Although all the Hernandez characters deal with (malfunctioning) love, Maggie was the only one to have an intimate connection with rockets. She begins the series as a "pro-solar mechanic" -- a rare occupation for a girl, we are told -- under the tutelage of her crush, Rand Race. The rockets and other extraterrestrial props lasted through the first volume, "Music for Mechanics," but abruptly disappeared in subsequent volumes, to be replaced by the more naturalistic, but no less surreal, mechanics of love, sex and politics. (Other characters occasionally flirt with the supra-natural world, most notably Penny Century, a billionaire's trophy wife and friend of Maggie and Hopey, who wants to be a superhero. But Penny's "superhero" persona is made possible by the fact that rich people have the darnedest gadgets, not because she has any magic powers.)

Each brother writes, draws and inks his own series. Gilbert's "Heartbreak Soup," also collected in the "Love and Rockets" volumes, follows the inhabitants of Palomar, a tiny fictional town somewhere below the Mexican border. Like Jaime, Gilbert commands dozens of characters, stretching back in time (sometimes in flashback) from the founding of the town in the early part of the 20th century through the '50s to the present, chronicling the lives of Marxists, factory owners, scabs, serial killers, lovers, wives, children and grandchildren.

But the center of "Heartbreak Soup" is inarguably Luba, the daughter of a fair-skinned, green-eyed failed beauty queen who had the talent of cracking walnuts with her belly, and the habit of giving herself to any man of means who asked -- or in the case of Luba's father, her Native American gardener, a man of means by no means. Luba's genetic heritage is her mother's buxom silhouette and her father's high-cheekboned face, but she loses both parents by the age of 3.

Luba grows from abandoned child to child bride of a gangster (and smack-addicted housewife) to divorced single mother of four children by three fathers who supports herself by running a public bath and then a movie house. Finally, in middle age (now the mother of eight children by five fathers), she exchanges her status as Palomar's sexual symbol to become its civic symbol -- the town's matriarch, the mayor of Palomar.

It would not be romantic hyperbole to state that both Jaime and Gilbert are clearly in love with their women. And most every woman in their work is unquestionably beautiful. But they are not beautiful in the way that women in, say, movies and magazines are beautiful. Fantastic women are beautiful through omission -- cameras capture the tilt of a perfect nose, but avoid a soft chin line; they skim over heavy hips to focus on small shoulders. This tendency to edit women into beautiful fragments only gets worse as an actress or model ages.

The Hernandez women look like the women who men and women actually make love to. Luba has the breasts of a fertility goddess, but loathes her spindly chicken legs (at one point, she even begs Gilbert to go easy on her chest, which she claims is getting too heavy to hold up.) By 29, her face is crisscrossed with fissures that only deepen with age. Later, her stomach develops those two little humps so common with women who've had many children, while her legs stay as stick-thin as ever, the kind of detail that is so often seen in life, and so rarely represented anywhere else.

Maggie, meanwhile, starts out with a generous ass and a slim body, but puts on at least 30 pounds by 23, a fact that pisses her off but does nothing to turn off her lovers, many of whom claim to like her better fat. (And yes, they say "fat." No soft-pedaling euphemisms here.) And even as she outgrows her jeans, Maggie continues to appear in bikinis, undies and tank tops, and tight dresses, and she still causes quite a stir when onlookers notice the way her rounded calves fit into her high heels.

But even the Hernandez Bros' young women are not airbrushed: Danita the stripper has a Playmate body and a gaptoothed smile; teen girls have braces and middles that bulge over the edges of their tight jeans. When Luba's plump, red-haired, freckled teenage daughter Doralis becomes a backup dancer on a fitness show in the United States, she upstages the gaunt, blond hostess. "Well," says the blond, "Latin American men do like corpulent women."

"I suppose I shouldn't tell her," Doralis stage-whispers to a friend behind the jealous hostess' back, "that most of my fan mail is from white English speakers."

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