Short Box: Love Everlasting #11

Love Everlasting

#11

Release: Jan 03, 2024

Creators

The first Mail Call of 2023 contained my rewards for subscribing to the Substack for Love Everlasting, a series that I’ve also been buying in physical form since its launch.

The series focuses on the many loves of a woman named Joan Peterson, each story filled with the tropes of old Romance comics with all their angst and yearning and secret fears, but with a mystery underlying the surface level romance. We keep seeing Joan in different eras, with different men, falling in love over and over again, always ending the same way and always staring over again in a new time and place.

We also see Joan becoming increasingly aware of her situation, doing her best to understand what is happening and how. Sometimes she’s plays along with the narrative, biding her time, secretly looking for a clue, and other times she fights against it.

But the end is always the same.

Or at least it was until this new story arc, which starts off in the usual manner, but ends in a way that may point us to the answers that have eluded Joan – and us – until now.

I like this series a lot – I should, given that I’ve essentially paid for it twice. King does a great job of capturing the feel of the Romance comics of old even while building an underlying modern sensibility into it, and Charretier’s style gives it a timeless feel that is never out of place no matter what time Joan finds herself in.

I’m glad to see the pattern being shaken up a bit with this issue and deepening the mystery even as we take a step towards solving it.

Born and raised in the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Jon Maki developed an enduring love for comics at an early age.