Love Everlasting #8 // Review
In his own way, the cowboy is trying to tell her that he doesn’t exist. Joan might be moved to agree with him, but he is SO integrated with her day-to-day reality that she doesn’t even seem to be acknowledging that he DOESN’T exist. She’s happy, though, isn’t she? She’s going to find out a whole lot more about the nature of her own inner life in Love Everlasting #8. Writer Tom King continues to play mind games with contemporary consciousness and the nature of romantic love in an issue that is drawn by Elsa Charretier. Color warms the page courtesy of Matt Hollingsworth.
Joan had been through a series of doctors. Maybe they had made some sort of a difference. Maybe she’s beginning to understand that she really DOES deserve to be happy in love. It is, after all, the 1960s. She doesn’t have to wrestle with the larger concerns. She just has to be happy with her husband. So what’s with the cowboy that keeps showing up and telling her to be happy? Why is he lingering if she’s really happy? And why is it that she’s having obsessive thoughts about her husband’s handgun? Clearly, something must be wrong.
King is fusing a trippy sort of mind-bender of a Phildickian sci-fi horror story that dives into the nature of traditional romance stories and the identity of the contemporary woman. It’s some of the heaviest stuff on the comics rack today, but it doesn’t need to be. There’s a surface level on which it can be taken as simply a dark psychological fantasy as well. The depth is there for the reader willing to dive into it. Above all, it’s a really fun period psychodrama. King’s been moving Joanie along a cycle that may feel repetitious, but that repetition fits perfectly into the deeper format of the series.
Charretier’s art continues to work well with the retro feel of the series. The art style seems like a slightly hipper contemporary version of a lot of the artwork that would have been going into romance comics back in the 1960s. It is a slightly more stylish version of 1960s clip art that matches the style of the era perfectly. It does a remarkably good job of conveying the conflicted emotions in and within Joanie as she comes to terms with what’s been bothering her.
The journey into self-awareness that Joan has been going through over the course of the series has been pretty intense. There’s some profound level of darkness going on in Tom King’s 1963 that reflects deeper concerns in the heart of the American home in that era. It’s a fascinating, provocative look at the human psyche that holds great promise in possibly exploring things of equal depth from other eras through Joan’s fractured psyche. In the long run, the series’ repetition COULD damage it, but it still feels like an impressive accomplishment eight issues-in.
