This is the third "Luba" collection, the 16th book collecting Gilbert's Love & Rockets work, and the 23rd Love & Rockets collection overall. So there's a lot of history here; even the great L&R hiatus is about a decade old at this point.I hesitate to say that someone could pick this up and enjoy it without previous knowledge of the characters, but I always seem to have completely forgotten who all of these people are between volumes, and I can figure it out (and enjoy the books) every time. And I also have to admit that I don't always remember the little bits of history that the characters allude to (as real people will) -- I know that a couple of past deaths mentioned in this volume probably weren't exactly as they are described here, but I didn't bother to pull out the older book to check the details. Getting everything out of this book requires some study, a better memory than I have, and time to think, but getting a lot out of it only requires reading it with an open mind and an interest in stories about real people. (Well, most of them are women with notably large mammary development, but you can't have everything.)
As usual, Gilbert is a master of characterization and dialogue; he has a large cast (which, as I said, I don't always remember from book to book, and certainly don't remember all of their odd interconnections -- Gilbert's people are real, and live in a real world, and so are connected in the usual unlikely real-world ways) that he keeps distinct at all times and maneuvers well through lots of mostly shorter stories. If I have one complaint, its that I'm not quite sure of the time-line; I suspect most of these stories take place a few years ago, but it could be 1991, or 1997, or 2004 (or all of those in different specific stories), and I don't know which. I'm sure Gilbert knows, but his fictional universe is getting large enough now to require a concordance.
(Past Gilbert Hernandez books at Antick Musings: Sloth, Luba: The Book of Ofelia.)
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