Love & Rockets - is it worth it.

[Link Prime]

Read Heartbreak Soup- loved it. Are those slug things they're eatin based on any form of reality? Sweet Jovus...
I ordered Maggie the Mechanic from Play.com yesterday- really looking forward to trying it too.
Noticed Comixology have the 'new' series of Love & Rockets available, but I'll wait for the inevitable half-price sale.
This series could be a keeper for me.

[Patrick]

I have mixed opinions about L&R.

Jaime draws like an absolute bastard - there's a lovely big hardback "Art of Jaime Hernandez" book that I treasure - but it took him a while to find his feet as a writer. Started out doing these slightly dodgy science-fiction mashup stories that just happened to have a couple of very likeable punk kids called Maggie and Hopey in them who didn't quite seem to fit. Then he abandoned the science fiction trappings, did a load of stories set in Maggie and Hopey's neighbourhood that were kind of inconsequential but expanded the supporting cast. Only really became brilliant went he sent Hopey away on a tour with her band, and had all these different threads with different characters going on.

Gilbert, who's a good cartoonist but doesn't draw half as well as Jaime, hit the ground running with his "Heartbreak Soup" stories, very vivid stories from the "old country" with believable and entertaining characters, but he kind of lost me with "Poison River", which tells Luba's backstory in a very stylised, condensed way that's very hard work to read. When the original Love & Rockets series ended and Gilbert and Jaime published separate series for a while, I only followed Jaime's, so I'm completely lost with Gilbert's current stuff.

[Tombo]

Well "Maggie the Mechanic" arrived yesterday, three days ahead of schedual but literally as I was stepping out to go to work (at ten past one, how's that for a late post).  Read it last night in one sitting and spent most of today dipping in to it.  I have to say it's a very interesting story and quite... charming I guess is the term I would use.  I shall definately be getting the other volumes.

It took me a while to get used to the art, from time to time I had difficulty telling if it was Maggie or Hoppie who was speaking, but eventually I was engrossed.  I guess Grant's shrine to Samantha Slade is safe for the time being