohetes finally collects together in one convenient package all the non-Maggie and non-Palomar stories by all three Hernandez Brothers from that classic first, 50-issue Love and Rockets series—a dizzying array of styles and approaches that re-confirms these groundbreaking cartoonists' place in the history of comics.

Five women stand in a police lineup; four of them are garishly dressed, impressively endowed superwomen ― perfectly normal, because this is, after all, the cover of a comic book. A closer look, however, reveals a fifth woman who seems thoroughly out of place ― mousy, in bathrobe and curlers, smoking a cigarette, she appears to have been suddenly yanked from her breakfast table. Surely, this diminutive, dowdy woman is here by mistake ― or is she? From the very first cover of the very first issue of Love and Rockets in 1982, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez have created artwork that has subverted, contradicted and celebrated the history of the comic book medium, inverting familiar tropes and creating some of the most iconic images in comics over the past three and a half decades, inviting fans and readers into their world. Amazingly, many of the covers created by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez for the various iterations of Love and Rockets over the past 35 years have never been collected or have only been reprinted in black-and-white. Love and Rockets: The Covers will not only rectify this problem, but present them without trade dress (logos, marketing hype, etc.), allowing the original cover illustrations to communicate on their own.

In Ofelia, the sisters, the kids, and the cousins are all settled comfortably in California after leaving Palomar in Luba and Her Family. Luba and her cousin Ofelia’s relationship has always been fraught, but when Ofelia threatens to write a book about Luba, past memories, secrets, resentments, and pain resurface. Meanwhile, Luba’s children―genius Socorro, recently out-and-proud Doralis, and prickly Maricela―show that a talent for trouble may be hereditary. Luba’s sisters, Fritz and Petra, swap lovers (as usual), but . . . are Fritz and family friend Pipo sittin’ in a tree? These vividly drawn characters are charged with Hernandez’s trademark complexity; they live, love, age, fight― and die―in this sweeping, multi-generational saga.

The first of three volumes chronicles the globe-trotting adventures and exploits of Maggie, her best friend and occasional lover Hopey, and their companions, Peggy Century, her weirdo mentor Izzy, aging wrestler Rena Titanon, and Maggie's new love interest, Rand Race. Original.

The third in Gilbert Hernandez’s line of original hardcovers featuring Love and Rockets’ “Fritz” in her guise as a Z-movie actress (the first two were Chance in Hell and The Troublemakers) is a trippy thriller that stars Fritz in no fewer than three roles. A beautiful waitress (Fritz, of course) and her hospital nurse brother (also Fritz) visit their estranged father, a once successful but now retired writer (amazingly enough, also Fritz), in order to find out the true reason why their mother committed suicide. When dad’s health fails, the siblings are then more concerned with the money he might leave them. The story weaves in and out of reality and hallucination and possibly back in forth in time, and to complicate things further, the sister is sexually obsessed with a mysterious man throughout the tale ― or is it her brother (at one point posing as his sister so that he might gain his and her inheritance) that is so hot and bothered by this mystery stud? And that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

For the first time ever, Gilbert Hernandez's Heartbreak Soup stories from Love & Rockets are collected in one 500-page deluxe hardcover edition, finally presenting the epic as the single novel it was always intended to be. Set in the mythical Central American town Palomar, the stories weave in and out of the town's entire population, crafting an intricate tapestry of Latin American experience. Luba, the guiding spirit of Palomar, has been universally hailed as one of the great characters of contemporary fiction. Ideal for fans and new readers alike.