Seventeen years in the making... it's Marc Sobel's mightily researched, heavily sourced, profusely illustrated, in-depth, from-soup-to-nuts study of the original run of the one-and-only Love and Rockets!
This 344 page, 8" x 11", French-flapped softcover is filled to the brim with not only the comics and art of Jaime, Gilbert and Mario Hernandez, but also illustrations of a wide variety of their inspirations – primarily comics of all sorts, but also movies, music and more – which serve to illuminate their pathway from culture consumers to culture producers, along with a healthy helping of photographs that show them at varioius points along the way, and plenty of rare ephemera – there's something to look at on every page!
And, of course, there's plenty to read here – notably including a continuous cascade of perceptively chosen excerpts from the many interviews given by Los Bros over the decades, which have been assiduously dispersed throughout the commentary. Sobel starts off with a forty page preamble, "Life Before Rockets", which works to set the stage for what is to come. This section is particularly valuable for presenting early, pre-Love and Rockets fan art, cartoons and comics by both GIlbert and Jaime, along with reproducing the actual two-page spread from The Comics Journal #67 containing Gary Groth's review of the original, self-published first issue of Love and Rockets. Then, it's off to the races as Sobel goes on to "read" – as in write about – all fifty issues of the magazine-size, first volume of Love and Rockets, published by Fantagraphics from 1982 through 1996 (that was recently collected in a super-deluxe hardcover box-set), in order. The serialized stories, which are the most widely known works from the series, are, naturally enough, each treated as a whole, rather than on a chaptter-by-chapter basis, and situated in their rough chronological position in the issuse-by-issue read through, alongside of the many short, stand-alone pieces that accompanied them through the years. Again, the read-through of each story is illustrated with sample artwork as well as images that provide a continual referencing of sources, and also a variety of asides, which together make for a rich, you-are-there experience that works to both inspire the reader to head to the actual comics to read the works themselves – or, perhaps more likely, re-read – and then to enhance that reading. Longtime readers will feel dormant synapses firing, bringing back halcyon days of immersive comics reading, while newcomers will experience the excitement of exploring this terrain for the fiirst time. All who delve into Reading Love and Rockets will be sure to find themselves drawn inexorably towards the work by the gravitational pull exerted by the world of Love and Rockets.
Marc Sobel's previous work – produced in collaboration with Kristy Valenti – was titled The Love and Rockets Companion, and provided a detailed index of stories and characters that functioned as a companion to the corpus of Love and Rockets. This work that we have before us now serves as a companion for the Love and Rockets reader, enabling a triangulated dialogue between itself, the reader – you – and the comics of Love and Rockets, opening up an expansive space for interpretation(s) and appreciation of this truly outstanding one-of-a-kind work, an appreciation that is sure to continue to grow in the years ahead as Love Rockets takes its rightful place as an era-defining classic of American art and literature.
