Jamie Hernandez - Locas and Gilberto Hernandez - Palomar

I was too young to read the early stories in these two collections when they were first published in Love & Rockets (starting in 1981), but have read the Hernandez Brothers eagerly work wherever I could since about 1988. As well as reading Love and Rockets from issue 30 up until it stopped in 1996, chasing down the various off-shoots, and finally, more recently, buying the newly reconstituted Love & Rockets (vol 2), I have over the years bought a fair few partial collections (The Death of Speedy, House of Raging Women, etc.) and some reprinted early back issues – all in an attempt to make sense of the worlds' and characters' Jamie and Beto separately create.

For this reason, I wasn’t sure what the experience of reading these two enormous volumes – 700-odd pages apiece – would be like, as I thought I had read all the stories contained within them already. However, I needn’t have worried: encountering these stories bound together, uninterrupted, gave them all sorts of new resonances and provided a much fuller appreciation of the overall plot-arcs, the journeys of the various characters, and the level of artistry and sophistication that underlies each narrative. These volumes leave no doubt that the Hernandez Brothers deserve the highest accolades within comic writing and, in Jamie’s case, artwork; and (once again) that we all owe a huge debt of thanks to Fantagraphics, who published both the original comics and these collected volumes. If you treasure the likes of Pete Bagge’s Hate or Dan Clowes’ Eightball and haven’t yet checked out Love & Rockets, here’s the perfect excuse.