Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories (Love and Rockets)
Gilbert HernandezFrom the pages of Love & Rockets, an intimate epic from south of the border. For the first time ever, Fantagraphics is proud to present a single-volume collection of Gilbert Hernandez’s “Heartbreak Soup” stories from Love & Rockets, which along with RAW magazine defined the modern literary comics movement of the post-underground generation. This massive volume collects every “Heartbreak Soup” story from 1993 to 2002 in one 500-page deluxe hardcover edition, presenting the epic for the first time as the single novel it was always intended to be. Palomar is the mythical Central American town where the “Heartbreak Soup” stories take place. The stories weave in and out of the town’s entire population, crafting an intricate tapestry of Latin American experience.
| status | Copy #1 (3615): in |
|---|---|
| genre | Literature and Fiction » General Literature |
| publisher | Fantagraphics Books |
| publish date | July 2003 |
| popularity | checked out 9 time(s) |
Many times I find comics that have made a profound effect on the medium and have acheived a sort of legendary status that gets them automatically added to many best-of lists. The Hernandez brothers and their work in their comic book series Love and Rockets is one such example of a book approached with such reverence, but unlike so many other stories, this one really stands the test of time. This work is SO AMAZING!!! This book contains all stories written and illustrated by Gilbert Hernandez (one third of the legendary ‘Los Bros Hernandez’) which were previously published in Love and Rockets and built the groundwork for the still continually building world that Gilbert has created.
These stories are most profound to me for their expansive depth, exploring the fictional South American village of Palomar. Palomar is a town of less than 400 denizens, many of which occur as consistent characters within the story. The beauty is in the rich and believable interlocking histories of the characters. As anyone who has lived in a small town will know, everyone is connected, whether they want to be or not. Essentially, the whole story is like a huge and continuing family drama which we get to watch develop across generations. Characters grow up and become adults and have children of their own and some leave Polomar to seek something more, but we wish they wouldn’t. The perspective shifts and we see events transpire from many different perspectives, to the point that eventually the reader identifies with no particular character as a central perspective, but comes to understand the interconnectivity of everyone and identify with the town as a whole. When characters leave, their absence is felt.
So much to say about this story! If you read it, we should talk.