Heartbreak Soup & Maggie The Mechanic

February 26, 2007 | Trades

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Heartbreak Soup
Creator: Gilbert Hernandez
Fantagraphics Books
$14.95 US (Paperback)
**** 1/2 (out of five)

Maggie The Mechanic
Creator: Jaime Hernandez
Fantagraphics Books
$14.95 US (Paperback)
**** 1/2 (out of five)

There’s an interesting recurring discussion that knowledgeable comic book fans like to have with one another. It begins with: “Who’s your favourite Hernandez brother?”
The answer to this question is rarely brief, often very personal and reflects very much upon what kind of person they are and what kind of life they’ve led.
This is how deeply rooted in comic culture Gibert and Jaime Hernandez’s book Love & Rockets has become over the last quarter century.
Trying to choose between Jaime’s poignant Locas stories, which follow the wild lives of one-time punks and sometimes lovers Margarita “Maggie” Chascarrillo and Esperanza “Hopey” Glass and Gilbert’s moving tales of the people of the fictional Central American village of Palomar can be as painful as choosing your favourite child.
For those not yet able to throw their two cents into these discussions, the 25th anniversary of Los Bros Hernandez’s series has yielded two new affordable, chronological collections.
Heartbreak Soup is the first of two volumes that will be released in 2007 that contain Gilbert’s sweeping Palomar stories, featuring a fascinating cast of characters that are so well developed that you might come to think of their village as a real place.
Maggie The Mechanic, one of three Locas books coming this year, takes readers back to when Jaime was trying hard to fuse sci-fi, post-punk culture and Chicano life into a single book. Watching this idea, along with Jaime’s art style, evolve is a true comic delight.

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