Fantagraphics Collects 'Locas' Stories

This fall, Fantagraphics Books will publish Jaime Hernandez's Locas, a mammoth hardcover collection of comics stories from the first 50 issues of the award-winning Love and Rockets comics series, originally published between 1982 and 1995. Variously known among Love and Rockets fans as the Locas, Mechanics or Maggie and Hopey stories, they document a couple of decades in the lives of a group of friends and lovers from California's multi-ethnic punk rock culture. They've been scattered through a bunch of books, but they collectively make up a single long narrative, and Locas presents them as a continuous 700-plus-page graphic novel.

In an interview with PW, Hernandez said he had worked to cut the book down: "it's okay for the book to be thick, but not that thick." He's also just completed a long story about popular Locas heroine Maggie Chascarillo. So for the future, he's "giving her a break—she'll be a B-character. When I put her in stories, she tends to take over."

Last year's similarly formatted Palomar, a hardcover omnibus of Gilbert Hernandez's stories (he's Jaime's brother) from Love and Rockets, sold out its first printing of about 10,000 copies within a couple of months (a second printing is due this month). Fantagraphics expects that Locas may do even better. "Jaime is probably the preeminent cartoonist of his generation, just in terms of the sheer skill and beauty of the work," said Fantagraphics's Kim Thompson.

"His art is so beautiful that it's easy to lose track of what a good writer he is. And, because he was so close to the milieu, it's peerless as a portrait of the disaffected youth, punk, and ethnic stewpot culture of the '80s and '90s. He used to be a punk like that—that's him and his friends."