This week when I saw the cover to Love and Rockets, vol. 2, #6 (Fantagraphics) on the racks of our local comics shoppe I immediately felt a fannish glow. Most of us have artists or musicians who do this to us: just the sight of fresh work by 'em lifts our spirits, makes us feel better about the world. (Hey, life can't be that bad if a new Love and Rockets is in it!) Los Bros Hernandez do it for me.

L&R number six delivers the goods: superb black-&-white art, stories that range from urban real to sci-fi surreal, heroines who pointedly defy the pin-up conventions of mainstream comic art, an unvarnished overlay of Hispanic culture as well as the periodic head-scratching moment. Over the years Gilbert & Jaime (w./ an occasional assist from brother Mario) have created a comic book universe that's unsurpassed in its inventiveness & breadth of emotional experience. The newest issue is a blend of serial stories plus stand-alone tales - though with the exception of the latest chapter of an extended South American adventure written by Mario and illustrated by Gilbert, you can read each entry by themselves. Three pieces, in particular, stand out.

"Toco," the four-page opener, is a Beto work: a disquieting slice-of-Southern-Cal-street-life whose hero - a bald-headed kid in an oversized sweatshirt - has appeared on the sidelines in a lot of Gilbert's stories. In this solo outing, Toco encounters a stranger on the beachside streets, is taken to a slasher flick where the stranger fondles him in the darkness. Though the boy appears unfazed by the experience, the stranger is afterwards attacked by a group of outraged adults.

As for Toco, we're unsure if he even knows what's been done to him. He watches his perpetrator get beaten without saying a word; only thing he says about his experience is he wishes he could go to the movies every day. Is he too young or developmentally delayed to comprehend? The cartoonist lets us draw our own conclusions.

Gilbert's other four-page opus is even less clear-cut: an improv piece featuring Roy, a fat security guard with a bowl haircut that's meant to recall sixties cult comic book hero Herbie Popnecker. Built on a series of tiny panels (fifty-five to a page) that admittedly were a strain for this bifocal-wearing reader, "30,000 Hours to Kill" follows Roy's misadventures as he is unjustly jailed for a crime he didn't commit. Packed with fantastic details - a bear-like monster with a large snout, a mysterious experiment in the bowels of the earth, and (most improbable of all) a guy who becomes a millionaire selling alternative comics - it has the to-hell-with-plot energy of early undergrounders at their loosest.

In one sequence, a prison riot breaks out, and assorted snitches & stooges are ruthlessly dispatched. Among the first to go: a "film, rock music and comic book critic" who gets his head crushed in a press. (Yikes!) "I'm always right," the bespectacled critic states, just before his eyes pop out.

As a character, Roy tends to react more than initiate - in this sense he's much like the aforementioned Herbie (though Roy typically has a more avuncular affect than the expressionless fat boy). "There's a lot negativity in the world," he tells the man who'll steal his girlfriend while he's imprisoned, "but honesty and integrity aren't dead." With his naiveté & capacity for animalistic violence, Roy is basically a roly-poly man-child. But, as in the Toco tale, Gilbert is unsparingly unsentimental about what this can entail.