Love and Rockets, Vol. 23: Three Daughters

A brilliant character-driven graphic novel from the co-creator of Love & Rockets.Gilbert Hernandez wowed critics in 2003 with his epic life’s work, Palomar, collecting more than 20 years of groundbreaking comics that Booklist called “the most substantive single work that the comics medium has yet produced.” Luba: Three Daughters is the final book in Hernandez’s post-Palomar trilogy (following Luba In America and Luba: The Book of Ofelia), a body of work comparable in comics only to Hernandez’s own Palomar in terms of scope and ambition. It continues the story of matriarch Luba and her extended family’s travails in the United States after her Central American hometown is destroyed at the end of Palomar.Luba: Three Daughters focuses on Luba and her two sisters, Fritz and Petra, as Hernandez continues to use his characters to explore the complex relationships that form between family and how the experiences and actions of one generation influence the next. Hernandez is renowned for his female characters. Trina Robbins, author of The Great Women Cartoonists, says “No other man in or out of the comics field understands women the way [Hernandez] does.” The book spans the dramatic childhood and adulthoods of the three sisters, a past and present which includes violence and sexual drama, and explores how these events have informed their own makeup as well as their own daughters. The stories depict both the innocence of youth and the subsequent, inevitable loss of the same with equal compassion and insight.Hernandez intersperses his main narrative with “The Kid Stuff Kids,” a series of lighthearted and playful one-pagers starring the young children of the three sisters, richly juxtaposed against the complex family drama at work in Three Daughters. Hernandez’s mix of Latino soap opera, magic realist touches and rich naturalism in the service of stories that speak to the changes that come with age and experience are unparalleled in comics, and feature the most vivid, memorable and honestly depicted characters in comics.