Both Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez developed their skills as artists in public, in the pages of Love & Rockets, and as quickly as any artists ever have. The first issue showed two promising young tyros; by the fourth, both brothers were clearly among the foremost cartoonists of their generation. But not all of that development took place on the main stage of their shared magazine. They built up to their 1981 self-published debut with years of experiments, fan art, zine illustrations, early short comics, and gig posters, and continued to work out in personal sketchbooks after establishing themselves as the preeminent cartoonists they became. Fantagraphics published two volumes of this nascent or private drawing in 1989 and 1992; now, a single volume collects the work from these two volumes with other rarely-seen artwork, for a new generation of admirers.
Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez's mastery of comics is seen on every page of the thousands of pages of Love and Rockets they've drawn over the last 40 years. Here, for the first time in three decades, see the work they put into becoming those artists.
Author Biography:
Gilbert Hernandez was born in 1957 in Oxnard, California, and is considered one of the greatest living comics writer-artists in the world. In 1982, Hernandez co-created, along with his brothers Mario and Jaime, the ongoing, iconic, internationally acclaimed comic book series Love and Rockets, one of the greatest bodies of work the medium has ever seen. In addition to his work on Love and Rockets, its spinoffs, and side series, Hernandez has released a prodigious amount of original graphic novels and miniseries, such as Sloth, Bumperhead, and Marble Season. He also collaborated with Darwyn Cooke on The Twilight Children for DC. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2017 and is the recipient of a Fellow Award from United States Artists and a PEN Center USA's Graphic Literature Award for Outstanding Body of Work. Hernandez lives in Ventura, CA, with his wife and daughter. Jaime Hernandez was one of six siblings born and raised in Oxnard, California. His mother passed down a love of comics, which for Jaime became a passion rivaled only by his interest in the burgeoning punk rock scene of 1970s Southern California. Together with his brothers Gilbert and Mario, Jaime co-created the ongoing comic book series Love and Rockets in 1981, which Gilbert and Jaime continue to both write and draw to this day. Jaime's work began as a perfect (if unlikely) synthesis of the anarchistic, do-it-yourself aesthetic of the punk scene and an elegant cartooning style that recalled masters such as Charles M. Schulz and Alex Toth. Love and Rockets has evolved into one of the great bodies of American literary fiction, spanning five decades and countless high-water marks in the medium's history. In 2016, Hernandez won the prestigious Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his graphic novel, The Love Bunglers. In 2017, he (along with Gilbert) was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame, and, in 2018, he released his first children's book, the Aesop Book Prize-winning The Dragon Slayer: Folktales from Latin America. He is a lifelong Angeleno.
