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Book Cover for: Beyond Palomar, Gilbert Hernandez

Beyond Palomar

Gilbert Hernandez

The sixth volume of The Complete Love and Rockets Library is the third collection of writer-artist Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar main storyline. Poison River is a dizzying period piece often hailed as one of Hernandez's masterpieces. It traces the pre-Palomar childhood of Luba, her teenage marriage to gangster Peter Rio, the secrets behind her mysterious mother, all the way up to her subsequent escape and arrival in Palomar. This story introduces a number of characters and themes that occupied later issues of Love and Rockets (including Luba's mother Maria and her sinister guardian angel Gorgo), and is a riveting page-turner besides, with lots of sex, drugs, guns, politics, and women who can crack walnuts with their stomachs.

Love and Rockets X, set in the early 1990s, takes us from plush Beverly Hills to the dangerous east side and introduces us to a dizzyingly diverse cast of characters, including a lowlife rock 'n' roll band, a posse of Black youths, a ditzy Hollywood mom and her spoiled son, a gay activist filmmaker and his rebellious, half-Iraqi daughter, and a group of racist thugs whose violent attack on an older woman sets the plot in motion -- as well as bringing in several older characters, including a couple of Palomar expatriates.

These stories originally appeared circa 1989-1999 in the long-running (and ongoing) Love and Rockets comic book series, also featuring work by Gilbert's brothers. L&R has been called the greatest American comic book series of all time by Rolling Stone and a great, sprawling American novel by GQ.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
  • Publish Date: Dec 1st, 2007
  • Pages: 256
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.20in - 7.50in - 0.90in - 1.60lb
  • EAN: 9781560978824
  • Categories: LiteraryContemporary WomenLGBTQ+

About the Author

Hernandez, Gilbert: - Gilbert Hernandez was born in 1957 in Oxnard, California, and is considered one of the greatest living comics writer-artists in the world. In 1982, Hernandez co-created, along with his brothers Mario and Jaime, the ongoing, iconic, internationally acclaimed comic book series Love and Rockets, one of the greatest bodies of work the medium has ever seen. In addition to his work on Love and Rockets, its spinoffs, and side series, Hernandez has released a prodigious amount of original graphic novels and miniseries, such as Sloth, Bumperhead, and Marble Season. He also collaborated with Darwyn Cooke on The Twilight Children for DC. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2017 and is the recipient of a Fellow Award from United States Artists and a PEN Center USA's Graphic Literature Award for Outstanding Body of Work. Hernandez lives in Ventura, CA, with his wife and daughter.

Praise for this book

In a real world, not the screwed-up world we have now, [Gilbert Hernandez] would be considered one of the greatest American storytellers. It's so hard to do funny, tragic, local and epic, and he does all simultaneously, and with great aplomb. -- Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Words can hardly describe how much I'm enjoying these affordable reprints of one of the five greatest comics series of all time. --Tom Spurgeon"
Poison River [contained in full in Beyond Palomar], a graphic novel by Gilbert Hernandez, gave me a master lesson in real writing. It was beautiful beyond words and violent and tender and heartbreaking. From that moment on, I knew what kind of writer I wanted to be. It's the great unknown novel of the 20th Century. --Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"