Love and Rockets: New Stories #7
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeLove and Rockets: New Stories #7 marks a pivotal moment in the decades-long Locas saga: it delivers the first extended, post-'Love Bunglers' reunion of Maggie and Hopey as middle-aged women, pushing their relationship into genuinely new emotional territory after years of anticipation. The issue also showcases both brothers working in complementary registers simultaneously — Jaime's intimate, real-time aging of his characters alongside Gilbert's gleefully genre-bending B-movie fabulism — demonstrating the unique two-voice anthology architecture that has made Love and Rockets one of the defining works of alternative comics. By grounding Locas characters squarely in 2015, with Wi-Fi and middle-age fatigue alongside the old punk-scene geography of Hoppers, Jaime made an implicit argument about what serialized literary comics can accomplish that no other medium matches. The series as a whole, of which this is the penultimate New Stories volume, has been praised for its nuanced depictions of Latinx, queer, and working-class lives and its complex female characters across five decades.
In "Killer in Palomar," Gilbert Hernandez weaves a layered narrative across decades, tracing the quiet echoes of family and memory in the fictional town of Palomar. Through intimate flashbacks, we glimpse moments between Maria and her father Fernando, between young Fritz and his mother Guadalupe, and between Maria and her daughter Doralis, all connected by unspoken truths and fleeting encounters. The story unfolds with Hernandez’s signature emotional precision, rendered in his distinctive, expressive style, while the cover by Jaime Hernandez captures the tale’s melancholic warmth.
In "Do I Look At the Camera or Do I Look At Me?", Hopey and Maggie say goodbye to their loved ones and set off by train to the Huerta punk reunion, their journey marked by quiet anticipation. Once in town, they head to the Vogue Theater, drawn by the shared ritual of watching a movie together in the same space.
In "Our Lady of the Assassinating Angels!" from Love and Rockets: New Stories #7, Angel and her wrestling crew find themselves stranded outside the wrong venue, forced to navigate the city on foot to reach the real event. The story captures their restless energy and camaraderie as they move through an urban landscape that feels both familiar and strangely charged.
In "If It Ain't Fixed, Don't Break It!", Jo finds herself caught between family tensions and old connections when she flees her sister Violet’s house and seeks refuge with Vivian. As she reconnects with old friends and navigates a web of unresolved feelings, a quiet but urgent confrontation looms at Hilly’s house over a matter involving Angel Rivera.
In "The Golem Suit," the Professor’s latest invention—a towering Golem suit designed to battle the Nazis—remains inert until a clay meteor crashes from the sky and is struck by lightning, sparking the machine to life. With deadpan humor and a touch of sci-fi whimsy, the story follows the unlikely fusion of ancient myth and mad science in a tale that’s as absurd as it is oddly compelling.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
Love and Rockets: New Stories launched in 2008 when Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth and the Hernandez brothers agreed to shift from a traditional saddle-stitched magazine format (released multiple times yearly) to an annual, roughly 100-page graphic-novel-format book, allowing each creator to tell longer, less chopped-up stories. By 2015 — the year New Stories #7 appeared — the format had been running for seven years and was in its antepenultimate issue before the brothers returned to an ongoing magazine format with Volume IV in late 2016. Each issue was produced independently by Gilbert and Jaime, with no editorial crossover between their storylines, continuing the self-directed creative model the brothers established when they first self-published Love and Rockets in 1981.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published February 17, 2015 by Fantagraphics Books; ISBN 9781606997703; 100 pages, black and white, trade paperback format.
- Written and drawn by Gilbert Hernandez (Beto) and Jaime Hernandez (Xaime); the seventh of eight issues in the Love and Rockets: New Stories (Volume III) annual run, 2008–2016.
- Jaime's primary contribution reunites Maggie Chascarrillo and Hopey Glass on a road trip — their most substantial shared page-time in years — and is the first major Locas story to address the post-'Love Bunglers' status quo of the Maggie/Ray/Hopey triangle, which had been largely dormant since New Stories #4 (2011).
- Jaime also contributes a sci-fi/grindhouse fantasy segment titled 'Princess Anima' (variously spelled 'Anim' or 'Animus' in review sources), as well as vignettes centering on Tonta and her family and on Ray Dominguez visiting old friends.
- Gilbert's suite includes 'The Magic Voyage of Aladdin' (Fritz as Morgan Le Fey teams with Aladdin against the evil Circle), 'The Golem Suit' (a WWII sci-fi thriller starring Killer/Doralis de los Santos Rivera), 'Daughters and Mothers and Daughters' (flashbacks to Luba's mother Maria reveal buried family secrets), and 'Meet Fritz Jr.' (introducing Fritz's doppelgänger figure Fritz Jr.).
- The issue continues Gilbert's multi-issue examination of the Killer/Fritz/Fritz Jr. constellation — figures simultaneously inhabiting soap-opera family drama and grindhouse B-movie pastiche — with the Palomar community serving as counterpoint.
- Material from this issue was later collected in Jaime's 'Is This How You See Me?' (serialized from New Stories #7–8 and Vol. IV #1–5) and 'Life Drawing' (serialized from New Stories #7–8 and Vol. IV #1–2, 6–15), and in Gilbert's 'Lovers and Haters' (serialized from New Stories #7–8 and additional material).
- Publishers Weekly gave the issue a starred review; Tom Spurgeon (The Comics Reporter) called it 'Another strong, strong, strong, strong, strong issue'; Booklist praised the brothers' 'respective graphic strengths' — Jaime's 'economically elegant cartooning' alongside Gilbert's 'bold designs and imaginative characterizations.'
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Reprints
Reprinted in Is This How You See Me? (A Locas Story) #[nn] (2019), Proof That the Devil Loves You #[nn] (2023), Life Drawing: A Love and Rockets Collection #[nn] (2025), Lovers and Haters: A Love and Rockets Book #[nn] (2025)
Key issues in Love and Rockets: New Stories
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