Short Review: The impending marriage issue.
The Hernandez brother each take one of these stories to themselves, and the differences, are more stylistic, and highlight the things they have in common, such as their unflinching willingness to write real characters, and real female characters at that.
Story and Art by Jaime Hernandez
This is an important time for Maggie/Perla/Shrimp, as she cuts her ties with her various love-interests around the time, preparing for a mysterious marriage. It's a serious, home-town story, about relationships and communications in a small community. It has its moments of poignancy, humour, and the disorienting background detail of a family of professional wrestlers. Good stuff.
Story and Art by Gilbert Hernandez
This is near the close of a slightly stranger tale, which deals with what happens when a woman leaves a small town to find out about her mother. Gangsters, a mutilated man, and a child with one arm all make up a slightly more cartoon world, but the souls behind the characters all seem realistic enough. The art is more pronounced towards babery, and there's more naked women (and a naked man, not in bad shape), and nipples poking through fabric than in the other story. I would guess, from the few issues I've seen, that the larger cast has caused Gilbert to spend less time on the material of these lives than Jaime has with Maggie, Hopey etc, but the emotions are real, and the decisions reached at the end show an epic scale of nobility in the characters. Great stuff.