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.

This concluding volume collects the "unclassifiable" stuff from the previous three years, including the stories where Jaime and Gilbert drew each other's characters. It's easily the wildest and most outlandish volume yet, featuring lots of hard-to-find stories, illustrations, and special features, including Gilbert's experimental, autobiographical "My Love Book," Jaime's adaptation of stories written as a child, and the glorious return of wayward brother Mario