Drawn to a dark side - The Hernandez brothers teamed up for comic book greatness with 'Love and Rockets,' but for older sibling Gilbert, his singular vision was calling.

But digging into dinner and joking about his childhood on a recent evening at a Valley bistro, he comes across as a well-adjusted, down-to-earth guy. It's hard to imagine him producing the kinds of characters and situations his three decades as a comics artist have led him to: the child who disappears during a solar eclipse, the father who's killed in prison fighting for a cigarette lighter, the lives full of hurt and sudden loss.

"I'm not a brooder," said the bearded and bespectacled Hernandez, 50, in town for a recent appearance at Book Soup.

"But those dark thoughts come out when I'm drawing. Sometimes I'm criticized for sitting around and thinking of the worst things that happen to people. But that's only partly true."

His goal, he said, is always to create a compelling narrative, not just a catalog of horrors. "I do want it to be a story."

That talent has earned him a legion of fans, including the novelist Junot Diaz. "In a real world, not the screwed-up world we have now, he would be considered one of the greatest American storytellers," Diaz said.

"It's so hard to do funny, tragic, local and epic, and he does all simultaneously, and with great aplomb."

Hernandez's latest work is "Chance in Hell," the violent and perverse graphic novel about a vulnerable young girl found wandering in a city dump. When co-creators break up -- Gilbert and his brother, Jaime, are still producing one "Love and Rockets" a year but have basically "gone solo" -- their tendencies typically emerge full-blown.

At the risk of forcing the Lennon analogy, "Chance in Hell" is more Plastic Ono Band than "Imagine": It's raw and, at 120 pages uncut by Jaime's more hopeful worldview and more graceful style, seems like a lot of pain and peril in one place.

For Gilbert himself, who hopes to produce a one-off each year, the process was liberating.

"There's nothing harder than doing new stories with old characters," he said of his multi-generational cast, headed by the fiery and large-bosomed Luba, who mostly reside in the vaguely magic-realist Central American town of Palomar. "Even though these characters are part of me. But I can't do it anymore, after 25 years. While with 'Chance in Hell,' I took the chance to deal with a character, all in one place, and say goodbye to her. It wasn't always easy, but it was freeing."