Comic book series : Love and Rockets

A graphic novel collecting Love and Rockets stories from the "Locas" universe. It starts with a barely-glimpsed slaying ("Life Through Whispers") and ends with a funeral ("Male Torso Found in L.A. River"). Even though (or perhaps because) he's still carrying the torch for Maggie, Ray diligently pursues the dangerous and annoying "Frogmouth," aspiring actress and full-time train wreck, from seedy bars and back alleys through comic book conventions... all the way to the ultimate, and unexpected, consummation. Meanwhile, Hopey spends an eventful week during which she undergoes a couple of major life changes, both personal and professional... and for that matter cosmetic. New characters include Hopey's long-suffering on-the-side squeeze Grace; Maggie's new roommate, the sweet-natured jockette "Angel of Tarzana;" and the live-wire would-be gangsta Elmer — while such classic Love and Rockets characters as the hard-living Doyle, the aging but still-rocking Terry, and the mysterious super-heroine Alarma pop up in the margins... As does Maggie, well off stage but visible as Ray's resentful ex, Angel's roommate, and (forever and still) Hopey's best friend.

Named one of Publishers Weekly's "Best Books of the Year: Comics"

"There is no greater all-around artist in modern comics than Jaime Hernandez, and his recent work builds on his past successes so that his oeuvre as a whole is shaping up to be one of literature's best sustained stories about aging and the shifting of relationships over the course of a life." – Ed Howard, "The Best Comics of the Decade" (ranked #1), Only the Cinema

"In this perfect confluence of stunning illustration and gripping narrative, Hernandez returns to his early Love and Rockets roots with aging punk-rocker Esperanza 'Hopey' Glass taking the spotlight in this collection's first half... Fraught with grimy intrigue that evokes a Chicano Mickey Spillane yarn, the second half of the book comes as an unexpected and pleasant surprise that rivets both old fans and newcomers to the page." – Publishers Weekly

Praise for Jaime Hernandez:

"Jaime's characters are so convincing and his stories so compelling that it is easy to overlook his greatest strength: the most economically handsome drawing style in comics." – Booklist

"American fiction's best kept secret." – Rolling Stone

"Hernandez's 'Locas' plunged me into a comics ecstasy I hadn't known since I was 10." – The Nation

"A high point in the comics form, conventional in idiom, but not comparable to any strips before it." – The Washington Post

"No other man in or out of the field understands women the way [Hernandez] does. Love & Rockets is the one book I always recommend to my female friends who've never read a comic before." – Trina Robbins, author of A Century of Women Cartoonists

"Jaime's Maggie is one of the great characters in contemporary American fiction." – L.A. Weekly

"Jaime's art balances big white and black spaces to create a world of nuance in between, just as his writing balances our big human feelings and our small human trivias to generate its incredible emotional power. Quite simply, this is one of the twentieth century's most significant comics creators at the peak of his form, with every line a wedding of classicism and cool." – Alan Moore

"[Jaime Hernandez] is still creating some of the best comics in the history of the medium." – The Onion A.V. Club