It was sometime in 1991 that I discovered Love and Rockets. My boyfriend and I were house sitting a
friend's flat, Donna Death, and her boyfriend owned a large collection of comic
books. I had always thought the guy was
a bit of a geek, the wire baskets which housed his extensive comic book
collection, sorted by title, sub sorted by date, each issue lovingly protected
in a plastic sleeve, only reinforced this impression. Back then the notion of adult/alternative
comics was not well understood, if at all.
New Zealand was miles away from New York with Art Spiegelman and his Maus,
from trans atlantic Neil Gaiman and his DC drawn and published The Sandman,
and, from the bros Hernandez in Oxnard, California with their West Coast punk
heckles rising (@xaimeh: if you were really hardcore, you'd have thrown a full
bottle) and their Love and #$%^&** Rockets.
[Vivian]
When I delved into
his comic book collection I began with Love
and Rockets, Issue 1, 1981, the
year Jaimie and his brothers Gilbert and Mario self published their first
issue. The early Mechanics stories of
Jaime hooked me in, first page. The
clean lines, the cool chicks (like legions of fans I fell in love with Maggie
and Hopey), and the brilliant stories too. These guys could write, they understood, and
still do, not just how to draw a story, but how to tell it, to make you listen
and want more. They are as good to my
mind as the great story tellers, writers like Mansfield and Poe, Poe
especially. There is a darkness that
plays out on so many of their best pages, the black ink allowed to spill out in
a way that's impossible in (plain) text.
[Isabel Ruebens]
Meanwhile my boyfriend had started to despair, I was spending
hours in bed, or curled up on the sofa reading comics and nothing would cajole
me out of the happy reading zone I found myself in. It took time to recall that my love of comics
was formed early in the 1970's with Tintin and Charlie Brown and the gang. I'm currently reading my way through the
Fantagraphics (who also publish Love and Rockets) republished The
Complete Peanuts of Charles M. Schulz.
And all these years later having to wait, impatiently, for the next
issue of Love and Rockets reminds me just how lucky I was to find this
treasury of comics and to read issue after issue in their original format. I guess my friend's (x)boyfriend was more
punk than geek - in retrospect.
