Love and Rockets, Vol. 14: Luba Conquers the World

No cartoonist has chronicled the turbulence and complexity of contemporary life as consistently and profoundly as Gilbert Hernandez. In this, the 14th and penultimate collection from the Hernandez Brothers' acclaimed Love & Rockets magazine, Gilbert continues to chart the lives of the women of Palomar in a series of short stories, vignettes, and character studies. These fictions pose questions surrounding the infinite complications connecting mothers with daughters, fathers with sons, men with women, siblings, friends, and lovers with one another. That they are questions not comfortably asked, much less answered, is why the men and women of Palomar are compelled to confront them. But, in Hernandez's art, as in life, nothing is simple, and it takes three generations bearing witness to acts of kindness and cruelty, of foolishness and wisdom, of suffering and joy, before the characters in these stories acquire the insight and understanding to reconcile the past with the present, the dead with the living.