Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez are two of my favorite comic artists of all time. From November 7 to December 3, Pasadena City College Art Gallery near Los Angeles is presenting a retrospective of their work, "Love and Rockets: the Comic Art of Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez." The reception for the artists is Thursday, November 17, 6-8pm. I've had the opportunity to meet Gilbert and Jaime a couple of times and they were very nice, modest, and seemed genuinely happy to talk to their throngs of admirers (myself included). This retrospective should be incredible. From the exhibition page:
Raised in the multiethnic farming and beach community of Oxnard, California, each of the Hernandez brothers creates innovatively designed comic stories noted for their epic scope and depth of characterization, and for their embrace of subcultures that had rarely if ever been previously depicted in comics. Their works feature complex female protagonists, Latin American families, Southern California punk rockers, and a gallery of fully realized characters who matter-of-factly reflect diverse ethnic backgrounds, sexual preferences, and economic classes.
"Love and Rockets broke new ground for comics in both content and form… revitalizing long-form comics with new themes, new types of characters, and fresh approaches to narrative technique," writes comics scholar Charles Hatfield, in his book Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (University of Mississippi Press, 2005).
The first series of Love and Rockets extended fifty issues before concluding in 1996. In 2001, the brothers revived Love and Rockets in a smaller format; fourteen issues of the second volume have been published to date by Fantagraphics Books, Seattle, Washington. Fantagraphics has also published massive hardcover collections of their major continuous storylines, Palomar (2003) by Gilbert Hernandez and Locas (2004) by Jaime Hernandez.
