Love & Rockets - classic or dud

So, Locas ordered from Fanta, the other two from Amazon (if anyone needs Amor y Cohetes it's $6.80 from Amazon right now). Thanks for the feedback, Dan.

The whole thing is so confusing and really pisses me off. So many different versions, and some of the books add pages, or scramble pages. Even the Poison River book scrambled pages around and added a ton of pages that weren't in the original comic!

I don't know what is what and am totally lost.

In any case, Poison River is great and Love and Rockets X is much less related to the Palomar storyline (though it has a bit of crossover) but is still good reading.

Far too confusing. I think the big hardcovers were a good idea but they only muddied the waters further.

At least los bros are consistent - TI Girls has new stuff not in the annual comics. Frustrating.

poison river in the comics skipped back-and-forth in time and hard to follow which iirc is why it was rearranged (chronologically) when collected.

*was* hard to follow.

also just that Beto adds pages and panels and stuff all the time, ever since the X collection

Ti-Girls is the first time Xaime has reworked for the collection afair

I thought he had for the two Locas hardcovers but not to the extent Beto had. Could be totally mistaken.

Locals HC 1 doesn't include stories about non-Maggie & Hopey characters (eg Flies On The Ceiling), no actual new pages or rewriting though afaik

The new soft backs starting from the beginning are comprehensive, no?

As comprehensive as they ought to be, yes (eg no Birdland).

The first three Jaime softbacks, plus the three Gilbert softbacks, plus Amor Y Cohetes = the complete L&R first series (if I'm not mistaken).

Two more Jaime softbacks reprint his stuff from the miniseries that came after and L&R vol 2. Subsequent Gilbert stuff, plus the likes of Birdland, have not been reprinted in this format yet.

yah if I were getting into Jaime I would totally go with the softcovers. There's more to pay for maybe, but its def more complete. I have the first four volumes, the three from the og series and then Penny Century as well.

EZ I think a lot of the stuff missing from the Locas hardcover can be found on the second SC, which I can send to you if you want...

Thanks, but when my orders arrive I'll have all the Locas stuff. I might be missing some Beto from the first two SC collections because I have the Palomar HC. But excepting that I will end up with all the volume 1 stuff from all 3 brothers and the Penny Century & Esperanza books.

Next will be the Luba books, New Takes of Old Palomar, and Ti-Girls. So much great stuff to read and, in the case of volume 1, reread.

New Takes? Fat finger phone typing motherfucker.

New Tales gets collected soon as "Children of Palomar".

Don't know if I've mentioned, but Gilbert's crazy underground stuff from the New Love series is amazing. That can be found in the Fear of Comics collection. The rest of New Love was Venus stuff I think that has probably been compiled with some of the post-Palomar paperbacks.

man, i stop reading for a few years and it's more baffling than ever lol. tri-girls?

Human Driastophism? Whoa Nrellie? Blood Of Pralomar? Chrester Square?

So far, reading the Locas stories chronologically feels weird. The reordered Palomar stories make so much sense, but the vignettes of Locas worked for me going backwards and forwards in time in the original issues. It works fine but feels strange after all these years.

The most recent annual is apparently the last, but only because they're moving back to a semi-regular comic format.

I need to catch up since Love Bunglers. That was almost so good I didn't want to read any more.

I also haven't read *any* of Beto's stuff from the original run, just Jaime's. That is.. an oversight.

Dude Heartbreak Soup and Human Diastrophism are amazing and collect his Palomar stuff beautifully, you should get on it imo.

I know! I've been hoarding HD and HS for a rainy day(s), but I just need to get on with it and read the things already.

The Palomar stuff is at least as good as Locas. I think I may have preferred it on my last readthrough.

After p much adoring those two books I eagerly bought the first volume of the collected Locas and it was dismal. I'm sure it was a bad place to start etc but I doubt I'll ever read further, and the generally Gilbert<Jaime opinions I always read rly bug me.

Also Fear of Comics is great!

Fear of Comics is the best, but now there's a new book that has a lot of the same stuff. As someone who's been reading since issue 18 of the original run, I have to say I can't keep up and am pretty annoyed by all the reprinting and shuffling of stories and duplicating collections. I just can't keep up.

