Love & Rockets Vol. 12: Poison River

Love & Rockets Vol. 12: Poison River by Gilbert Hernandez. paperback edition. ISBN: 9781560971511.

Gilbert Hernandez (Love and Rockets series) has produced some of the best comics work of the last ten years. Poison River is the story of one of his most engaging characters, Luba-self-possesed, intelligent an iconoclastically sexy- in the years before she arrived in Palomar, Hernandezs mythological Central American Village. We meet Maria, Lubas mother, beautiful, pampered and recklessly promiscuous. Marias husband discovers that Luba is the result of a tool-shed trystwith Eduardo, a poor indian worker and kicks mother, child and lover out into poverty. Glamorous Maria abandons the other two in turn, and much later a teenage Luba meets her future husband Peter Rios, a conga player and small-time(soon to be big-time) gangster who takes her away to a life of privilege. But their meeting is not by chance and Rios peculiar sexual obsessions (womens navels and well-hung chorus "girls") are driven by carnal memories of the exquisite Maria. Indeed Lubas new life (and the men in it) is much like her mothers - lavishly sheltered by violent anticommunist gangsters, who murder and terrorize the local "leftists" in the name of "business" and right-wing patriotism.