Love & Rockets: New Stories #4 by Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez ships in September (hopefully).

Will it be brilliant? Probably.

Will it be as good as Love and Rockets: New Stories #3, where Jaime Hernandez gave us a look at Loca Maggie after three years of absense in two beautiful tales The Love Bunglers and Browntown? Now that might be tough.

Our own Kenny Penman had this to say about Jaime’s Browntown story, and L&R in general:

“Los Bros single-handedly changed the way I read comics and the comics I read. Without them, there would be no Blank Slate Books as I would never have left the reading ghetto of superhero comics I had so long luxuriated in. At times I liked Gilbert’s stories more – although there was never much in it – but I knew, and still do, that Jaime is probably the best cartoonist in the world. It’s not just his drawing, the writing can be off the cuff sometimes but when he gets it right the comics can be filled with melancholy and still be uplifting.

This look at Maggie’s early life with her siblings in a desert town that their dad’s job has brought them to, is wonderful. The art is sublime, as mindful of empty space as the drawn parts – beautiful and elegant. The story gives us lots of Maggie’s back story, which as we know her life after this, gives us hope in how she rose above circumstance. I’d started to take L&R for granted – always good but maybe not with the punch of those early comics that had turned my head. This came up and gently whispered in my ear and I was deeply in love all over again. Comic of the year.”

And the thing is, he certainly wasn’t alone in that praise. Browntown is quite rightly up for an Ignatz for outstanding story. So the expectation for New Stories #4 is huge.

Jaime is returning to The Love Bunglers and presents a sort of sequel to Browntown with the teenage Maggie returning to Hoppers in Return For Me, it may be magnificent.

Gilbert isn’t slacking off either – his two stories are the 35-page cover story King Vampire and the return of High Soft Lisp’s Fritz returns in the 15-pager And Then Reality Kicks In, which Fantagraphics are describing as “This complex and layered dialogue may be Gilbert’s finest piece of writing yet”.

Fantagraphics have provided a preview of Love And Rockets: New Stories #4 here with 5 pages from each brother. But just to tempt you…

(cover to Love From the Shadows by and (c) Gilbert Hernandez, published this week by the lovely Fantagraphics mob. Love the small hardback format and the semi pulp 50s style cover work; below; interior pic from the book, again (c) Gilbert Hernandez)