Pick any character: Gilbert's Tonantzin, for example, who starts out as a plump teenage girl who gives herself to any boy who asks, then grows into a slim young woman who gives herself to any man who asks. In her mid-20s, Tonantzin, who is illiterate, surprises everyone by becoming a political radical after she gets an education in Marxism and indigenous people's rights via a correspondence with a prisoner. (Since she can't read, she enlists the help of Luba's daughter, Maricela, and her lesbian lover.) Tonantzin eventually becomes a political martyr, an ending that Gilbert says even he found shocking.

Palomar is matriarchal both politically (Palomar's mayor and sheriff are both women) and in the sense that many families are headed by single mothers. The stories cover the full range of motherhood, from fucked-up (both Luba and Hopey appear balancing whiskey glasses on their pregnant bellies) to fulfilling (Luba marries her true love, Khamo, who was once a spectacular beauty, but who ends up scarred in the fire that killed Tonantzin).

And the Hernandez women are often as interesting when they fail -- in their careers, in love, in living up to their own expectations -- as when they succeed. For example, Maggie the Mechanic, from age 18 to age 36, rarely works as a mechanic. The reason is simple: Most people won't hire a girl. Maggie, it seems, would rather be a mechanic without a job than suffer the humiliation of being turned down for a position she is qualified for. This alone is a rare insight: Many women would rather ignore sexism than confront it.

But it's difficult to find a more compelling story than "Chester Square," ("Love and Rockets" No. 13, the last in the original series to feature Maggie) in which Maggie the failed mechanic flirts with becoming a whore.

Maggie, now in her mid 30s, has just broken up with Hopey and finds herself stranded at a truck stop, trying to make a bus back to Hoppers. She is wearing a tight dress and has no money and, at first glance, the locals take her for a whore. Maggie is furious, but then one man recognizes her and defends her honor -- she is Maggie the Mechanic, he tells his friends.

Because Maggie is a woman with an unconventional profession, her friend is attracted to her. He tries to take her home. But Maggie surprises him and herself by reverting to the oldest profession: She demands money.

Her friend declines, but someone else accepts. And Maggie is left with an identity crisis: Is she Maggie the Mechanic or Perla the Prostitute? Is a woman who can't find work as a mechanic still a mechanic? Is one act of sex for money enough to make a woman a whore?

In lesser hands, this plot line could be sheer melodrama. But Jaime's -- and the readers -- love for Maggie makes this a sensitive and compelling story about the price of being an unconventional woman in a world which rewards the conventional. In this post-sexual revolution age, the issue for Maggie is not the sex, but the money. Many men and women have certainly had casual sex with someone they may not be attracted to, and the line between casual sex for pleasure and sex for compensation may be more fluid than we would like to think.

Today, you can find Maggie Chascarillo, newly divorced and reclining on her unmade bed with her unfolded laundry, waiting for Izzy, the "Witch Lady," to come through town on her book tour. Hopey tends bar and sometimes still tends to Mag's sexual needs, and the preppy girls who taunted the pair in high school are just as bitchy in middle age.

Volume two of "Love and Rockets" came out from Fantagraphics Books in late January, and will publish roughly four times a year. Jaime will continue to spotlight Maggie in "Love and Rockets," and he will continue his separate quarterly comic, "Penny Century." Gilbert will contribute roughly 100 pages of a new serial novel, "Julio's Day" to the new volume and continue his quarterly "Luba."

"Love and Rockets" began with the bang of youth, but in its middle age, it refuses to whimper. Certainly, the young "Love and Rockets" was a pop-cult phenomenon -- a spinoff group of the British band Bauhaus paid Los Bros the dubious compliment of naming their band "Love and Rockets." For a good part of the '80s, the poseur-punk-Goth band was arguably better known than "Love and Rockets," the graphic novel of non-poseur-punk-Goth culture. (For Los Bros' take on this thievery, see "L&R X," No. 10 in the series.)

But the novels have aged far better than the youth culture that they documented. For an account of what it was like to be a young street punk in the '80s, there is still no better document than Jaime's early "Love & Rockets" -- Hopey fighting her graffiti-lust, or Maggie spare-changing her way into a punk show, or Izzy, the Goth "Witch Lady," delivering a truly mad rant on the plight of the nails that hold together her bookshelf. But while Sid is dead, and Daniel Ash and David J. are playing reunion tours to kids half their age, Jaime's aging punks are more interesting at 40 than they were at 20.

Most of us are.

Order "Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood" from the editors of Mothers Who Think.