History Characters / LoveAndRockets

* BellyDancer: With a twist: Maria has the celebrated ability to crack walnuts with her abdominal muscles.

* DropTheHammer: Luba is rarely seen out of doors without her signature hammer, which she uses for self-defence.

* CoolLoser: An adult example. Though attractive and possessing a sense of style (albeit a quirky one), Ray is far from the "alpha male" type. Due to a lack of self-confidence and resolve, he often has trouble meeting women, as well as holding on to the relationships he does have. His friends tend to be similarly low-ambition sorts (Doyle), lacking in confidence (Maggie), or those with a knack for getting themselves in trouble (Speedy, 'Litos, Vivian).

* DoesNotLikeShoes: Doralis, as a teenager, goes barefoot indoors and out not only in Palomar (where she isn't the only one to do so), but also in L.A. She does however generally wear boots as part of her show costumes.

* DoesNotLikeShoes: Maggie frequently goes barefoot outdoors.

* TheEeyore: Izzy, post-Mexico, rarely smiles or laughs, and her dialogue tends toward the gloomy and fatalistic. At times this crosses over into outright morbid and disturbing pronouncements, as when she and Hopey come across Maggie and [[TheChick Daffy]] chatting whimsically about marriage. Hopey mischievously says that Izzy has some thoughts on the subject, whereupon Izzy launches into an allegory about two cats tied together by their tail and hung on a clothesline, then left to attack and cannibalize each other. The nauseated Daffy, her good mood ruined, excuses herself and heads home.

* SuperOCD: In addition to her desperate, determined need for her family always to get along and her little sisters to stay put at all times, the young Guadalupe is prone to painful obsession with weighty questions such as the infinity of space and the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

* BuxomIsBetter: Luba's breasts are enormous, a trait she shares with most of her female relatives. The attention she receives as a result runs the realistic gamut from fascinated and aroused men, disgusted men with a preference for thinner women, and jealous women who call her names like "blimp-chest." Luba has complained that her build makes people automatically assume that she is a slut.

* YourCheatingHeart: In "Love and Rockets X," she catches the eye of the bisexual teenage Kris who, after some mutual flirting over time, invites her over, ostensibly in order to have her father arrange legal immigration status for her and Riri. Although their near-liaison is cut short, Riri (despite having been [[{{Hypocrite}} less than faithful herself]]) leaves her anyway.

* YourCheatingHeart: She cheats on her first husband with Eduardo.

* YourCheatingHeart: While married to David, Petra sleeps with Carlos, and attempts to seduce Pipo's son, the star soccer player Sergio.

** To a more qualified extent, this trope characterizes her relationship with Pipo, who's often verbally abusive to her. "Qualified," because Fritz, as with most of her partners (except Scott), doesn't ''love'' Pipo initially, and indeed only gives herself to her physically after a long period of resisting Pipo's advances. As well, by the end of ''Love and Rockets'' Volume II, Pipo seems to have laid off the abuse entirely and their new marriage seems poised to be a [[HappilyEverAfter happy]] one.

** Fritz does, however, also have a passive-aggressive tendency. For example, she tells Petra about her years-ago casual liaison with David, despite it being a one-time only encounter which happened before Petra and David started dating, which only serves to hurt Petra's feelings and contribute to the breakup of her marriage. It's heavily implied that she's also slept with ''every'' man she's tried to set up with Petra, which did a number on her self-esteem something that Mark characterizes as "Real passive-aggressive shit."

** Fritz does, however, also have a passive-aggressive tendency, which manifests when, for example, she tells Petra about her years-ago casual liaison with David, despite it being a one-time only encounter which happened before Petra and David started dating. Because all her confession does is hurt Petra's feelings and contribute to the breakup of her marriage, Mark characterizes Fritz's action as "hostile."

* {{Badass}}: Petra has muscular arms and wicked boxing skills, and uses them on those who mess with her sister and with Hector.

Hopey is Maggie's best friend and sometimes lover. Of mixed Scottish and Colombian heritage, as a child she resists her mother's attempts to make her a TV star. In high school, Hopey is initially friends with the class AlphaBitch, but then falls under the influence of her classmate, the domineering punk rock guitarist Terry Downe, leaving home to live with her in a sleazy punker's crash pad. She becomes estranged from her mother, who'd raised her and her brother Joey after divorcing their father. As Hopey embraces the "angry punk" lifestyle, she quickly inverts her relationship with Terry, and eventually attaches herself to Maggie instead. Nevertheless, she continues to play bass (poorly) for Terry's band, eventually leaving Hoppers and Maggie to go on tour. Following the band's acrimonious backup, Hopey makes her way back home with their roadie Tex, unintentionally becoming pregnant with his child and suffering a miscarriage. A reunion with Maggie proves short-lived as they part ways again after a bitter fight over their clashing attitudes toward their Hispanic identity. When Hopey's band goes on tour some time later, she and Aggie have a bittersweet reunion and get back together in another open relationship, which survives both Maggie's marriage and Hopey's taking up with her coworker Rosie. Hopey, her angry punk rebel days behind her, becomes a kindergarten teacher's assistant and eventually a teacher, settling down with an unnamed woman with whom she raises a son.

