Love and Rockets: New Stories #1

In 2007, the huge success of Fantagraphics' seven Love and Rockets reprints, beginning with Maggie the Mechanic and ending with Amor y Cohetes, brought renewed attention to this trailblazing series among the book-buying public.

Love and Rockets: New Stories #1 builds on this success by rebooting the ongoing "Love and Rockets" comic (heretofore only sold in specialty stores as a slim periodical) to a fat, all-new annual graphic novel length package that will be available in bookstores.

Jaime launches the new format with a story that's unusual even for him...A full-on, pulse-pounding super-hero yarn. Maggie's longtime friend Penny Century has finally realized her long-time dream of acquiring super-powers, but at a terrible personal cost. Now she rampages through the galaxy, half mad with grief, and a motley group of super-heroes assembles to try to stop her—led by Maggie's girlfriend Angel and her mysterious neighbor Alarma, and involving a number of characters long-time Love and Rockets fans will delight in recognizing as the story progresses.

The epic-length 50-page story (only the first half of the saga!) combines Jaime's razor sharp characterization and superlative art with wildly inventive, Kirby-style slam-bang super-hero action. "The Search for Penny Century" does for super-hero comics what Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof" did for car-chase movies: it miraculously manages to satisfy the pulp-fiction exigencies of the genre (with a vengeance!) while creating as involving and character-driven a tale as any other work of Jaime's.

Then Gilbert Hernandez explodes with a similarly generous helping of his fantastically creative one-shot short stories: "Tamanny" (rookie cop vs. demonic drug users); "Papa" (a turn-of-the-century story involving a traveling businessman); "The New Adventures of Duke and Sammy" (super-powered Martin and Lewis impostors in outer space); "The Tender Room" (Into the Wild as re-imagined by Beto); "Chiro el Indio" (written by third brother Mario Hernandez); and "Never Say Never" (a kangaroo gets lucky in Las Vegas).

One hundred pages of Jaime, Gilbert and Mario Hernandez at the peak of their powers: All-new Hernandez Bros. work available for the first time to the bookstore trade. This will be one of the major graphic-novel events of the season.