A Fantastic Secret

When you hold the latest Love and Rockets graphic novel in your hands, you immediately notice the baby blue sky of its cover. Simple lines form three expressionless children. A woman holds an infant and shades her face from the sky while a balding man faces a building. Both have their backs to the reader, or—probably more accurately—to the children.

There is simplicity and yet there is depth.

This is the powerfully efficient storytelling world of the Hernandez Brothers.

Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez almost singlehandedly gave the comics business literary credentials when they launched Love and Rockets in 1981—a time when superheroes dominated the art form. I was an avid comic reader at the time, and still recall grabbing my Spider-Man and X-Men books and wondering what this Love and Rockets was all about. It seemed so…adult. It turned out to be groundbreaking, spellbinding, and shocking.

The Hernandez Brothers grew up in Oxnard, California, raised by a mother who loved comics and rock music. The boys grew up drawing and, later, jumped into the punk rock scene, identifying with its loud, rude, and anarchistic messages and drawing poster art for local bands. At the same time, they began creating comics, inspired by the characters they met on the music scene—"punk girls" who were strong, smart, independent, bitchy, and beautiful. "[Punk] made me cocky enough to believe that I could do a comic book," Gilbert has said. "I took that musical anarchy to comics."

The result was their independently published Love and Rockets, which ran for fifty issues between 1982 and 1996. In 2001, the brothers—Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario—reunited to launch Love and Rockets, Volume II, which ran for twenty issues. Most of these seventy comic books remain in print, with graphic novel collections released by Fantagraphics Books.

Over three decades—with deceptively simple artwork influenced by Archie Comics and legendary superhero artist Jack Kirby—the Hernandez Brothers developed characters such as the busty Luba; her promiscuous mother, Maria; the feisty punk Hopey Glass; and her lover Maggie Chascarillo.

As a medium that blends artwork and words, comics offer a chance to use unique storytelling tricks, and the Hernandez Brothers seem to know most of them. Sometimes, stories are set in the present day. Other times, they swoosh to the future, or zip back in time to when the characters were children.

Jaime, for example, has told tales of Maggie as a forty-something apartment complex manager and also as a young girl. Sometimes, in the best of cases, stories about Maggie's young life help explain developments in her adult life. In his book The Art of Jaime Hernandez: The Secrets of Life and Death (2010), comics historian Todd Hignite says that Jaime—most notably in his ongoing "Locas" serial narrative—has "chronicled the lives of some of the most memorable and fully formed characters the comics world has ever seen. His female protagonists, masterfully delineated with humor, candor and breathtaking realism, come to life within California's Latino culture and punk milieu."

Gilbert has received his share of praise as well. His "Poison River" story, released in graphic novel form in 1994, fills in the details of Luba's early life before she arrives in the mythological Central American village of Palomar. It's a soap opera of sorts, beginning with Luba's wealthy dad discovering he is not her biological father and Luba's mother being kicked out of the house to deal with her newfound poverty. Luba grows up to marry an older man and soon is dealing with drugs, gangsters, affairs, and rape. The story "gave me a master lesson in real writing," Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz has told Baltimore Magazine. "It was beautiful beyond words and violent and tender and heartbreaking.… It's the great unknown novel of the 20th century."

With scenes of violence and sex, like the deepest of underground comics, the brothers' character-driven stories are not for children. The results...