* ProudToBeAGeek: Venus just loves old comic books, particularly the {{Romance}} genre and various ECComics titles, and won't hesitate to let you know how much:

* WhyDoYouKeepChangingJobs: Before as well as after her marriage to Costigan, Penny is too irresponsible to keep a job for long. Indeed, her second appearance is in a short titled, "Penny Century, You're Fired!", her boss at an assembly line [[TitleDrop shouting these words]] as she daydreams about being a superhero. In a later story, she deliberately causes an accident as a restaurant server so that, being fired, she's free to have lunch with friends.

* ManipulativeBastard: In "Human Diastrophism," the functionally illiterate Tonantzin brings letters from her jailed radical lover Geraldo to Maricela and Riri to read to her. When the subject of the letters turns from politics to religion, Tonantzin appears bored. So Maricela and Riri, fearing they'll lose their eye candy,[[note]]Tonantzin has taken to dressing scantily like her indigenous ancestors[[/note]] make up further political letters out of whole cloth. They fail to realize that doing so sends Tonantzin deeper and deeper into SanitySlippage and poor health as she takes "Geraldo's" mention of {{Mahatma Gandhi}}'s fasting to heart. What's worse, as they confess all this to her sister Diana, they admit they have [[WorthIt no regrets]].

* BiTheWay: He occasionally sleeps with Doyle.

The central character of the "Palomar" stories from 1983 through 2007, Luba is the child of the wealthy matron Maria and her servant Eduardo. Cast out of the home, along with her parents, when Maria's husband realizes she isn't his, Luba grows up amid poverty and political unrest in various Central American[[hottip:*:likely Mexican, but never identified as such]] villages. Following Eduardo's incapacitation from a head injury and Maria's subsequent desertion, Luba's cousin Ofelia raises her until, at age sixteen, she marries the wealthy bandleader/gangster Peter Rio. Bored and lonely as a result of Peter's frequent business trips, she becomes addicted to speed, ultimately causing the premature (apparent) stillbirth of her first child, a boy, following which she gives up drugs. After Peter suffers a permanently incapacitating stroke, and as his organized crime enemies close in for revenge, Luba and Ofelia skip town, eventually settling in the fictional isolated village Palomar. There, Luba establishes herself as a ''bañadora'' (bath-giver), initially competing with Chelo before the latter becomes town sheriff, upon which they become close allies. Luba also runs the village movie theatre. At Chelo's urging, she successfully runs for mayor. With Ofelia's help, she raises seven children (six daughters and one son) from nearly as many fathers, and later marries her on-again, off-again lover Khamo. When Peter's enemies finally catch up with her and attempt to kill her longtime family protector, Gorgo, she emigrates to America, taking with her younger children and Ofelia and settling in Los Angeles, eventually managing to bring Khamo over and to start a business that provides immigration and tax services.

* SanitySlippage: Luba undergoes a temporary version of this during "Human Diastrophism." The combined stress of romantic troubles, raising four daughters (including a somewhat rebellious teenager), and the presence of a serial killer in town results in wild mood swings and increasingly frequent and violent abuse of her children. This culminates in a breakdown in which she attempts to hand off her daughters[[hottip:*:except for Maricela, who's already skipped town]] away to their respective fathers and, during a confrontation with Guadalupe, bursts into [[LaughingMad hysterical laughter]] at the sight of her most recent ex, Khamo, sporting an aboriginal mohawk in solidarity with his new love, Tonantzin. A [[DeusExMachina monkey in a tree]] then knocks her out, and as she recuperates from the head injury, she appears to have recovered from her SanitySlippage as well.

* ManipulativeBastard: In "Human Diastrophism," the functionally illiterate Tonantzin brings letters from her jailed radical lover Geraldo to Maricela and Riri to read to her. When the subject of the letters turns from politics to religion, Tonantzin appears bored. So Maricela and Riri, fearing they'll lose their eye candy,[[hottip:*:Tonantzin has taken to dressing scantily like her indigenous ancestors]] make up further political letters out of whole cloth. They fail to realize that doing so sends Tonantzin deeper and deeper into SanitySlippage and poor health as she takes "Geraldo's" mention of {{Mahatma Gandhi}}'s fasting to heart. What's worse, as they confess all this to her sister Diana, they admit they have [[WorthIt no regrets]].

