SOURCE: "Barrio Culture," in New Statesman & Society, Vol. 1, No. 7, July 29, 1988, pp. 48-9.

[In the review below, Sinker remarks on the work of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, noting their focus on strong women characters and Hispanic themes in their graphic novels and comics.]

The way to make money on adult comic books in the late eighties is to put the monthly issues together into glossy compilations and sell them as "graphic novels". The new market can avoid the wait and has its literary ego stroked a little, too.

But comics aren't novels and novels aren't comics. So it's appropriate that a character in Gilbert "Beto" Hernandez's strip Heartbreak Soup—from the comic Love & Rockets, written and drawn by Gilbert and his brother Jaime—is seen discussing One Hundred Years Of Solitude in a faintly pretentious way only a short while before his wife throws him and the book out...