Love and Rockets - A Fan Writes

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.