It was also clear that while Jaime had the smoother, more effortless drawing style -- "he'll draw in his sleep," his older brother said -- that Gilbert was the more sophisticated storyteller of the duo.
Perhaps because their father had died when they were young, the main characters are almost all women,
The comic came from what Gilbert describes as "a mixture of things we heard happening to people, overhearing conversations of adults talking -- when the adults don't think you're listening -- things we saw in the paper and on the news, and a lot from films." His literary influences, which he said include "The Great Gatsby" and some novels of Carson McCullers, are more limited.
Gilbert's work, Wolk writes, captured the tensions of post-punk Los Angeles, where the strains "of race and class and sex and language and culture were insupportable and about to erupt into flames."
It's not hard to track the influence of the series, which served as a bridge between the '60s underground and the world of today, inside the comics subculture. Probably the most respected comics artist under 40, Adrian Tomine of the "Optic Nerve" series, is lavish in his praise of Los Bros Hernandez.
The current reissues of the books in oversized trade-paperback form on Fantagraphics is only likely to increase the exposure. But the stories resonated outside the comics ghetto as well: When three former members of the gloomy English band Bauhaus started a new group in 1985 they took the name Love and Rockets. And Diaz, the author of "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," began reading the series in the '80s and never stopped. Diaz praises his ability to write about Latin America without cliché, sentimentality and folkloric overdose.
"For those of us who are writing across or on borders, I honestly think he was, for me, more important than anyone else. The stories he was writing on Palomar were recognizable to me, who grew up in the Third World, in a way that made everything else seem shabby and familiar. And his eye is stupendous."
Hernandez appreciates the acclaim "Love and Rockets" has drawn and the growing respectability of comics. But this hasn't made it any easier to make a living as an independent comics artist, and he lives in Las Vegas with his wife and daughter largely, he said, because he couldn't afford to buy a house here.
In harm's way
