Celebrating Latino Books Month: The Art of Jaime Hernandez

In 1981 three Mexican-American brothers self-published their first comic book, Love and Rockets, and “changed American cartooning forever” according to Publishers Weekly. Over twenty-five years later it is still being published to critical and commercial success.

Jaime Hernandez’s moving stories chronicle the lives of some of the most memorable and fully formed characters the comics form has ever seen. His female protagonists, masterfully delineated with humor, candor, and breathtaking realism, come to life within California’s Mexican-American culture and punk milieu.

In April 2006 Hernandez began serializing his work with the New York Times Magazine—all of which will be collected here in full color. The notoriously private artist has opened his archives for the first time, revealing never-before-seen sketches, childhood drawings, and unpublished work, alongside his most famous Love and Rockets material.

Here's what author Todd Hignite had to say about Hernandez's work in a Publisher's Weekly interview: "Ethnic and class diversity is crucial to his characters’ experiences and as an informing sensibility to delineate the world they live in. It’s not that he’s just showing diversity, it informs how the characters interact and relate to one another in a very deep way. This had a huge impact on me as a young teenage comic reader in the mid-1980s as it opened my eyes to the larger world outside of superheroes—and his humane treatment of individuals is a hallmark of all of his stories to the present." Read the whole interview