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The Hernandez brothers self-published the first issue of Love and Rockets in 1980, and it's been released in various formats--as a periodical comic and as an annual trade paperback--by Fantagraphics since 1982. Gilbert's world, centered on the fictional Central American town of Palomar, isn't connected to Hoppers (Palomar is more magical realism, Hoppers is just realism); each is its own complex universe where characters age and change and the tiniest detail of everyday life can have a profound impact. Loosely connected to his better-known stories, the narrative focuses on Tonta, a teen girl who is enthusiastic about her crushes, passionate about her enemies, and completely stunned when her family life turns out to be a melodrama of murder, secret siblings, and jealousy.

In 1981 he, along with his brothers Jaime and Mario, self-published a highly eclectic and off-beat comic book, Love and Rockets, a work that quickly caught the attention of the Seattle-based publisher of comic art, Fantagraphics Books. Over its fourteen-year run, Love and Rockets exemplified what alternative comics, and comic books in general, could actually achieve. Hernandez has spent the better part of his career fleshing out the personal histories that populate Palomar, most notably those of Chelo, the town's aggressive female sheriff; Pipo, a striking and confident entrepreneur who creates her own line of clothing and eventually her own media empire; and Heralcio, a school teacher with a flair for philosophy and a passion for Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Franz Kafka. What follows is the result of a phone conversation, along with a series of email-based correspondences in early 2007, in which we discussed his Palomar stories, the significance of Love and Rockets, the influence of popular culture on his writing, and the social function of graphic artists who take on the issues of ethnicity, class, and gender in their work.

[Gilbert Hernandez] is brilliant on the particular embarrassments of growing up (the moment, say, when an older boy points out how illogical some pretend game is, and the whole illusion suddenly falls apart), and on the way its disappointments, however trivial, linger into adulthood ([Huey] is devastated to find that his mother has mistaken his Mars Attacks cards, purloined from a bubble gum machine, for trash and thrown them away, and the reader knows instinctively that 40 years later he'll still be trying to replace them on eBay). I'm not sure the book needs the long, hectoring afterword that an academic called Corey Creekmur has provided. Does the publisher think we're too dim to get all the references? To realise that while nothing much happens, everything happens? But this is a quibble. Marble Season is a treat: beady, nostalgic and sometimes unexpectedly piercing.

  Viewing will be from 4 to 8 p.m. Thursday, with recitation of the rosary at 6 p.m., at Smith Funeral Home Chapel in Sunnyside.