This chapter examines the birth and development of Latinx comics from the early 1980s to the present. It places the Hernandez Brothers (Los Bros Hernandez: Mario, Gilbert, and Jaime), their long-standing series Love and Rockets, and their alternative publisher Fantagraphics (with editor Gary Groth at the helm) at the center of this expansion. They opened new avenues of expression, production, and distribution of Latinx comics and graphic novels and influenced subsequent generations of Latinx authors. Under the generic umbrella of the series, the Brothers produced unique, single-authored narratives, whose threads were woven across individual volumes, forming a complex story world and creating wide story arcs of a novelistic nature. Stories set in the United States and south of the border portray multiple members and generations of the Latinx community, reflecting the lives and experiences of Latinx readers, left unrepresented in graphic fiction to that point. The chapter argues that today’s vibrant Latinx comics production (e.g., Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters) followed in the Hernandez brothers’ footsteps, with similar stories about everyday life, immigration, racism, and survival.

The introduction offers an overview of recent scholarly discourse and approaches to comics and graphic novels. It provides brief close readings of panels from Rodolphe Töpffer’s L’Histoire d’Albert, the anonymous comic strip, Lucy and Sophie Say Good Bye, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, and Emil Ferris’ My Favorite Thing is Monsters, which apply comics methodologies of reading language (Hannah Miodrag) and analyzing graphic novels (Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey), among others. To further highlight the scope of comics analyses across the variety of forms of the medium, the introduction discusses the comics in the light of Rita Felski’s concepts of knowledge and enchantment.

The introduction ends with an overview of the Companion’s seventeen chapters, from the first part on Forms, to the second one on Readings, and ending with Uses.