Love And Rockets: The Girl From Hoppers: The Second Volume of Locas Stories from Love & Rockets, v. 2

The legendary "Love and Rockets" comic book series continues in a comprehensive series of new paperbacks. The 25th anniversary "Love and Rockets" celebration continues with this, the first of three volumes collecting the adventures of the spunky Maggie; her annoying, pixie-ish best friend and sometime lover Hopey; and their circle of intimates, including the blonde bombshell Penny Century, Maggie's weirdo mentor Izzy--as well as the ageing but still heroic wrestler Rena Titanon, and Maggie's handsome but mostly out-of-reach love interest, Rand Race. Having abandoned the sci-fi trappings of the earliest "Love & Rockets" stories (as seen in "Maggie the Mechanic," the first volume in this series) Hernandez refined his approach, settling on the more naturalistic environment of the fictional Los Angeles barrio, Hoppers, and the lives of the young Mexican-Americans and punk rockers who live there. A central story and one of Jaime's absolute peaks is "The Death of Speedy." Such is Jaime's mastery that even though the end of the story is telegraphed from the very title, the downhill spiral of Speedy, the local heartthrob, is utterly compelling and ultimately quite surprising. In this volume, Maggie also begins her on-again and off-again romance with Ray D., leading to friction and an eventual separation from Hopey (which will form the narrative backbone of "Wigwam Bam," as seen in the upcoming third volume that completes the "Locas trilogy"). A number of these stories--including a whole cycle of wrestling stories starring or co-starring Rena Tinanon, whose return was memorably chronicled in the "New York Times" serial "La Maggie La Loca," and the supremely unnerving "Izzymeets the Devil" story, "Flies on the Ceiling"--were not collected in the hardcover "Locas."