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Rating: 
Summary: uninformed soapboxing posing as writing
Review: Gilbert Hernandez, who certainly is not without some talent, became ever more lazy with his artwork as Love and Rockets progressed, perhaps realizing that it was impossible to compete with the visual brilliance of his brother. He seemingly tried to compensate by becoming more "writerly" with his little fictions, and ended up creating in Poison River and especially this awful volume just the sort of stilted, derivative hash one would expect of a half-educated adolescent with an interest in puck rock and comic books. There is nothing worse than some guy trying to lecture on subjects he doesn't understand in the least (this guy thinks on the level of someone who slept through high school, never attended college and then read a book or two about politics and thought it made him a philospher) and disguising it in the form of a badly drawn and truly horribly written comic book. It is sad to see his talent go mostly to waste; he could have been a decent middleweight cover designer or children's book illustrator if he hadn't imagined that he could write.
Rating: 
Summary: A low point for Beto...
Review: One of my least favorite of these 15 incredible volumes -- why? Basically, there's a fine line between letting your characters have strong opinions and proselytizing through your characters -- in LOVE & ROCKETS X, Senor Hernandez seems (unfortunately) rather too snug on the latter side of that boundary, and the work suffers for it. The diversity of the characters seems incredibly forced here -- he continually falls back on an extremely limited lexicon of cliches and racial stereotypes, the contrary result of which tends to be the obscuring and confounding of GH's own aims (namely, a noble, active tolerance and appreciation of the HUMAN, as opposed to the Caucasian or Latino or African-American or Gay/Lesbian, ad nauseum) -- but a little of that goes a very long way (likewise for overlong sociological Iggy Pop diatribes and the sort of musicological conversational asides which seem more like a vehicle for GH to brag about his record collection than anything else) and it times this book gets so supersaccharined with such unnecessities I had to restrain myself from hurling. The "All the World's Problems Would Be Solved If We'd All Just Embrace Our Inherent Bisexuality (Not To Mention the Nearest Available Member of Your Own Gender, Though Preferably One of a Different Race Just To Make Absolutely Certain That Beto Hernandez's Message Is Not Lost On Anyone) and Flesh Out Our Record Collections With Old Germs 45s, etc." message, presented with all the subtlety of Chick tract, ultimately estranges (read: nauseates) the reader. Crosby, Stills and Nash didn't convince me, and neither does this book -- when the Hernandez's stuff works, it really works; but when it doesn't, it's as smarmily insufferable as being forced to watch "The Big Chill" alongside some overtalkative person who counts it among her top ten favorite films of all time...Secondly, it seemed to me, reading this particular story, that something which ought to have been intrinsic to the story seemed instead to have been lost on the artist: i.e., the fact that the set of unspoken rules which govern human relationships (govern them as the moon governs the tides) is not the same set in Palomar and in Los Angeles. And this should have been central to Riri and Maricela's running-away experience, but was hardly explored (that was to be left up to Steve Erickson, who copped/altered/fleshed it out in his second novel "Rubicon Beach"). But -- more pertinently -- the story falls flat on its (admittedly quite attractive) face for the same reasons. Los Angeles ain't Palomar. Los Angeles is so apalomaric (sorry) it might as well be on another planet, populated by a different species. I sort of got the feeling that he was jumping into brother Jaime's territory. Later work based around the LA-Palomar pipeline (I'm thinking specifially of the unbelievable "Luba Conquers the World" and of last year's "New Love" series) juggles all of these themes, characters, plots and conflicts admirably and successfully, so I imagine Gilbert eventually found his way through to the same clarified butter as the sorely missed Mr. Coltrane.
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