Answers have been thin on the ground in Love Everlasting. The book’s central premise (Joan Peterson, locked in a series of ever-repeating romance-comic plots throughout the ages) labored in the first handful of issues as a sort of barely-present framing story. Issue #5 brought us as near to the surface of Joan’s existential nightmare as the book has allowed us to be, introducing a second endless being in Penny Page and allowing both we the reader and Joan a gasp of air and a glimpse of the larger metaphysics of our narrative.
The last several issues, however, have dropped us into the book’s most concrete – though still very strange – reality so far. Billed “Too Hip for Love”, the book’s second arc catches Joan in the trap of matrimony; her previous ‘escape hatch’ of concluding the plot of a brief romance-as-genre tale has failed. Joan has, somehow, found herself a middle age housewife and mother of two.
What’s compelling in issue #8 isn’t exactly the reality-jumping hook the series promised us. Aside from a few troubling errors in her otherwise average existence (it is, for example, always 1963 – and has always been 1963), the only remarkable thing about our narrative is the real-world ennui that overtook housewives in the postwar years of the last century.
If that doesn’t sound so much like the sci-fi setup for a comic you might have anticipated, the book makes no apologies – and it’s made all the more revelatory by ignoring its own narrative framework to make the reader simmer with Joan in what feels like a truly tragic reality; bounced from hospital to hospital and clinic to clinic, Joan’s mental illness truly resembles the bumbling, tragically misunderstood handling of women’s ‘hysteria’ in a pre-second wave era.
While granted the steely heart of a studied comic book fan, the reader can assume Joan’s current hell is only some disheartening construct of some large, trans-reality puppet masters, and yet issue #8 begs the reader to consider that perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps Joan is struggling with the sad reality of her existence, married to an unexceptional man and raising two barely loved children. Perhaps the mundanity of that existence has conjured visions of a cowboy only she can see; perhaps her many romances were but dreams she had to be any other place than here. She spends the whole of the issue with a fragile and false facade, a smile that only someone hiding a deep inner turmoil might wear.
The issue ends with Joan willing to end it all; if the reality is as the first five issues suggest it to be, she’ll simply wake up in a world where she might fall in love again. The nagging sense of delusion is too strong, however; the postwar hysteria too tragically commonplace. Joan cannot commit to her impossible and magic truth because the world itself is, particularly for women like her, so utterly devoid of magic.
This isn’t the most dynamic issue Tom King and Elsa Charretier have produced, but it is the most thrillingly earnest.
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