Love and Rockets: The Sketchbooks

Both Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez developed their skills as artists in public, in the pages of Love and Rockets, and as quickly as any artists ever have. The first issue showed two promising young tyros; by the fourth, both brothers were clearly among the foremost cartoonists of their generation. But not all of that development took place on the main stage of their shared magazine. They built up to their 1981 self-published debut with years of experiments, fan art, zine illustrations, early short comics, and gig posters, and continued to work out in personal sketchbooks after establishing themselves as the preeminent cartoonists they became.

Fantagraphics published two volumes of this nascent or private drawing in 1989 and 1992. Now, this deluxe hardcover collects the work from these two volumes with other rarely-seen artwork for a new generation of admirers. It’s presented as a dual-sided flip book with one cover, and one half of the book, featuring Jaime’s work and a second cover, and other half of the book, highlighting Gilbert’s work. The Hernandez Brothers’ mastery of comics is seen on every page of the thousands of pages of Love and Rockets they’ve drawn over the last 40 years. Here, for the first time in three decades, see the work they put into becoming those artists.