Love and Rockets X

Love and Rockets X is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Gilbert Hernandez. Its serialization ran in the comic book Love and Rockets Vol. 1 #31–39 from 1989 to 1992, and the first collected edition appeared in 1993.

The story crosses the paths of a large cast of characters from various social and ethnic groups in Los Angeles. Central is a garage rock band that calls itself Love and Rockets. The story shifts quickly from scene to scene and character to character, none of whom take the role of a central protagonist. Hernandez uses none of the magic realist elements in this work that are prominent in the Palomar stories he is best known for.

Love and Rockets was an alternative comic book begun in the early 1980s showcasing the work of the Hernandez brothers: Mario (b. 1953), Gilbert (b. 1957), and Jaime (b. 1959), who normally worked independently of each other. The stories featured sensitive portrayals of prominent female and multiethnic characters—especially Latinos—which were uncommon in American comics of the time. 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.

Hernandez gradually took advantage of serialization to broaden his narrative scope; the stories became longer and more ambitious, and Hernandez delved more deeply into the backgrounds of his characters, their community, and sociopolitical issues. His longest and most complex work Poison River appeared in #29–40.Love and Rockets X ran alongside Poison River and Jaime's eight-part Wig Wam Bam.

The serialization of Love and Rockets X appeared in Love and Rockets Vol. 1 #31–39 from December 1989 to August 1992. The serialization was titled Love and Rockets; the X was appended when it appeared as the title story of the tenth volume (hence "X") of the tenth volume of the Complete Love and Rockets in 1993, to which Hernandez added a few extra pages. The collected page count comes to 96 pages. In 2007 Love and Rockets X appeared in the Beyond Palomar volume of The Love and Rockets Library with Poison River. Hernandez arranges the panels in either a six- or nine-panel grid, depending on the page sizes of the volume the work appears in.

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