Gato loved Pipo who loved Manuel who loved no one but dated everyone. Amidst love stories, family dramas, boyish pranks, and a touch of the supernatural, Gilbert Hernandez introduces us to Palomar, a village somewhere in Latin America where the stories collected in *Sopa de Lágrimas* (Soup of Tears) take place.

Frequently compared by international critics to the literature of Isabel Allende and the classic *One Hundred Years of Solitude* by Gabriel García Márquez, the stories in *Sopa de Lágrimas* have much of the magical realism of Latin American literature. And it features characters that are among the most vivid in the history of comics, such as Luba, the exuberant outsider who settles in Palomar, Chelo, the town's official bather, and Típin Típin, the last heartbroken romantic.