The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. - May/June 2026 Edition of Devin's Chicago Comics Book Club Digest

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In this issue: What We’re Reading - About What We’ve Read - Shameless Self-Promotion - Some (More) Thoughts on Love and Rockets

Our resident retailer was in attendance this month and brought along a couple items for “show and tell,” including a full-color reprint of an individual issue of Love and Rockets, which had smaller dimensions than the original, and a compendium of the Locas stories, which made me worry about his back. Lol One person didn’t finish this volume, so we tried to avoid spoilers, but we also got to talking about how the characters have aged and grown in real time over the last forty years, including major developments like marriages. That person did read “The Death of Speedy Ortiz,” so we got to discuss that story and share theories about the ending. One person had some trouble parsing the large cast of characters, and admitted they prefer color comics to black and white. This led to a discussion about the advantages black and white comics have and how they convey mood and texture. There were a couple slurs present in the dialogue that took a couple of people by surprise, and one character wearing a swastika t-shirt inspired a not-unrelated conversation about the history of punk. That segued nicely to how the Hernandez Brothers had conceived of the series as a “punk rock Archie,” which became obvious as soon as it was brought up because of some of the cartoonier flourishes in the action sequences and facial expressions.

Our next meeting will be Wednesday, June 17 to discuss I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together.

June 17 - I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together by Maurice Vellekoop

July 15 - Our Dreams at Dusk, Volume 1 by Yuhki Kamatani

August 19 - Minor Arcana, Volume 1: The Fool by Jeff Lemire

September 16 - Search and Destroy, Volume 1 by Atsushi Kaneko, based on Dororo by Osamu Tezuka

October 21 - Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done? by Harold Schechter and Eric Powell

November 18 - Loving, Ohio by Matthew Erman and Sam Beck

December 16 - Hello Sunshine by Keezy Young

January 20, 2027 - Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath

Next month’s selection is not on hoopla, but there are plenty of copies available at the Chicago Public Library. Just reserve them soon, because I did not realize how long this comic is when someone suggested it and it does seem to be in pretty high demand.

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I couldn’t find much history or criticism about this specific volume, especially since it collects individual issues that have appeared elsewhere, but there’s been so much written about Love and Rockets that I wouldn’t know where to begin anyway. It was named “the best non-superhero comic” by Rolling Stone. Conversely, Wizard magazine ranked it 95th on a list of 200. I’m not gonna bother linking to that. I will share this essay by Scott Cederlund about “The Death of Speedy Ortiz” (spoiler warning, though).

There are two videos I want to share, too. The first is from PBS looking at the Los Angeles punk rock scene that influenced Love and Rockets:

The second is this in-depth interview with the creator of this volume, Jaime Hernandez:

The latest NEWS digest is available here. The next NEWS digest will be posted in two weeks on Friday, June 12.

I want to start this section by promoting the work of a couple of friends of mine. My main non-comics collaborator, Onicia Muller, recently interviewed writer Latasha for Rebellious Magazine about her Black feminist romantic comedy, She Loves Me Not. Latasha was running a crowdfunding campaign through Seed & Spark for the post-production and managed to raise 110% of the funds needed!

My friend Morgan A.Drake is part of the Parallel Truths graphic novel anthology that’s in pre-launch on Kickstarter right now! She’s written one of the twelve stories that will be part of that volume, “Dead Reckoning,” with art by Sam Hart. Make sure to follow the campaign to be notified when it launches on June 9!

I promised to share more about “The Cleanest Room in AI City,” an eight-page gay sci-fi noir comic I’ve written with art by Federico Peters. Here’s the first page!

The main character, Ray, pictured above, is the hotel detective in a city run by artificial intelligence. Buddy Beaudoin will be lettering the pages once they’re complete. I’m hoping to have physical copies for the latter part of the summer.

Another project I’m working on is something I’ll code name Project: Drag Queen. I’m reuniting with artist Wren Rios, who illustrated my contribution to the Prism anthology. She’s provided a couple of character sketches that were somehow exactly what I was thinking of but better. Check them out below!

I’m hoping this will be complete by the end of next month, but I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to share while it’s in development. I’m excited to be working with Wren again! This collaboration has already led to a lot of cool conversations and I’m thoroughly impressed by her work.

Rise of the Flightless, the penguins versus robots anthology for which I wrote a four-page comic, will be launching on Kickstarter soon.

I have a storefront on comix.one! They’re selling my self-published comics digitally and via print on demand.

The Dreamlands Anthology from Warden Comics should be shipping soon.

Geek Collective’s Archetypes #2 has gone out!

The Prism anthology is available on Global Comix!

The first anthology to publish a comic I wrote, CyberSync, is available for purchase. It went into a second printing! You can also find it in my online shop.

Among certain insufferable music snobs, the Great Debate is “Which band is better: The Beatles or the Rolling Stones?” (Stick with me here.) The conventional thinking is that The Beatles reinvented and/or redefined pop/rock music, while the Rolling Stones should win because of their sheer longevity and for being “grittier” than The Beatles (or something). I do not care about this argument, but in comics terms, Love and Rockets is The Beatles and it’s the Rolling Stones.

This series has defined the slice of life genre of comics for multiple generations at this point, while also branching off into multiple genres like science fiction and sports and incorporating surrealism, magical realism, and darker, more grounded themes. As for longevity, Love and Rockets is unsurpassed and exceptional!

Something that struck me while reading this volume is how quietly experimental it was. The pages were all more or less grids, but they mirrored each other or led the eye in subtle ways that were funny or devastating. (I got a couple more paragraphs into this topic before realizing that Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, once again, has already done a better and more succinct job of analyzing this aspect of Jaime Hernandez’s art while looking at a different Love and Rockets volume, Perla la Loca. Enjoy the video below!)

I remember when I learned about Love and Rockets. When I was in high school, the clerk at my local comics shop had included a magazine supplement about “hot new characters in comics” with my usual titles as a gift (he would eventually be fired to giving away too much store merchandise to customers). In between the entries for Lorca (from Defiant Comics’ Warriors of Plasm title) and Megaton Man by Don Simpson, there was a page for Maggie and Hopey (the main characters of L&R).

They were the only non-superpowered or non-superhero-adjacent characters in the whole magazine and I’d never heard of them. I wish I could say I sought them out, but I did not. Love and Rockets would have been publishing for at least a decade by the time that magazine had come out, so it’s funny to think of it as “new” while surrounded by titles that didn’t survive the nineties.

I think I was intimidated to start Love and Rockets because I knew there was so much of it over so many years. The cast is sprawling and the relationships are complicated, but I found it remarkably accessible once I started. I think Perla la Loca was my first volume, but then I jumped around, went back, and read forward again. I don’t recommend this strategy to anyone looking to start. Lol These latest editions from Fantagraphics are organized really well and are much easier than other scattershot or gargantuan collections.

Early Love and Rockets perfectly captures the aimlessness of people in their late teens and early twenties figuring themselves out, which is why it’s so rewarding to see how these characters develop. The way conversations loop and characters talk around what they mean or how they feel makes this one of the most human comics ever created. There’s so much more I would like to discuss, but I’m getting down to the wire again.

Thanks for reading! What are some of your favorite indie comics? Have you read much (or any) of Love and Rockets? If so, who’s your favorite character and why? Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below. Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Take care of each other. Make sure to be here next month for I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together by Maurice Vellekoop!