A Novel, Realistic Approach to Comics : Books: In ‘Love & Rockets,’ cartoonists Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez celebrate everyday heroics with down-to-earth characters.

“Welcome to Palomar,” the sign says. “Population 386. Where men are men and women need a sense of humor.”

You can search in vain for Palomar in an atlas. The richly peopled Central American village is no more--and no less--real than Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo or Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon.

It’s an imagined village full of commonplace and poetry, tenderness, lust, tragedy and myth, but most of all, startlingly human characters. That’s to be expected in a novel, but Palomar is a comic book, created by Gilbert Hernandez, who with his brother, Jaime, make up Los Bros Hernandez. Their adult comic, a collection of stories under the title “Love & Rockets,” challenged the industry’s conventions nine years ago, when the Bros were in their 20s, and today “brings in people who don’t read comics.”

That’s the view of Bill Liebowitz, whose crammed Golden Apple comics-plus store on Melrose Avenue was recently the scene of a book signing that featured, among other stars, both Hernandez brothers.

“We get a lot of people from the entertainment medium, where people have heard about ‘Love & Rockets’ by word of mouth,” Liebowitz says. “It’s real refreshing to see ‘Love & Rockets’ ’ audience: literate 18- to 35-year-olds who look at it like a serialized novel. Some of that has to do with their being local, but a lot of career women we see relate to the girls.”

Those “girls” are Maggie Chascarillo and the punkish Hopey Glass in Jaime’s scenes from the life of young, hip barrio kids, “Locas.” Like all of Gilbert and Jaime’s characters, they’re complex. Arrestingly drawn and set against a background of sharp political and social commentary, these women are by turns strong, smart, frail, obsessive, bitchy, motherly, un-motherly. In short utterly human.

By “L&R;’s” third issue, in 1983, the Palomar stories that had been boiling in Gilbert’s head for years began to appear on its pages, the emotional geography of “his own little town.”

Britain’s Alan Moore, writer of “Watchman” and arguably the best mainstream comics author, gave an insider’s view of Gilbert’s strengths. When the first Palomar stories were collected, Moore wrote: “Instead of implying that the only real human heroism comes with transcendence into a super-human state of grace, Hernandez uses a genuinely poetic eye to show us all the rich and shadowy passions that surge behind the bland facade of normal life. . . . (He) shows us a little of what humans are actually worth, and while some of it, predictably, is bad news, there are moments of understated optimism that are both touching and illuminating.”

(It was Moore who inadvertantly helped in the theft of the name Love & Rockets when he introduced an English band to Los Bros’ work and they blandly swiped the name.)

Caped marvels and plutonium-powered superheroes are not Los Bros’ style; from their art comes the strong sense that, stacked up against real life, that stuff is a waste of time.

Publisher and comics authority Gary Groth, by telephone from Seattle, observed, “Jaime and Gilbert are doing something with comics that no one else is doing: bringing a novelistic and naturalistic mode to comics narrative. Even Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus’ (in which a Polish mouse family struggles to stay alive during the Holocaust) uses the distancing trick of funny animals to tell that story. Gilbert’s ‘Human Disastrophism’ ranks with ‘Maus’ as one of the most satisfying comics stories ever; it achieves a sense of genuine tragedy.”

It was Groth to whom Los Bros sent their first home-produced book for a review in his tough Comics Journal nine years ago--sure the Journal would “give it to us full blast,” says Gilbert--but hoping for a little publicity on the cheap. Their timing was perfect; Groth was about to begin publishing and immediately took “Love & Rockets” for his new company, Fantographics Books.

There’s the sense in their work that both Jaime and Gilbert looked hard at the Oxnard barrio where they grew up; listened to the stories of their Texas-born mother and their Chihuahua-born father and all the aunts and uncles, and forgot none of it.

Now, in the Woodland Hills apartment he shares with his wife, Carol, Gilbert’s sunlit drawing board sits neatly screened off from the living room. For someone to whom every page comes agonizingly hard, he meets any excuse for a break more than halfway.

“Growing up,” he remembers, “the future didn’t look too good to me. I thought I was destined for a life of odd jobs and drawing for fun. I did have a full-time job once, as a janitor, and it completely drained all the energy I had for drawing.” Doggedly, he and Jaime poured everything into their very personal drawings, encouraged by their older brother, Mario.

“We had comics around because my mom loved them when she was a kid too, but films were probably my strongest influence. Home with six kids, Mom had the TV on all the time. I was struck by the family-type movies she liked: ‘How Green Was My Valley,’ ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ I was this long-haired, rock ‘n’ roll kid, yet it was completely normal for me to be watching ‘The Thin Man’--my friends who came over could not believe that.”

Although there is sensuality and violence in the stories from Palomar, Gilbert’s own reaction to certain kinds of film violence, like “Blue Velvet’s” rape scene, is profound. “Degredation like that happens all the time and no one knows about it. It’s their ‘little secret,’ but it happens. That’s real horror.”

“And I always had trouble with ‘Psycho.’ Even when I was young, I felt weird about it. It had such mixed messages. All the boys imagined they could see Janet Leigh naked. But I kept thinking ‘Yeah, she was naked, but she was getting hacked up.’ The worst part about it was that it was incredibly well shot. I think it’s odd that ‘Psycho’ should have made Hitchcock’s career, while ‘Peeping Tom’ crushed Michael Powell’s and it was probably the most honest horror story ever made.”

Now it’s Gilbert who can control his Palomarians’ lives with the freedom of a filmmaker. The fact that his cartoonist’s tablet creates a world as rich as any movie still amazes him. He wonders, “Where’s the leap between a janitor and the guy who makes ‘Star Wars?’ ” His smile is sweet. “It turns out a janitor can make ‘Star Wars.’ ”