Love and Rockets X, Gilbert Hernandez's second full-scale graphic novel, is also his first work set in a modern, recognizably contemporary milieu: late '80s Los Angeles. With close to fifty characters moving in and out of a complex narrative that builds toward, and then away from, a musical event that never happens, Love and Rockets X echoes Robert Altman's 1977 film Nashville not only in structure but also in intent. As Nashville summed up the tensions and conflicts (and hopes and dreams) of America a decade an a half ago, so Love and Rockets X explores Americans' sexual politics, racial politics, personal politics--political politics too, for that matter--at this moment in their history. Love and Rockets X was begun (and takes place) before two of the dominant events of the turn of the decade--the Iraq war and the Rodney King uprisings--but these calamities loom large over the narrative. Their ghostly, implicit presence, and the familiar immediacy of the urban location, contribute to making this some of Hernandez's most harrowing work. A few readers may wish they could transport themselves back to the more comforting rhythms of his earlier "Heartbreak Soup" stories set in Palomar, where terror and grief and despair also exist but are simpler, more finite (indeed, at one point, one of the characters in the story literally wills himself back to Palomar)--but ultimately, life in these United States reasserts itself, and almost everyone recovers his or her balance. In a sense, Love and Rockets X is a story about resiliency. Resiliency--and tolerance, too. Although some of the men, women, and children who populate Love and Rockets X act in ways that are despicable, pathetic, or simply stupid and irresponsible, Hernandez withholds judgment. El Fontanel, Love and Rockets' aging post-psychedelic drummer, sums it up when he mutters, in paraphrase of Jean Renoir's famous aphorism from Rules of the Game, "The one truly terrifying thing in this world is that every man has his reasons." Everyone in Love and Rockets X has his or her reasons, and the story's tragedy and comedy ultimately flow from everyone else's misunderstanding, dismissal, or ignorance of those reasons.