Start with Maggie the Mechanic. It is the first volume of Jaime Hernandez's Locas story in the collection scheme currently in print, and Locas is the more approachable of the two halves of Love and Rockets.
Understand the structure before you buy anything, because it is the reason this looks confusing. Love and Rockets is a magazine, not a series. Since 1981 it has carried the largely separate work of two brothers — Jaime and Gilbert, with a third, Mario, contributing occasionally. Jaime writes Locas: Maggie, Hopey and a Southern Californian punk scene, followed across forty years of real time. Gilbert writes Palomar: a Central American village and, later, the family that leaves it. The two almost never intersect. Reading "in order" means choosing one brother and following his books through; reading the magazine issue by issue means alternating between two unrelated novels every twenty pages.
Jaime: the Locas books
Maggie the Mechanic, then The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S., then Perla la loca, then Penny Century, Esperanza A Love And Rockets Book and Angels and magpies.
The second book is not in our catalogue, and its absence matters more than most gaps on this site. The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. contains "The Death of Speedy", which most readers name as the best work either brother has done, and it is the hinge between the loose early material and the long realist novel that follows. Buy it separately. Do not go straight from Maggie the Mechanic to Perla la loca.
What the earliest Jaime is like
The opening chapters of Maggie the Mechanic are science fiction. Rocket ships, dinosaurs, a mechanic's apprenticeship in an invented Latin American country, a superheroine. Jaime drops all of it within a couple of years without explanation, and readers who came for the celebrated realist saga spend the first fifty pages wondering whether they bought the right book. Keep going — the transition happens on the page and you can watch him decide.
Gilbert: the Palomar books
Heartbreak Soup, Human diastrophism, Beyond Palomar, then Luba And Her Family, Ofelia and Three sisters.
Gilbert starts stronger. Heartbreak Soup is assured from its first story, and Human diastrophism is the peak of the Palomar material. Beyond Palomar collects Poison River, a non-linear account of Luba's early life that is the hardest thing in the whole enterprise — most readers find it genuinely difficult on a first pass and much better on a second. The three volumes after it move the family to the United States and are looser and more sprawling.
Which brother first
Either, but not both at once. Jaime if you want the accessible one; Gilbert if you want the one whose ambition is visible from the first story. Alternating between them is how the magazine works and it is not how the collections work.
Three collection schemes, and why you must pick one
The 1980s and 1990s Fantagraphics trades — Music for Mechanics, Chelo's Burden, Las Mujeres Perdidas, House of Raging Women, Duck Feet, Blood of Palomar and others. These follow magazine publication order and mix both brothers. They are everywhere secondhand and they line up with nothing else.
The Love and Rockets Library paperbacks — the scheme above, one brother per volume. The current standard and the one to buy.
The oversized hardcovers — Locas and Locas II for Jaime, Palomar and Luba for Gilbert. The same material in larger, costlier books.
Separately there are the annual comic-sized Love and Rockets: New Stories, which print new work that is later re-collected into the library paperbacks. Love And Rockets New Stories is one of those annuals, credited in our catalogue to Gilbert though the annuals carry both brothers — buying it alongside the later paperbacks means paying twice for some of the same pages.
Content
Sex and nudity throughout, in both brothers. Gilbert's work includes sexual violence, and Poison River is the most extreme of it. The Love and Rockets hub collects what else we hold nearby.
Follow the full ordered path here: Love and Rockets Reading Order: Where to Start With Los Bros Hernandez.
