Fantagraphics celebrates the 40th anniversary of Love and Rockets and the debut of the Hernandezes' first published comics with an impressive eight-volume slipcase collecting the series' first 50 issues. Painstakingly compiled in issue by- issue facsimile - including every cover, comics page, letter column, and even ads! - the comic books are presented just as they appeared between 1982 and 1996, recreating not only the reading experience of tens of thousands of fans, but of a particularly fecund period in comics history when a new generation of cartoonists was exploding the idea of what comics could be. An eighth volume contains numerous other essays, reviews, and profiles written concurrently, a virtual history of the growth of Love and Rockets and the simultaneous rise of the literary comics movement of which they were exemplars and trailblazers.