Comic book superheroes may rule movie screens recently, but two Chicanos from Southern California have used comics to tell amazing stories about ordinary people for the past 30 years. We meet Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, godfathers of the alternative comics movement and creators of Love and Rockets. Latino USA’s senior producer Carolina Gonzalez reports.

Click here to download this week’s show. Love and Rockets, Copyright 2012, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez. Photo courtesy of Fantagraphics.

Diaz On Hernandez/Hernandez on Diaz

Dominican-American author Junot Díaz’s work often references Love & Rockets. And Jaime Hernandez has illustrated four Díaz stories published in The New Yorker magazine. So we decided to ask Díaz about the influence Los Bros. have had on his storytelling, and asked Jaime about translating Diaz’s obsessions into images. Check out what they said here:

But wait! There’s more…check out this exclusive cover art slide show below:

Carolina Gonzalez is an award-winning journalist and scholar with over two decades of experience in print and radio. She served as an editorial writer at the New York Daily News, and has covered education, immigration, politics, music and Latino culture in various alternative and mainstream media outlets, such as WNYC radio, AARP Segunda Juventud, SF Weekly and the Progressive Media Project. The guidebook she co-authored with Seth Kugel, Nueva York: the Complete Guide to Latino Life in the Five Boroughs, was published in 2006 by St. Martin’s Press. She was raised in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and Queens, New York and lives in Brooklyn, New York.