Love Everlasting vol. 1

Joan Peterson has a problem with love.  Falling into it isn’t it, however.  She has no problem seeing the appeal of spending the rest of her life with a rich man’s son, a singer in a local rock band, her best friend’s fiancee, a soldier during wartime… the list goes on.  It isn’t until they all start to blur together and she realizes that none of them are real that things go wrong.  That’s when she gets a violent reminder, each and every time without fail, that love… is everlasting.

I don’t know if any of us had “Satiric Deconstruction of Old Romance Comics” as the subject for his first post-”Batman” creator-owned project, but that’s what writer Tom King, along with artist Elsa Charretier has given us here.  At first it seems like the writer is riffing on “Groundhog Day” as well as Joan is living through multiple formulaic stories rather than one specific scenario.  By the end of the volume, though, we get a better idea of where “Love Everlasting” is going.  Not a clear idea, just a better one.

Vol. 1 has the feeling of a story where your ultimate enjoyment of it is going to hinge on the resolution that King and Charretier have in store for us.  There’s so much we don’t know about why Joan is being put through this that it makes it hard to really embrace what’s on display here.  Not that this first volume is devoid of charm as King finds increasingly clever ways of showing how Joan defies the logic of the stories she’s experiencing as things go on.  Charretier also demonstrates some nimble visual style as she’s called upon to showcase multiple eras over the course of the volume.  Sometimes more than one in an issue.  Sometimes more than one on a single page.  It’s quality work from both creators, and I hope that I’ll be able to fully enjoy what they’re doing here with the next volume.