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Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories.

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Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories. Gilbert Hernandez. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2003. 522 pages. $39.95 cloth.

Palomar is a colossal project, compiling thirteen years of Gilbert Hernandez's contributions to the first volume of Love and Rockets, the comic book series he co-wrote with brothers Jaime and Mario Hernandez beginning in 1982. Love and Rockets, which began as a self-published family enterprise, was quickly picked up by Fantagraphics and helped to herald the alternative comics boom of the 1980s. Much like Art Spiegelman and Francois Mouly's Raw, another of the era's shining lights, Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar stories and Jaime Hernandez's Hopper narratives--the heart of the Love and Rockets series--tell intensely personal and intricate tales, while insisting upon the importance of the medium of comics as an art form.

Despite their mutual devotion to innovation, Los Brothers Hernandez, as they are often called, crafted very different tales in the pages of Love and Rockets. While Jaime Hernandez concentrated on charting the vagaries of punk rock Los Angeles through countercultural lesbian hero Maggie, Gilbert Hernandez focused on depicting Palomar--a fictional...

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