Love Everlasting vol. 2
The cover to this volume has a happy-looking Joan in a familiar housewife getup that suggests a veneer of domestic normalcy. Which doesn’t come through at all because it also shows that she’s poisoned her husband and two sons while saying, “Hello again! My name is Joan Peterson… and I probably love my family!” It all implies a level of twistedness, possibly meanness, that I wasn’t expecting to see after the first volume’s run-through of multiple romantic story tropes. Too bad that the story in vol. 2 doesn’t deliver any of that.
It all starts familiarly enough in 1963 as wild college girl Joan finds herself settling down with safe, comfortable square Don, and finding out that her story doesn’t reset like it usually does. Our protagonist keeps living in this same year as she, Don, their kids, and family grow older and her life turns into a portrait of suburban mundanity of the era. The catch being that she knows exactly what she’s missing but doesn’t know how to get it.
There is some interest to be had in seeing Joan scratch at the confines of her life as writer Tom King and artist Elsa Charretier play with the idea of her feeling of being trapped within a waking nightmare. They deliver some inspired freak-outs as Joan’s madness boils over, and even manage a couple affecting scenes as her struggles wear on her family. It’s all perfectly fine – much in the same way Joan’s life is in this story.
The problem is that this will be very familiar to anyone with any experience in stories dealing with the rot inherent to suburbia, the era itself, or both. While there are a few direct nods to the title’s ongoing story – the Cowboy shows up on more than one occasion – Joan’s struggle to escape her situation feels like it was put on hold simply so its creators could tell this story. Which is one that suffers because it’s not interesting enough to stop me from hoping that the next issue would be the one to bust things wide open. Either by having Joan escape her situation in some clever way, or that she’d finally poison her family.
Things don’t start moving forward until the end of the volume with a resolution that could be described as clever, I guess. Not in a way that made me go, “Oooooh! I didn’t see that coming!” It was more like, “Yeah, I get it.” Which means that we’re ultimately left with a story that feels like it strung its audience along until the very end. King and Charretier may yet deliver a payoff to the overall story that is worthwhile, but this second volume doesn’t inspire confidence. If you’re not already onboard their bizarro deconstruction of old romance comics, you won’t find any good reason to get caught up with vol. 2.