We invite participants for a roundtable where each person will perform a sustained close reading of a single page from the comics of Gilbert Hernandez and Jaime Hernandez—collectively known as Los Bros Hernandez. For more than four decades, the Hernandez Brothers have shaped the landscape of alternative comics through Love and Rockets and related projects, crafting formally inventive, politically astute, and emotionally resonant stories grounded in the textures of everyday life. From Gilbert’s magical-realist Palomar cycle to Jaime’s long-running “Locas” narratives set amid the punk and working-class subcultures of Los Angeles to their various independent projects, their work has redefined what comics can do as literature and as visual art.
This session takes inspiration from Snapshots: Teaching Los Bros Hernandez (Amatl Comix/ SDSU Press, 2025), edited by William Nericcio and Frederick Luis Aldama, which models the pedagogical and critical power of slowing down with a single page. Building on that project, we ask: What happens when we treat one page as an archive of aesthetic decisions, cultural histories, and narrative experiments? How do panel composition, gesture, lettering, silence, and sequencing generate meaning? How do these pages register the racialized, gendered, queer, and subcultural formations of Los Angeles and beyond?
We welcome approaches informed by comics studies (e.g., Scott McCloud, Thierry Groensteen), Latinx studies (e.g., Frederick Luis Aldama, William Nericcio, Enrique García), and scholarship on the Hernandez Brothers by critics such as Charles Hatfield, Christopher Pizzino, and Shelley Streeby. Comparative, theoretical, archival, and pedagogical readings are all encouraged, provided they remain grounded in detailed analysis of a single page.
By foregrounding the page as a unit of analysis, this roundtable aims to illuminate the formal rigor and cultural significance of Los Bros’ work while modeling methods of attentive reading across text and image.
Please submit the selected page, a 250-word abstract, and a brief bio to William Orchard (william.orchard@qc.cuny.edu) and Qiana Whitted (whittedq@mailbox.sc.edu) by March 16.
