"Welcome to Palomar," the sign says. "Population 386. Where men are men and women need a sense of humor."

You can search in vain for Palomar in an atlas. The richly peopled Central American village is no more--and no less--real than Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Macondo or Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon.

It's an imagined village full of commonplace and poetry, tenderness, lust, tragedy and myth, but most of all, startlingly human characters. That's to be expected in a novel, but Palomar is a comic book, created by Gilbert Hernandez, who with his brother, Jaime, make up Los Bros Hernandez. Their adult comic, a collection of stories under the title "Love & Rockets," challenged the industry's conventions nine years ago, when the Bros were in their 20s, and today "brings in people who don't read comics."

That's the view of Bill Liebowitz, whose crammed Golden Apple comics-plus store on Melrose Avenue was recently the scene of a book signing that featured, among other stars, both Hernandez brothers.

"We get a lot of people from the entertainment medium, where people have heard about 'Love & Rockets' by word of mouth," Liebowitz says. "It's real refreshing to see 'Love & Rockets' ' audience: literate 18- to 35-year-olds who look at it like a serialized novel. Some of that has to do with their being local, but a lot of career women we see relate to the girls."

Those "girls" are Maggie Chascarillo and the punkish Hopey Glass in Jaime's scenes from the life of young, hip barrio kids, "Locas." Like all of Gilbert and Jaime's characters, they're complex. Arrestingly drawn and set against a background of sharp political and social commentary, these women are by turns strong, smart, frail, obsessive, bitchy, motherly, un-motherly. In short utterly human.

By "L&R's" third issue, in 1983, the Palomar stories that had been boiling in Gilbert's head for years began to appear on its pages, the emotional geography of "his own little town."

Britain's Alan Moore, writer of "Watchman" and arguably the best mainstream comics author, gave an insider's view of Gilbert's strengths. When the first Palomar stories were collected, Moore wrote: "Instead of implying that the only real human heroism comes with transcendence into a super-human state of grace, Hernandez uses a genuinely poetic eye to show us all the rich and shadowy passions that surge behind the bland facade of normal life. . . . (He) shows us a little of what humans are actually worth, and while some of it, predictably, is bad news, there are moments of understated optimism that are both touching and illuminating."