That's a good question, though: what is real? I still have my questions about the end of "Love Bunglers," which has an element that I'm afraid is not exactly real.
(From poking through The Love and Rockets Companion, I'm guessing it is real, but I'm still withholding final judgment until I actual read later stories. It is so parallel to the end of L&R Vol. 1 that I don't trust it. It's also so much a wish-fulfillment for both characters and audience that it's deeply out of character for Jaime's work.)
So this is Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 4. The stories more or less alternate here, though it starts and ends with Jaime.
I've written about "Love Bunglers" twice recently in this series -- just last week and when I read the revised version in Angels and Magpies a few weeks before that. I don't have much new to say about it this time, though it lays out interestingly in this book: Part Three opens with a one-page vignette about two unnamed long-married characters -- I don't think we've ever seen them before, or are meant to recognize them -- with the woman's thought overlaid as captions. And that moment is strongly parallel with the end of the book, a scene with Maggie and Ray. That's not as obvious when the whole story is collected, and speaks to how Jaime planned the effect of the stories in a particular serial installment of L&R.
On the Gilbert side, "King Vampire" is another movie presented in comics form. Confusingly, it seems to star Killer as the young vampire wanna-be and Fritzi as an older vampire in a parallel plot, but the other Gilbert story in this volume, "And Then Reality Kicks In," is a discussion between Fritzi and an unnamed guy about "the vampire project," which won't happen until she gets out of her current seven-year contract. So "King Vampire" is a movie from the future of Gilbert's continuity, or something.
"King Vampire" is pulpy, violent, and full of sex, of course -- that's generally the point of Gilbert's "movie" stories.
"And Then Reality Kicks In" is quieter, showing one long conversation that's about more than it shows on the surface. If I remembered who that guy was, it would probably be a bit more meaningful to me, but I find the men of this era of Gilbert's work to be pretty colorless and interchangeable.
Next week I'll have a full book Love and Rockets stories from 2012 that I've never read before: this one was half-new, but from here forward it's all stuff I haven't read. It's weird how you can realize you haven't read one of your favorite comic series for close to a decade....
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