`Love and Rockets' celebrates 40 years of comics

Brothers Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez are remarkably modest when asked why they think their groundbreaking comic book series “Love and Rockets” has been such a success for 40 years since its debut.

“There are a few factors,” Gilbert Hernandez says as he signs for fans alongside his cartoonist daughter Natalia Hernandez and brother Jaime at San Diego Comic-con. “One is that we didn't stop.

“And we managed to luck out with a fanbase early on,” he adds.

“We did the work and we kept doing the work,” Jaime Hernandez agreed. “And hopefully, we were pretty good.”

He laughs after that, but it's true what he and Gilbert say: Together, they, and sometimes their older brother Mario Hernandez too, believed in the work they were doing, and fans loved it.

The first issue of “Love and Rockets” was self-published in black and white in 1981 and sold by the brothers at comic conventions. A year later, Fantagraphics republished it with a color cover, and has published the series and side projects by the brothers ever since.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary this year, Fantagraphics this fall will publish the “Love and Rockets: The First Fifty: The Classic 40th Anniversary Collection.” The slipcased collection includes eight hardcover volumes of the first 50 issues of the comic, with an eighth book that includes essays, press articles, a cover gallery and more.

“When I read Gilbert and Jaime's stories in ‘Love and Rockets' for the first time, their work looked to me, miraculously, like the artistic future of comics — and so it was,” said Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth in a press release announcing the new collection this week.

“It has certainly been a high point of my career (and my life) to have known and published these brilliant cartoonists over the last 40 years, and I look forward to publishing them another 40,” he said. “Well, OK. Maybe 30.”

Also this fall KCET and PBS Socal will broadcast and stream a new documentary, “‘Love and Rockets': The Story Behind the Great American Comic,” as part of the station's “Artbound” series.

“We decided to do our Latin heritage, and our music, and mix it up into a mishmash,” Gilbert Hernandez says of the origins of the series by the brothers from Oxnard.

“We chose adult subjects, but adult in the way the world was,” Jaime Hernandez says. “And we didn't talk down to readers. We tried to entertain them and not educate them.”

The late '70s and early '80s punk rock scene of Southern California was also a big part of their inspiration, he says.

“Right before we started the comics, we were punk rockers,” Jaime Hernandez says. “Listening to a lot of punk bands from L.A. and Orange County. The punk thing taught us that DIY thing.”

By the time the first issue of “Love and Rockets” came out, the brothers were in their early 20s, and it felt right to include their own interests in the stories they wrote and illustrated.

“There's rock ‘n' roll, comics, science fiction movies,” Jaime Hernandez says. “They were all sort of connected to each other somehow.”

Gilbert Hernandez often created stories set in the fictional Central American town of Palomar. Jaime Hernandez's were typically centered around a group of Latino characters in Los Angeles.

Those kinds of stories were fresh and unknown in much of entertainment at the time, Jaime Hernandez says.

“In the early days of our comics, in the early '80s, there were not a lot of comics or even television shows that were talking about topics in Southern California,” he says. “That's what we knew, because we were from here.”

Jaime Hernandez lives in East Hollywood, his brother in Ventura. Both say they're always pleased when readers, old or young, tell them what “Love and Rockets” means to them.

“I think most of it is because people were young when they first read it, and they have a sentimental feeling for it,” Gilbert Hernandez says.

“I get some saying, ‘I've been following you for almost 40 years,' and I say, ‘Wow, and you stuck with it!'” Jaime Hernandez says.

“And then there are kids who say someone told me to try it, and we go, ‘Well, we hope you like it.'”

JEFF GRITCHEN — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Brothers Gilbert, left, and Jaime Hernandez, along with Gilbert’s daughter, Natalia Hernandez, attend Comic-con in San Diego on Thursday. The Hernandez brothers are the creators of the influential indie/art comic book “Love and Rockets,” which is celebrating its 40th anniversary.