LOVE AND ROCKETS SKETCHBOOKS HC (C: 0-1-2) Behind the scenes of The Brothers Hernandez: 300
pages of sketches, inked drawings, early comics, and
uninhibited graphic ephemera that never made it into
the pages of Love and Rockets.
Both Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez developed their skills as artists
in public, in the pages of Love & Rockets, and as quickly as any artists
ever have. The first issue showed two promising young tyros; by the
fourth, both brothers were clearly among the foremost cartoonists
of their generation.
But not all that development took place on the main stage of
their shared magazine. They built up to their 1981 self-published
debut with years of experiments, fan art, zine illustrations, early
short comics, and gig posters, and continued to work out in personal
sketchbooks after establishing themselves as the preeminent cartoonists they
became. Fantagraphics published two volumes of this nascent or private drawing
in 1989 and 1992; now, a single volume collects the work from these two volumes
with other rarely seen artwork, for a new generation of admirers.
Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez's mastery of comics is seen on every page of the
thousands of pages of Love and Rockets they've drawn over the last 40 years. Here,
for the first time in three decades, see the work they put into becoming those artists.
Gilbert Hernandez and Jaime Hernandez were born and raised in Oxnard, CA and
continue to create comics from their homes in Southern CA.