Fans consider Love and Rockets series creator a trailblazer

Centennial Hills resident Gilbert Hernandez is a Las Vegas treasure.

That’s according to Ralph Mathieu, owner of Alternate Reality Comic Books, 4110 S. Maryland Parkway. Mathieu is a longtime fan of Love and Rockets, the cult comic book series authored by Hernandez and his brother Jaime.

“The great thing about Love and Rockets is the characters don’t stay the same,” Mathieu said. “It’s been very influential on alternative artists, the way it taps into complex characters that really run the gamut of the types of characters you see in great (literary) novels. (Hernandez) leaves a lot open-ended, a lot open to interpretation.”

Mathieu describes Love and Rockets as the prototype for post-underground comic book authors — a groundbreaking series that introduced the kind of strong female characters and minority voices not often seen before the comic’s early 1980s debut.

To Mathieu, the comic is a deep, David Lynch-esque dive into plot and character development that has long surprised readers weaned on one-note action superheroes.

It’s not the first time Hernandez, who played guitar in bands at the forefront of Los Angeles’ ’80s hardcore punk scene, has been counted among members of the vanguard, though he prefers comparisons to indie filmmaker Quentin Tarantino.

“We’ve taken on lots of different topics in Love and Rockets,” he explained. “I tend to go more toward exploitation: the action-oriented or crime-oriented or horror-oriented stories.”

First published in 1982, the series follows a core group of seven Latino teenagers from high school in a fictionalized version of Hernandez’ Oxnard, Calif., hometown, to a rural village in Latin America and back again, drawing on a cast of some 70 satellite characters along the way.

Thirty years later, much has remained the same. Love and Rockets is a comic about “the day-to-day lives of regular people,” according to Hernandez — a slacker story told through the eyes of Hispanic teenagers growing up on punk in the 1980s.

“There’s a lot more sex than in some other comics,” he said. “In the early days, there was really a punk rock angle, which hadn’t been around before. It’s been that way from the beginning. We’ve tried to do things because they weren’t popular, things people hadn’t looked to comics for.”

That thinking has earned the series a following that’s seen the comic’s 56-year-old co-author host standing-room-only book signings around the world, including a trio of appearances in Toronto, New York and Chicago in support of his recently released graphic novels “Julio’s Day” and “Marble Season.”

Hernandez, for his part, has remained grounded. It seems the author, who stopped by Mathieu’s Alternate Reality Comics last month for Free Comic Book Day, has never lost sight of his audience.

“Our fans are pretty rabid,” Hernandez said. “I’ve had pretty good reviews in Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone, but if one of my (graphic novels) gets a bad review, they’ll swarm (the reviewer) like hornets. Which is pretty cool for us. We don’t have to fight bad reviews. Someone else does it for us.”

Hernandez laments the fact that many of the Marvel and DC comic book heroes in the ’60s are now a much more familiar sight on the silver screen.

With narratives most often likened to “magic realism” — and themes that sometimes touch more on sex and drugs than actual love and rockets — Hernandez doesn’t expect to find his own comic book’s heroes gracing marquees anytime soon.

In a way, that’s how he likes it.

“We’ve had talks with television people and movie people for over 25 years now,” Hernandez said. “I’ve also written a couple of action comics and it just didn’t gel. I’m not hooked into what they’re into. I just don’t have that sensibility. That’s why I probably don’t read mainstream comics anymore. But that’s fine. That’s actually how Love and Rockets got started: You’re bored, you don’t see what’s out there for you, so you do it yourself.”

Contact Centennial and North Las Vegas View reporter James DeHaven at jdehaven@viewnews.com or 702-477-3839.