Heartbreak Soup

Heartbreak Soup by Gilbert Hernández
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Heartbreak Soup is a collection of tales set in Palomar by Gilbert Hernandez.

I read all of Jaime Hernandez' Love and Rockets books earlier this year so I figured it was time to give Gilbert a shot.

Heartbreak Soup is a collection of 20 tales set in the fictitious town of Palomar, a place that is a curious mix of the past and the present, where there are no TVs and people still believe in witches. Some of the tales have a supernatural element but most of them are human stories about the people of Palomar.

The characters are rich and varied. If I had to gripe about something in this book, it's that there are a ton of characters to keep track of: Tonantzin, Luba, Chelio, Heraclio, Israel, Carmen, and many, many others. For people who want LGBTQ representation in comics, the Hernandez comics were doing it before it was cool and doing it more than a token amount once a year.

Gilbert Hernandez' art reminds me of Jaime's quite a bit but they are not the same, like using the same ingredients to make different recipes. I expect they share a ton of influences, growing up in the same household, but Gilbert's art feels a little more cartoony to me.

I'm trying not to judge this based on Jaime Hernandez' Locas book but I think this suffers a little by not centering on one or two characters. That aside, I'm already looking forward to my next visit to Palomar. The town feels very old fashioned at times, with no TV and people paying for baths and seeing old movies at a single projector movie house. There's an undercurrent of the past fighting the present for most of the book.

Heartbreak Soup shows the beginnings of a masterpiece. I'll be visiting Palomar again sometime soon. Four out of five stars.

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