Loverboys by Gilbert Hernandez Review

Loverboys is Gilbert Hernandez doing what he does: mixing Latin soap opera with David Lynchian woowoo! And it’s not bad.

Handsome young buck Rocky starts a relationship with an older woman, his former teacher Mrs Paz (another one of Hernandez’s trademark giant busty women) while his lil sis Daniela explores the small town of Lagrimas. There’s a secret building supposedly full of dynamite; a strange hole in a tree; and then there’s the tiny people…

There’s enough to the story that it’s never boring but not enough to say that it’s great either. Rocky and Paz’s relationship is fairly fluid, in the style of most of Hernandez’s characters, and uneventful; starting and finishing without much in the way of meaning.

The other characters are quite well-defined but don’t do anything beyond pine for one another, and the more unusual aspects of the narrative go unexplored; they might be symbolic of something but they’re too underdeveloped to know. There’s mysterious and there’s underwritten and a lot of the story is the latter.

Still, the weird aspects saved this otherwise mundane book of rocky (like the character’s name, geddit?) relationships for me and I liked the haunting presence of the secret building, particularly in its role in the story’s explosive conclusion.

But I can’t say Loverboys was a standout given that Hernandez has told similar, more compelling stories in books like Speak of the Devil and The Children of Palomar. It’s worth a look for fans of this creator though for more casual readers curious about Gilbert Hernandez I recommend those other books instead.