The return to Palomar is Gilbert Hernandez's Love and Rockets comics in recent years is oddly free of nostalgia, but it is still reassuring to see the fictional town is surrounded by violent, weird shit.
Poor fucking Diana - she lost her sister in an awful tragedy years ago, and now she's lamenting a young daughter who drowned while away at summer camp. And while Luba might not be able to remember who Diana is because she was abducted by aliens, but it's still cutting to see her dismissed like that.
And she can't wander around her old running haunts without getting dragged into some kind of weird political violence, with dudes getting blasted in the skull and shot in the ass.
The violence is always funny in Beto's style, with wide eyed craziness and bendy bodies getting contorted in horrific bodily violence. It's always a laugh.
Palomar is a town of warmth and humanity - it's surprising that Tipin' Tipin' is still wandering around with a shovel, unless he's one of the town's many, many ghosts - but it's also had some dark shit going down, especially around the edges of town.
In Beto's comics, the cycles of violence aren't just confined to that small town somewhere south of the border - Luba's half-sister is still masking up and beating the shit out of various scum in the streets - but as a small town that has frequently served as an apt metaphor for all the fucked up shit in the world, it's never lost its power to make the point.
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