Love and Rockets X

Love and Rockets was an alternative comic book begun in the early 1980s[a] showcasing the work of the Hernandez brothers: Mario (b.

[3] Gilbert's Palomar stories focused on the lives of a fictional Latin-American community, in particular that of the hammer-wielding bath-giver Luba, who makes her way to the center of the village's political and social life.

[12] Hernandez arranges the panels in either a six- or nine-panel grid, depending on the page sizes of the volume the work appears in.

The band is slated to appear at a party at the bass player's upper-class mother's home, but the performance never takes place in the story.

[14] The story builds in complexity to a chaotic alcohol- and drug-fueled party in which someone almost gets killed; the turbulent narrative then calms and slows into a sequence of wordless panels that pan out into the cosmos.

[18] The artwork is abstract and cartoony: cars speed along without touching the ground, characters' expressions are sometimes reduced to simple shapes such as large, enraged shouting mouths with jagged teeth, and dialog balloons are sometimes filled with no more than symbols.

[16] Hernandez uses marginal notes to identify bands and songs played in the story[20] and to explain non-English vocabulary the book's various ethnic characters use.

[26] The copy on the first collected edition compares the book to Robert Altman's film Nashville (1975), which features a large ensemble cast and interweaving storylines.

[5] The Los Angeles setting and themes of punk rock and ethnic and sexual relations are central in the Locas stories of Hernandez's brother Jaime as well.

[28] To Neill, Hernandez underlines this in the closing sequence in which he "shuts down narrative development and isolates each character to one panel apiece",[22] an ending that "indicates a shattering of the relationships between people"[22] and "reiterates the importance of the values of la familia, acceptance of identity, integrity, the normalcy of the supernatural, and the sanctity of secrets".

[29] Aside from Riri and Maricela,[27] other characters from earlier Hernandez works include the unnamed "dudes" who made minor appearances as tourists in Palomar in Human Diastrophism (1989)[5] and Fritz the psychiatrist from the erotic Birdland (1992).

He calls it "a comics equivalent of a Victor Hugo-style social novel" and praises Hernandez for successfully interweaving so many of the quasi-isolated ethnic social milieus of Los Angeles into one narrative, though he found weakness in Hernandez's grasp of their various speech patterns and suggested actual South Americans would have been more appropriate to the real political background than the fictional Palomarians.