Lucky for them and their readers, Los Bros aren’t out of ideas just yet. As 40th-anniversary celebrations ramp up, they can’t afford to stop. They have to be punks, because they’re in one of the country’s lowest-paying and most unforgiving creative industries. Los Bros stay relentlessly in control of their own vision. Although they’ve done occasional mainstream work here and there, they have rarely worked for the so-called Big Two, Warner Bros.-owned DC Comics and Disney’s Marvel. This seems fine with Los Bros, who still live the ethos of the punk rock they were obsessed with in their youth. Protect Los Bros at all costs!”Īnd yet, despite all this literary respectability, the Hernandez brothers have not become mainstream geek touchstones like Moore, Miller, or Gaiman.
And after all these years, the quality has never dipped. “The core magic of the series is these characters who feel so real and complex. Because it is.” The creator of the hit Marvel streaming show She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Jessica Gao, concurs: “ Love and Rockets is my all-time favorite comic,” she tells me. We didn’t think that way anymore when we became adults.”Īs Neil Gaiman put it a few years ago, “I don’t really understand why the material of Love and Rockets isn’t widely regarded as one of the finest pieces of fiction of the last 35 years. “They were how your regular comic fan thinks. “ Watchmen and Dark Knight were money, man the mainstream,” Jaime, 63, tells me over Zoom, no less suspicious of mainstream comics today than he was when he and his brothers debuted Love and Rockets in 1982. Los Bros bristled at being lumped in with those ostensible peers. Perhaps more importantly, the series wasn’t about superheroes. The series was touted as a breakthrough for comics: The characters were nearly all Latinx, many of them were queer, and all of them existed in worlds so richly imagined that one couldn’t help but sink into them like quicksand.
It was Love and Rockets, an ongoing series that boasts a panoramic scope and deep empathy, crafted in stark black and white by the three Hernandez brothers: Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario, often collectively referred to as Los Bros.
The third, spoken about in the same breathless conversations by comic aesthetes, has not turned out to be nearly as lucrative. The second was Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, the grim tale of an aging and bitter Caped Crusader by writer and artist Frank Miller. One object of adoration was Watchmen, the viciously deconstructionist take on superheroes by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons. “Comics Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore,” was the gist of most headlines: A new wave of serialized comics art was rolling out, so provocative and mature that grown-ups might hand the products off to one another. Somewhere around the middle of the Reagan administration, a tiny handful of revolutionary comic-book series were heralded by both longtime geeks and surprised media outlets.
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