Months go by between issues of Love and Rockets, and so it goes in Jamie Hernadez's comics inside those covers, with huge developments unfolding at a breathtakingly rapid pace.
Hernandez's style has always looked so effortless ,even if the artist spends a long time looking for the perfect line, but he's just as proficient at long-term plotting exploding into sudden (and often emotional) incident, as just as good at making it all look easy.
His stories are all told in short, sharp chapters, with never a line or panel wasted. Many of them are only a couple of pages long, some of them are only one. Love and Rockets #11 features five new chapters in the wonderfully massive Locas story, mainly broken up between the latest Beto tomfoolery, and only one is more than two pages long. (There are also four pages of his excellent sci-fi nonsense.)
But there are big things happening in tiny page counts. New friends and new dramas and new introspection, and Maggie getting drawn into a whole new generation of nonsense as she gets close to Tonta - Jesus Christ, the look on her face when she sees how Tonta lives every day - only for all these escapades to recede into impossibility because of, as Ray so eloquently puts it, the 'fucking frogmouth' factor. And it all comes with a last-page twist that blows everything up again, handled with cool style and terrific humour.
We get so few pages of Hernandez's art every few months, but can get so much out of them. He remains an absolute comic master.
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