SOURCE: A review of Poison River, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 241, No. 34, August 22, 1994, p. 52.

[Below, the critic lauds Gilbert Hernandez's complex plot, striking characters, and vivid dialogue in Poison River.]

Along with his brother Jaime, Gilbert Hernandez (Love and Rockets X) has produced some of the best comics work of the last 10 years. Poison River is the story of one his most engaging characters, Luba—self-possessed, intelligent and iconoclastically sexy—in the years before she arrived in Palomar, Hernandez's mythological Central American village. We meet Maria, Luba's mother, beautiful, pampered and recklessly promiscuous. Maria's husband discovers that Luba is the result of a tool-shed tryst with 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, conga player and small-time (soon to be big-time) gangster...