On sale date: June 23, 2009
Finalist for the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Graphic Novels: the sequel to the 2003 perennial classic, Palomar.
Gilbert Hernandez climaxed his award-winning "Palomar" series at the end of Love and Rockets' original run by leveling the Central American hamlet. But he soon picked up the story of Luba: The hammer-wielding matriarch had emigrated to the U. S. where she contended not only with an unwelcoming new culture but also her extended family. These "America" stories - over 80 of them, ranging from quick one-page blackout sketches to graphic novellas—were originally published in a number of different comics and reprinted in a trilogy of oversized paperbacks. Luba collects in one compact, affordable hardcover the entirety of these tales, showcasing Gilbert Hernandez's wicked wit, great compassion, and uncanny understanding of how human beings love, squabble, and ultimately find a way to make it through this life.
Luba is part of the Love and Rockets series.
Praise
"Starred Review. After closing the chronicles of life in the fictional Latin American village, Palomar, Hernandez followed the town's matriarch, Luba, to America...This handsome edition collects more than 10 years' worth of stories, and if these latter-day adventures lack the poetic grandeur of the Palomar tales—the North-of-the-border saga reads more like a freewheeling, sexually explicit telenovela—their welcome compilation lends much-needed cohesion to the sprawling continuum they constitute." — Booklist
"Luba encompasses everything a turn-of-the-21st-century novel should be: paraliterary or lowbrow tropes of comics, pornography, soap opera, blended seamlessly with a highbrow literary accomplishment of pathos and familial history. It is as profane as it is dense...Luba is surreal and bizarre and arousing and gut-wrenching and hilarious." — Dusty Horn - CarnalNation
"Just like Heartbreak Soup and Locas, Luba is hard to put down, and Beto's art gets better as it gets more experimental... there's tons of good material here, and the humongous format can't be beat in terms of bang for your buck....There's no denying that Hernandez's comics reflect one of the highest peaks the comics medium has yet achieved." — The Onion A.V. Club
"It's probably not fair to expect Hernandez to issue another creative virtuoso like Palomar, but in the pages of Luba, he comes closer than might be expected. ... Although Luba doesn't hit as hard as Palomar, it remains a compelling portrait of family in all its messy glory. Alternately sexy and vulgar, beautiful and mean, optimistic and intolerant, Luba and her family encompass all the ugliness and amazement that comes with being part of the human entity." — Michael C. Lorah - Newsarama
"It's an astounding collection of stories about family, life, love, and heartbreak. …[W]hen you read all of these powerful tales together in one place, you realise that Beto has created an epic here, unrivaled in its scale and depth. Words fail to express just how wonderful this collection is." — Edward Kaye - Hypergeek
Specs
- Pages
- 608
- Format
- Hardback
- Dimensions
- 7.2" × 10.4"
- ISBN-13
- 9781560979609