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.html by Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez Back for a fourth printing, Volume 4 of the Love & Rockets Collection contains all the essential elements of Los Bros. Starting off with Gilbert's epic "Errata Stigmata" title story, and continuing through many, many short stories by both Gilbert and Jaime, including "Penny On the Road Ag'in," the entire "Rocky" saga, "The Reticent Heart," plus a bonus six-page story by Gilbert done for this volume, "The Many Faces of 'Big' Danny Chesterfield," Love & Rockets Volume 4 can't miss. With nearly all the collected volumes back in print, it's now easier than ever to see why Time magazine called this cartooning pair one of the Top 100 Innovators of the Century MATURE READERS. SC, 136pg, b&w

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.html by Gilbert Hernandez The most explosive Heartbreak Soup story ever, “Blood of Palomar” originally ran in Love & Rockets #21-26. In this saga, a serial killer stalks the streets of Palomar. Gruesome and senseless as his depredations are, they are dwarfed by the resulting social and psychological collapse suffered by the inhabitants of the tiny Central American village. Featuring all the Heartbreak Soup players - Heraclio, Luba, Tonantzin, Carmen, Pipo. “Blood of Palomar” is a true graphic novel - a masterpiece of comics that can hold its own next to any piece of literature. MATURE READERS SC, 8x11, 136pg, b&w

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.html by Jaime Hernandez From one of the Top 100 Innovators (according to Time magazine) comes the graphic novel that The Comics Journal called "one of the best stories in any medium" and named as the 13 th best comic book of all time! Beautifully drawn, "Wigwam Bam" is an amazingly rich meditation on the power memory has over one's everyday life, as presented through juxtaposition of the reality and idealization of the relationship between Jaime's best-loved characters, Maggie and Hopey. Praised by the likes of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, don't you miss out on one of the true comics geniuses of the 20th Century if you aren't reading Jaime Hernandez's work. SC, 8x11, 132pg, b&w

Gilbert Hernandez (Love and Rockets series) has produced some of the best comics work of the last ten years. Poison River is the story of one of his most engaging characters, Luba-self-possesed, intelligent an iconoclastically sexy- in the years before she arrived in Palomar, Hernandez's mythological Central American Village. We meet Maria, Luba's mother, beautiful, pampered and recklessly promiscuous. Maria's husband discovers that Luba is the result of a tool-shed trystwith Eduardo, a poor indian worker and kicks mother, child and lover out into poverty. Glamorous Maria abandons the other two in turn, and much later a teenage Luba meets her future husband Peter Rios, a conga player and small-time(soon to be big-time) gangster who takes her away to a life of privilege. But their meeting is not by chance and Rio's peculiar sexual obsessions (women's navels and well-hung chorus "girls") are driven by carnal memories of the exquisite Maria. Indeed Luba's new life (and the men in it) is much like her mother's - lavishly sheltered by violent anticommunist gangsters, who murder and terrorize the local "leftists" in the name of "business" and right-wing patriotism.

The Hernandez brothers recently published the last issue of their alternative comics groundbreaker, Love and Rockets. This book collects Jami's last stories from the magazine, which wrap up a saga begun in 1981. Heroine Maggie has been languishing at her aunt Vicki's women wrestler's camp in rural Texas. Jamie brings back other cast members, ranging from Maggie's sister Esther to Billionaire's wife Penny Century, and even makes a nod to the fantastic series' early science fiction slant. Of course, at the very end, Maggie is reunited with soul mate Hopey.