Lovers and Haters by Gilbert Hernandez

Look, Gilbert Hernandez is one of the giants of world comics, right? So anything I say here on a minor blog is probably pointless. He's also one of the most wild-hair creators I've ever seen, prone to run off in really bizarre directions - witness Blubber, witness the long series of "The Fritz B-Move Collection," witness Birdland and Garden of the Flesh and...just about everything he's done for the past two or three decades, frankly.

It can also take a while for a new Love & Rockets collection to percolate: first the stories appear in individual issues - which have changed format a lot over the years, and are now I guess roughly annual magazine-sized things - and then those stories are usually edited a bit for book publication, to include most of the material in L&R but tweak some pages and add more. So any one book is a record of a longer time than it might seem. This book, for example, was published in 2025, but the first piece in it is dated 2014.

So a lot of what I said about Gilbert's work when I wrote about the first six issues of the current L&R series back in 2018 (!) is still relevant here: this is some of the same material. Actually, I think this is the weakest of what I remember from that material, the stuff that was most tedious and repetitive.

Which finally brings me to Lovers and Haters, the 31st volume in The Complete Love and Rockets. (Note: that doesn't mean the "library editions;" there have been I think fifteen of those so far, each roughly twice the size of a "Complete" book. It also doesn't mean the really big hardcovers, like Palomar and Locas, which have even more material but don't reprint the smaller books directly. The counts of both series also also includes the work of Gilbert's brother Jaime; their material appears side-by-side in L&R but the two have never worked together. Oh, and there's also a few stories here and there over the past forty years by a third brother, Mario, who has worked occasionally with Gilbert, just to be more confusing.)

When I wrote about that current L&R series back in 2018, I said, optimistically, that "Gilbert wrote his way out of the swamp of Too Many Fritzes." But this book collects the plotline I thought of as Too Many Fritzes, and mostly includes material later than 2018, so I was not entirely correct at that time. (And I live in hope that the things I saw then that I considered stronger, and showing a movement towards more lightness and openness in his work, will be collected themselves, eventually.)

Fritz is the half-sister of Luba, who was Gilbert's big central character for the '80s and '90s. Originally, she was a psychologist, but that may have been completely retconned away by now. In these stories, she's in her late forties - just turning fifty near the end - and has been a bad actress her entire adult life. I say "bad," but I may mean "limited" - there's a sense that she appeared in almost entirely bad movies and may not have been worse than mediocre herself.

These stories, mostly a series called "Talent," circle around Fritz, her controlling but borderline incompetent boyfriend/manager, several skeevy porn producers, and a bewildering array of younger women who adopted versions of Fritz's name to cash in on her fame, mostly by working as strippers, in porn, and in fetish movies that might not be distinguishable from porn. There's a largish cast that mostly stands around saying the same things to each other, or announcing plot and background details, as they sarcastically cut each other down. You see, they mostly hate each other, even though a lot of them work on the same movies and have sex with each other regularly - in fact, working on the same movies often is having sex with each other.

This is weird and artificial and odd on a storytelling level - before I even get into the mostly-underlying plot idea of the mad scientists who invented some kind of human growth serum that gave all of the women breasts of various massiveness (the smallest are about the size of their heads) and some men similarly freakish muscles. Oh, and there's a guy with two dicks - that seems to have been natural, though.

Just the frenzy about Fritz is already silly, as if there was a massive global industry of Linnea Quigley imitators. With all of the other material piled on top of it, Lovers and Haters is incredibly difficult to take seriously. I'm not going to try to do that: it is deeply not-serious.

There's also a lot of moments or elements that seem out of place. Or maybe I mean that the timeline is really confused, and it's unclear when all of these events are happening. Fritz is married to a woman, Pipo, in a couple of stories late in this book, which doesn't seem to match at all with her relationship with her boyfriend/manager, and Gilbert's narrative voice doesn't comment at all.

I think this is mostly for Beto completists, who want to see what's going on with his main storyline. (Spoiler: very, very little; it's chasing its own tail through sex cults and breast-inflation fetishes.) In a few years, there will be another L&R collection by Gilbert, and I don't see any way that it can be worse than this. But I have been surprised before.