Book-A-Day 2018 #288: Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 3 by The Hernandez Brothers

Comics are not movies: obviously. The two forms do have some things in common, and can use similar visual language -- they're both storytelling mediums with limited space for dialogue and various ingenious ways to show time passing, among other parallels.

But, even at best, they're parallel: they can do similar things in different ways. So when a creator continuously evokes cinema in his comics, as matter and style, the reader starts to wonder what is up.

By 2010's Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 3, Gilbert Hernandez had been telling movie-inspired stories for about a decade. His major character Fritzi had become a B-movie star, in at least a minor way, and he'd not only told stories about her life and work, but he'd "released" several of her "movies" as separate graphic novels: Chance in Hell (2007), Speak of the Devil (2008), The Troublemakers (2009). And, in the previous year's No. 2, he'd launched another young buxom starlet on a Hollywood career, in Dora "Killer" Rivera, daughter of Guadalupe and grand-niece of Fritzi.

Killer is back in Gilbert's two stories in No.3: "Scarlet in Starlight" is the comics version of what in-continuity is a ten-year-old SF movie that Killer is being considered for a sequel/remake of, and "Killer * Sad Girl * Star" explains that. They're both intensely late-Gilbert stories, full of people talking about the things that they want to talk about, having endless meta-conversations about the things they're doing and feeling and saying to each other. I'm finding this is getting more airless and hermetic at this point, as if Gilbert is circling the same material ever closer -- the re-run of Fritzi's movie career in miniature with Killer is another example -- and I hope he broke out of that cycle between then and now.

Jaime's half of No. 3 is the first two pieces of "The Love Bunglers" (set in the modern day) and the flashback "Browntown," part of the same overall story. I've already read the second half -- both in the Angels and Magpies omnibus a few weeks ago and in No. 4 this morning before I got to typing this very post -- so I'm mostly going to save my thoughts about that overall story for the conclusion.

But I will repeat what I said before: "Love Bunglers" is Jaime's masterwork, even more so than the previous high points like "Flies on the Ceiling" and "The Death of Speedy." And if you think this first half is emotionally strong, you don't know what you're in for.

(And I note that I, like nearly everyone else, found "Browntown" the standout when I read No. 3 new in 2010: none of us realized it was part of the same story of "Love Bunglers" and that the latter was not nearly as light as it seemed.)