This volume is the second in a chronological series, The Complete Love and Rockets Library, and the first that collects comics writer-artist Gilbert Hernandez's main Palomar storyline and more. Heartbreak Soup reprints the earliest tales a small Central American town, Palomar, beginning with the groundbreaking Sopa de Gran Pena (which introduces most of his main cast of characters as children, plus imposing newcomer Luba), and continuing on through such classics as Ecce Homo, Act of Contrition, Duck Feet, and the great love story For the Love of Carmen. In addition to seeing Hernandez develop as a cartoonist from 1983 to 1988, readers will see how he draws characters with various body types that change as they age in real-time.

These stories first appeared in the long-running (and ongoing) Love and Rockets comics series, also featuring work by Gilbert's brothers, Jaime and Mario. L&R has been called the greatest American comic book series of all time by Rolling Stone and a great, sprawling American novel by GQ. It broke ground with its craft and the casual intersectionality of its huge and diverse casts of nuanced characters (many of whom are LGBQTIA+) who live and have relationships in often-naturalistic settings and situations (although L&R has SF and magical realist elements too). Along with contemporaries Chris Ware, Lynda Barry, and Daniel Clowes, the Hernandez brothers pushed the comics medium into new artistic heights.