Love Everlasting Volume 1

February 1, 2023
Romance comics had their heyday before the superhero boom of the 1960s, with anthologies bolstering familiar archetypes. The expressive strokes of Charretier's art here have nostalgic warmth, but they're more connected to the retro-modern cartooning of, say, Batman Adventures than actual art from any of those doe-eyed comics of yesteryear. This feels like then, but it's deeply rooted in now, which makes it the ideal aesthetic for this meta take. Readers are introduced to the pining Joan, who, in one disconnected story after another, is plagued by impossible memories of previous stories. She's being pursued by a dark force which--like love--we'll never completely understand. King's interest, as it's often been, is deconstruction, and the narrative necessarily takes some repetition to achieve it. However, certain chapters function as gripping romances on their own merits, even as they advance toward a conceptual, distressing, but ultimately compelling culmination. Those romantic archetypes can exert a terrible hold on us, but a lady's got to make a claim on her own destiny, even under the barrel of a gun.

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Starred review from October 1, 2022

Sometime in the 1950s, Joan Peterson moves from Indiana to New York City and falls in love with her best friend's boyfriend, George. Actually, it's the 1960s, and Joan Peterson rebels against her domineering father by exploring Greenwich Village, where she falls in love with a freewheeling folk musician. No, actually Joan is at the center of a love triangle in the old west. Maybe she's a maid in the Abbey, pining for the Lord of the Manor--or maybe Joan Peterson is being shunted between realities, forced to live through an apparently endless series of melodramatic love affairs. But who would have the power to put her in such a situation, and why would they do such a thing? Also, there's a gun-toting masked man apparently chasing her through time and space. This edition collects the first story arc in an ongoing series originally published on Substack. VERDICT King (Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow) and Charretier's (Department of Truth, Vol. 3) gripping mystery subverts the romance-comic genre but still delivers genuine romantic melodrama. An uncommonly compelling first volume.

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