The central character of the "Locas" stories from 1981 through 2011, Maggie is a Chicana (Mexican-American) woman born and raised (for the most part) in the fictional, mainly Chicano southern Californian town, "Hoppers"[[hottip:*:official name Huerta, based on the Hernandez brothers' hometown of Oxnard]]. In her early teens, she discovers a talent for mechanical work and a passion for punk rock culture. The latter breaks the ice between her and the angry, alienated Hopey, with whom she becomes best friends and eventually on-again, off-again lovers. Following a two-year period of adventures at home and abroad as an assistant to mechanic Rand Race, on whom she has a mostly unrequited crush, she abandons the mechanic's life. Maggie then takes up a series of odd jobs, a two-year romance with childhood friend Ray, followed by another open relationship with Hopey, followed by a long period of wandering. Eventually reuniting with Hopey back home, Maggie reconnects with her one-time high school lover Tony Chase and marries him, only to divorce him amicably two years later because she's still restless and unsatisfied. Soon thereafter, she accepts her first steady job in years as an apartment complex manager; several years later, she comes full circle in her career by opening her own garage. She even manages to find lasting love.

* PunnyName: Beatríz gets her nickname when Maggie, in one of their initial meetings, dismissively calls her "Penny of the Century," a garbling of Hopey's and Izzy's nickname for her, "Penny Tentiary," because she's "kooky."[[hottip:*:Of course, as Maggie points out to Hopey, penitentiaries are for criminals, not the mentally ill.]] Beatríz mishears this in turn as "Penny Century" and, [[InsultBackfire far from being insulted]], immediately adopts it for her own.

Hopey is Maggie's best friend and sometimes lover. Of mixed Scottish and Colombian heritage, as a child she resists her mother's attempts to make her a child star. In high school, Hopey is initially friends with the class AlphaBitch, but then falls under the influence of her classmate, the domineering punk rock guitarist Terry Downe, leaving home to live with her in a sleazy punker's crash pad. She becomes estranged from her mother, who'd raised her and her brother Joey after divorcing their father. As Hopey embraces the "angry punk" lifestyle, she quickly inverts their relationship and eventually attaches herself to Maggie instead. Nevertheless, she continues to play bass (poorly) for Terry's band, eventually leaving Hoppers and Maggie to go on tour. Following the band's acrimonious backup, Hopey makes her way back home with their roadie Tex, unintentionally becoming pregnant with his child and suffering a miscarriage. A reunion with Maggie proves short-lived as they part ways again after a bitter fight over their clashing attitudes toward their Hispanic identity. When Hopey's band goes on tour some time later, she and Aggie have a bittersweet reunion and get back together in another open relationship, which survives both Maggie's marriage and Hopey's taking up with her coworker Rosie. Hopey, her angry punk rebel days behind her, becomes a kindergarten teacher's assistant and eventually a teacher, settling down with an unnamed woman with whom she raises a son.

* DCupDistress: Petra initially has an even more enormous bust than her mother and sisters, but hates it and gets breast reduction surgery (much to Maria's disdain), rendering her chest merely "big." Her breasts eventually get bigger again, along with the rest of her, when, secure and happy with her second husband and tired of her once-freewheeling lifestyle, she puts on a considerable amount of weight.

Petra, the older of Maria's two daughters with her second husband, is a medical technician and a bodybuilding/general fitness enthusiast with a huge sexual appetite. Several years after divorcing Bobby (Venus's father), she marries pediatrician David Vasquez and becomes stepmother to his two sons Rogelio and Joey, and has a daughter, Marie, with him. Their marriage is not a happy one. Petra and Fritz learn from Gorgo about their long-lost sister; however, although Luba is friendly to them when they hang out, she keeps them at arm's length. Petra eventually leaves David when Fritz confesses she'd slept with him, despite this being before he and Petra had started dating. Nevertheless, Petra is fiercely protective of her younger sister, breaking with her only when her subsequent boyfriend, Hector (a courier service worker), makes a similar confession about himself and Fritz, the blow exacerbated when she then learns Fritz is starring in a B-movie about their mother (an argument over which leads Luba to break with her sisters as well). Petra eventually finds happiness with another unnamed, unseen man whom she marries.

* HotMom / GrandmaWhatMassiveHotnessYouHave

[[folder: Other Hoppers Characters]]