Agreed-upon wisdom that I'm sure has been repeated ad infinitum in this very thread: starting Locas from the beginning is a bad idea. Jaime didn't have as clear a vision from the start as Beto did for Palomar, but dismissing Jaime's work out of hand on that basis is doing yourself a grave disservice. Pick up like the second digest-y Locas trade paperback. Los Bros have been operating on roughly the same qualitative level for a long time.

Fear of Comics is wonderful. If you're a fan, I highly recommend Beto's current Fanta series, Blubber. Pure homoerotic id.

(Re: the ridiculous number of reconfigured collections, I have some of the same L&R material in three different formats at this point. It's goofy. I'm just sticking with buying the annuals/single issues and the new digest things as they come out.)

god Blubber is some seriously sick and twisted shit

One alien phallus penetrating an alien orifice after another.

I'd be fascinated to know what Beto's actual views on sex are. One could certainly draw all kinds of conclusions based on his comics work.

creepy thing tho is that it seems to flirt ever so slightly w things like rape and pedophilia and it is so so so graphic

It gives me the sort of visceral reaction I get from Solondz

It does feel like Gilbert's work has become more blatantly fetish-y as the years have gone by.

Birdland almost feels quaint in comparison.

Anybody else ever watch the Naked Cosmos?

Fear of Comics is the best, but now there's a new book that has a lot of the same stuff. As someone who's been reading since issue 18 of the original run, I have to say I can't keep up and am pretty annoyed by all the reprinting and shuffling of stories and duplicating collections. I just can't keep up.

― dan selzer, Tuesday, June 28, 2016 9:18 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a problem and has kept me from buying Jaime stuff lately - that and the fact that it's hard to find individual issues

The Jaime stuff is really easy not to duplicate: buy either a thick digest every eight years, or a tall hardcover every 2-3 years.

The single issues have never been easier either, as they've just spent a decade only coming out once a year or less.

and you could buy them in both comic shops and bookshops, which wasn't the case in the first 25 years of the series

more helpful than it used to be: http://www.fantagraphics.com/howtoreadloveandrockets

Yes, from that link, I'd simply recommend new readers buy the Complete Love and Rockets collections (maybe starting with vol. 2 of Jaime's stuff if you want to skip the patchier material and returning to vol. 1 once you're in love with his work) and the annuals (of which I believe there are now eight). Or skip the annuals and wait for the Complete Love and Rockets collections of that material to trickle out over the next couple of years. I'd skip the hardcovers (particularly since at least one of the big ones bafflingly skipped some fairly pertinent material).

yeah otm, the Complete trade paperbacks are the way to go if you don't mind the pages being sliiiiightly smaller than the OG publishings

The jumbo compendium best-of hardcovers don't exist anymore. I would still recommend buying the single-story hardcovers for Jaime's 21st century stuff, because both Bros are much better larger.

sorry if I'm repeating myself but all the scrambling editing has really taken it's toll. Here's what I remember bugging me. The original comics version of Poison River jumped back and forth a lot and was hard to follow, but the collected Poison River simplified by consolidating the flashbacks in a way I thought worked great. But then I bought the big Palomar book and all of Poison River was left out of it...despite characters and events that take place towards the end really only making sense if you've read Poison River!

So re: Jaime and L&R hardcovers, I picked up something called "The Education of Hopey Glass" for $1 today.

Late-period collection of L+R v. 2 material, since recollected in the compact digest-y trades. Part of the OG series of trades/HCs (volume twenty-something). I have all of those up to the point where it became clear that they would be refocusing on the digests.

Again, the Jaime collections have not refocused on the digests: the magazine-size hardcovers have continued to collect his L&R material by storyline after vol 2 ended. He even started reworking the material for them, Beto-style.

(I think the latest digest is up to Education Of Hopey Glass - the next will likely cover all the vol 3 Locasverse material in four years or so; I'd guess ten years before there's enough for another Amor Y Cohetes. The Love Bunglers, the most recent hardcover, is one of his two best books ever.)

I dunno, I thought the whole deus/diabolus ex machina solution of introducing a previously unmentioned brother who plays a crucial part in the story felt weirdly extraneous. The brother's story was a well-done bit of soap opera in itself, but IMO it should've been a separate thing, and "Love Bunglers" should've focused on just Maggie and Ray.

Wait how is he reworking material for them??

and yeah the latest Jaime digest is Esperanza, which collects the latter half of v2 (I think Penny Century collected the first half). They're done with New Stories entirely though so I'm guessing it won't be long before they release a digest of all of it.