“Perfection,” writes comic artist Karl Kesel of the art of Jamie Hernandez, writing specifically about an iconic Love and Rockets cover, for Number 24, first published in January 1987.
“Jamie Hernandez is an amazing artist (and writer!) but this piece is a master class all by itself. Composition, contrast, gesture, dynamics, intensity, humour – not one wrong line or bad decision.
“And he makes it look so easy. (But it’s not!)”
From the very first cover of Love and Rockets, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez have created artwork that subverted, contradicted and celebrated the history of the comic book medium. Their art was collected in Love And Rockets: The Covers, published by Fantagraphics back in 2013.
Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez inverted familiar tropes and created some of the most iconic images in comics over the past 30 years, inviting fans and readers into their world. Amazingly, until the release of Love And Rockets: The Covers, many of the covers had never been collected or printed. This collection not only rectified the problem, it enhanced the covers by showing them without trade dress (logos, marketing etc), allowing them to shine in an oversized art book.
Jaime Hernandez was one of six siblings born and raised in Oxnard, California. His mother passed down a love of comics, which for Jaime became a passion rivaled only by his interest in the burgeoning punk rock scene of 1970s Southern California. Together with his brothers Gilbert and Mario, Jaime co-created the ongoing comic book series Love and Rockets in 1981, which Gilbert and Jaime continue to both write and draw to this day.
“Jaime’s work began as a perfect (if unlikely) synthesis of the anarchistic, do-it-yourself aesthetic of the punk scene and an elegant cartooning style that recalled masters such as Charles M. Schulz and Alex Toth,” notes a biography on the Fantagraphics website. “Love and Rockets has evolved into one of the great bodies of American literary fiction, spanning five decades and countless high-water marks in the medium’s history.”
In 2016, Hernandez won the prestigious Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his graphic novel, The Love Bunglers. In 2017, he (along with Gilbert) was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame, and, in 2018, he released his first children’s book, the Aesop Book Prize-winning The Dragon Slayer: Folktales from Latin America. He is a lifelong Angeleno.
Head downthetubes for…
• BlueSky: @xaimeh
• Instagram: @xaimeh
• Jaime Hernandez on Fantagraphics
• The Love Bunglers by Jaime Hernandez – A Preview
• The Love Bunglers (AmazonUK Affiliate Link)
• downthetubes: Lakes Festival Focus: A Chat with Jaime Hernandez (2022 interview)
Love and Rockets
In 1982, Fantagraphics Books published the first issue of Love and Rockets by the Hernandez brothers (Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario), and the series has since gone on to become the publisher’s flagship title, a monumental work of graphic fiction.
Collected under the umbrella of L&R, the series is comprised of two separate ongoing stories: Gilbert chronicles the colourful inhabitants of the fictional Latin American town of Palomar, while Jaime follows Latinx friends and sometime lovers Maggie and Hopey and their circle of friends in the punk scene of the fictional Californian town Hoppers.
Over the course of L&R’s multi-decade run, its characters have aged in real time, lending these stories a depth and weight that few literary works achieve. The Hernandez brothers continue to release new issues of Love and Rockets.
• Love And Rockets: The Covers (AmazonUK Affiliate Link)
• Love and Rockets is published by Fantagraphics – full available catalogue including merchandise as well as books, here
• Love and Rockets on AmazonUK (Affiliate Link)
• The Classic Love and Rockets 40th Anniversary Slipcase Set: The Classic 40th Anniversary Collection: 1-50 on AmazonUK (Affiliate Link) | ukbookshop.org Affiliate Link
With thanks to…
Karl Kesel for highlighting the Love and Rockets cover on Facebook, which Doctor Who and Star Trek artist Mike Collins then described as the “Greatest comics cover of ALL TIME”…
• Panic Button Press was started in 2017 to publish the creator-owned graphic novel Section Zero by Karl Kesel and Tom Grummett
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.
Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.
He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.
Categories: Art and Illustration, Comic Art, Comics, Creating Comics, downthetubes News, Other Worlds
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