Paying off thirty years of continuity and character development. Delivering shocks, gasps, cheers, and tears in equal measure, seemingly at the author's whim. Offering a master class in everything from laying out a double-page spread to drawing clothes. Telling a story about beloved characters so emotionally engaging that even their most ardent fans wouldn't mind if this were the last one ever told. Any way you slice it, Jaime Hernandez's "The Love Bunglers" -- his contribution to the recently released Love and Rockets: New Stories #4 and the conclusion to the already wildly acclaimed "The Love Bunglers"/"Browntown" suite from last year's issue -- is a hell of a comic. But you don't have to take my word for it.

Dan Nadel, editor of The Comics Journal, has posted his own appreciation, and invited cartoonists Frank Santoro (Storeyville) and Adrian Tomine (Optic Nerve) to do the same. (SPOILER WARNINGS in effect at those links, folks.) Nadel (like Jordan Crane on the first part of Jaime's tale in issue #3 before him) minces no words: "This is not just Jaime’s finest work, but one of the best (at this moment I’d rank it in my top five of all time) works ever created in the medium." Santoro calls Jaime "the greatest cartoonist of all time," saying "No art moves me the way the work of Jaime Hernandez moves me." Tomine talks of picking the issue up at a signing event for Jaime and being so moved by a two-page spread he encountered while randomly flipping through that he actually had to leave.

I posted my review at the beginning of August, after the book had started circulating at cons but long before it hit stores, but weeks and even months later people would still post comments on the review, like they'd been hungrily seeking out anything anyone had written about this remarkable comic. I've got a feeling that as more and more critics read this comic, they'll never go hungry again.