You don't "buy" Love & Rockets; you experience it.

It is all those things....and more. It does evolve, as Los Bros grow as storytellers and artists. At the start, Maggie is a mechanic in a sci-fi setting and there are other fantasy elements; but, as it progresses, it falls more into the real world, as Maggie and Hopey go through their lives, while Gilbert writes stories of the fictional village of Palomar. You get stuff like the superhero Penny Century and Maggie's aunt, Vicky Glory, who is a lady wrestler (showcased in House of Raging Women). You get a look at the Punk world, as Los Bros loved the Punk scene and incorporate it, especially with Hopey.

Stylistically, I tend to gravitate more to Jaime's work, though Gilbert's Palomar stuff is probably a bit more sophisticated, in the writing, and has been likened to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian novelist.

What makes it stand out is that the characters are real people, even in the early fantasy stories. They act like real people, have real emotions and real foibles. There is humor there, love, hate, friendship, human failings, aspirations, disappointments..,..everything that is "real" in life.

I kept hearing about it, through the 80s and early 90s, but never saw it in a shop; so, I didn't get into it until I started working for Barnes & Noble, and we got the final issues, of the original run, on our newstand. I then got a few of the books; mostly the Jaime stories. Then, I bought the big omnibus books of Locas and Palomar. I have digital of it now.

If the comics medium has ever produced something comparable to genuine literature, it's Beto's Palomar stories.

Cei-U!
Can you tell I'm a fan?

The appeal of Love and Rockets is that it's NOT like mainstream comic books. So, if you're into more mainstream books and Love and Rockets seems like a turnoff, then it probably will turn you off. When it first launched, it was like a new type of comic had arrived. It wasn't the first independent book, or the first creator owned work, but it was groundbreaking. In essence, it was a punk comic book. And hugely influential. It gave all the major cartoonists that followed the visual language they needed to tell the stories they wanted to create.

What I've always liked about Love and Rockets is the juxtaposition between Gilbert and Jaime's work. Not only the differences between their art styles, but the two stories. Locas follows the lives of two punks who grow up in real time over the course of the series. Palomar is an incredible work of fiction. It's hard for me to believe that people wouldn't fall in love with Palomar and the characters who live there. Locas is basically a slice of life story about the LA punk scene that turns into the story of these characters lives over forty years. Palomar, and the work that followed, is far more exaggerated. There are slice of life elements, but also surreal, supernatural elements. Both artists experiment with other types of storytelling from time to time. Jaime is currently running a side feature in the recent Love and Rockets issues that is a return to his sci-fi roots from the first issue. 

The first Love and Rockets issue I got was a floppy from the original series. It was magazine-sized and like nothing I'd read at the time. Just holding it in my hands was a thrill. It was closely related to music to me, perhaps more so than any other comic, which is why it was cool when this dude put together all the songs from Jaime's run: bitchinville.tumblr.com/post/87022612971/historia-de-la-musica-rock-locas

One of the biggest problems with getting into 'Love & Rockets' is figuring out where to start.
This is simultaneously easier and harder than you'd imagine. Easier, because the new 'Library Editions' provide great, affordable collections, but hard because there's no indication of which to read first.

Your first step is deciding whether you want to start with Gilbert or Jaime's stuff.

Gilbert's work tends to be slice of life stuff with elements of magical realism set in and around a fictional Central American town called Palomar. The first volume is 'Heartbreak Soup'.
My response to 'Heartbreak Soup' was similar to my response to the TV series 'The Wire'. You start and it doesn't seem all that big a deal, but gradually, the vibe kind of settles over you until you sync up with it... and from then, you're off to the races. One of the first things that kinda snuck up on me was all the characters.
As you're reading, you get all these insights into all these different people over many years and several generations. Someone'll be telling a story and one character will show up as a kid, but then, a couple of pages later, that same character is an old man. As you process this sort of thing, it'll suddenly start to dawn on you that, these people are all real to Gilbert. Dozens and dozens of characters, their interrelations, their family trees, their histories... they're all in his head and he knows them as reflexively as though they were people he sees every day. He makes it look so effortless that it seems simple, but that's the genius of it.

Jaime started with 'Maggie the Mechanic' which has a lot of sci-fi elements. You can start there, but he soon gives up on those for the most part and takes the sci-fi characters, relocating them to a fictional Los Angeles neighbourhood called Hoppers. If you want to skip the sci-fi stuff, you can start with 'The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S.'.
In either case, Jaime's stories are largely about young people in and around the local punk scene, vaguely centring on his two leads, Maggie and Hopey.
Like Gilbert, Jaime's people and their relationships feel real. You can sense that he has all of it in his head. Gilbert's writing tends to be more subtle and nuanced than Jaime's but Jaime's art is just gorgeous. He has the gift of being able to draw completely identifiable and distinctive characters with a handful of lines. His grasp of minimalist cartooning is nothing short of sublime.

I've tried to get into the book multiple times and it just doesn't work for me at all. So, yeah, I don't get it.

You called it.  L&R isn't a comic I'd recommend to everyone, necessarily.  And certainly a reader who prefers a plot, as opposed to a meandering slice of life, it's not for them!

I'm another one who has Volume 1 and has started reading it several times but never finished it. Someday I'm sure I will, I've read too many glowing reviews to give up on it.