Love and Rockets: The New Edition - Heartbreak, Maggie and more - by Gilbert Hernandez and Jaime Hernandez

Most frequenters of copacetic web space have already found the way that is Love and Rockets. However, there are still those who have yet to see the light. Are you someone who still hasn't managed to get around to reading the greatest comics ever produced? If so, all we've got to say is: if you haven't read the original run of Love and Rockets (in any one of its extant formats) and you are trawling the web looking for exciting new releases and looking through back issue bins at your friendly neighborhood comics shop for classics of the days of yore, then you are simply wasting your time -- you are not going to find anything better than what is already right here, sitting, waiting, 24/7 on the shelf.

Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez have fulfilled the promise of comics. Love and Rockets delivered a new covenant, a covenant that prioritizes a development and demonstration of character -- of human being -- and which, while rooted in and based upon it, has superseded the old covenant of comics that is devoted to encoding meaning into narrative formulas heavily reliant on fantasies that use simplistic and reductive characterization. Love and Rockets opened the doors to a new way of comics that we fortunates have exulted in for over a quarter a century now. The holy panoply of modern muses -- Maggie, Hopey, Rena, Izzy, Luba, Tonantzin, Carmen, Pipo, and their cohorts -- embody a vital mythos that has channeled powerful forces in our culture in ways that have changed, are changing and will continue to change the shape of things to come.

Those unfortunates among you who have remained skeptical are now offered a new and better chance of deliverance in this new and improved repackaging of seven volumes (keep scrolling to see the rest) that collects the entirety of the first volume of Love and Rockets that was originally published from 1982 to 1996 -- all 50 magazine-size issues in seven jam-packed volumes. These volumes are paragons of excellence in every way, including price point (muchos kudos to Jacob Covey for his sporty yet elegant design and to Paul Baresh for his stalwart, spit and polish production). The first six volumes are split three each for Gilbert and Jaime, and collect in chronological order the Palomar and Locas storylines, while the seventh is divided between them -- and also includes the rare contirbutions to L& R by their elder brother Mario.

These first two volumes, Heartbreak Soup and Maggie the Mechanic, provide between them over 500 pages of comics that will still be standing -- in one form or another -- long after every contemporary Ozymandias has fallen to dust. They contain the bulk of the material first presented in the first dozen and a half issues of the original series. Maggie the Mechanic contains Jaime's contributions, while Gilbert's can be found in Heartbreak Soup. ("BEM," the story he used in the first issue of the series to overcome the grip of the old covenant narratives, is not present. It is, however, now available in the seventh volume of this series.)

While we realize that not everyone is able to immediately connect with the eternal forces that reside dormant in the pages of Love and Rockets, we are here to tell you that an infinity of potential energy is encoded in pen and ink on those self same pages and that to crack the code and convert that energy to a kinetic flow that will rocket you through the cosmos to meet your destiny head on, all you need is love (well, to be honest, you also need fifteen dollars... but such is our world).

retail price - $16.95
copacetic price - $13.55
AND, FINALLY:

Amor Y Cohetes
by Gilbert, Jaime & Mario Hernandez

It's hard to believe, but with this volume, the seventh in the new format, the repackaging of the first volume of Love and Rockets is now complete! While the first six volumes gave us the massive mythologies of Hoppers and Palomar, this issue collects all the odds 'n' ends and bric á brac that the fertile imaginations of los Bros unleashed when they were kicking back; as well as the story that started it all back in Love and Rockets #1, Gilbert Hernandez's BEM. Let us rhapsodize for a moment: It was with BEM that Gilbert Hernandez -- comics' own St. George -- slew the dragon of derivative, formulaic heroic fantasy comics by ripping out its heart and laying it bare. BEM demonstrates once and for all that the success of the formula is based on keeping fear alive, that the hero and the villain are, unwittingly perhaps, complicit in an illicit pact to keep the reader enthralled with the eternal recurrence of evil. BEM pulls back the curtain and reveals formulaic heroic fantasy comics as Ouroboric circles devoid of any real hope, real progress or real growth; promising salvation but instead delivering the damnation of addiction with an empty formula expertly designed to keep readers coming back for more with the dangled promise of an imminent unveiling of a mystery that not only is there no intent to deliver on, but as BEM finally and brilliantly reveals, there is neither the capacity nor ability on the part of the danglers to do so in the first place for the simple reason that the creators of this formula are themselves trapped within it by their fealty to the profit motive -- unable to see outside the borders of their own fear and need and so drawing in the hordes to feed their own cravings. Whew! Well, we'll be the first to admit that anyone coming to this story now, over 25 years after the fact -- and especially those who were never themselves in the thrall of superhero comics in the first place -- will have a hard time fully appreciating the importance of this story, but that's no reason not to try. Love and Rockets: it's not just a comic book series, it's a hermeneutics.
retail price - $16.99 copacetic price - $15.75
L & R mega-pack

=•> !HOLD ON -- THERE'S MORE! <•=

If you've stayed with us this long, you might be interested to know that we're offering a SUPER SPECIAL on the whole bunch. Yes, that's right: we are offering the entire first volume of Love and Rockets -- one of the greatest creative works of our time -- for one spectacular price. Who says it isn't a great time to be alive?

Complete set of all seven volumes listed above, which together collect the entirety of the first volume of Love and Rockets that originally appeared in the 50 issue run that was published between 1982 and 1996.
retail price - $125.93 copacetic super special price - $99.99

ordering info