“This blood rose tinted reality…”
“Friday Fictions” ponders LOVE EVERLASTING, Elsa Charretier and Tom King's Substack comic about romance through time
Hey folks, sorry this one’s a day later than promised… and I missed my intended Wednesday review of the first 3W/3M comics altogether! That HickHuddleMundo review will be tonight’s podcast episode, recorded probably from a hotel bathroom. No more ado… on to LOVE EVERLASTING…
The new Everlasting Productions, early in its launch a couple of weeks back, shared writer Tom King’s pitch to artist Elsa Charretier (free for now, but part of the “Behind the Love” process series that will become paid subscriber-only), which describes pretty much the scenario revealed in the first free issue, and also includes this premise:
Love Everlasting is an epic, mind-blowing series of hope, death, and rebirth set in a world as frighteningly fantastical as any found beyond the stars or after the apocalypse: The Romance Comics of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. In this blood-rose tinted reality, Joan Peterson slowly discovers that she is trapped in a seemingly endless cycle--a problem to be solved, a man to marry—and every time she makes it, falls in love, kisses him, she disappears into another teary saga. She needs to find her way out, find who she is, what this world is. To escape she must deconstruct her stories and reconstruct her identity.
-Tom King, from “Behind The Love: Love Everlasting's pitch” by Elsa Charretier
So far, we’ve also gotten the insightful process pieces and behind the scenes that we’d expect from two of the medium’s foremost spokespeople. Elsa Charretier’s YouTube channel and Tom King’s chattiness on podcasts like Word Balloon and Off Panel are both sources of fascinating honesty and artistry to me. Charretier broke down, from script through roughs to final, the 19th page of that first issue in a super cool process piece. GREAT STUFF for PROCESS JUNKIES!
What’s interesting to me about all the transparency of these two creators, peeling the curtain back along the way, is that they’re also both crafty employers of comics’ penchant for mystery.
While “Love Everlasting” has all the trappings of romance comics, that first issue shows quickly that the genre itself is actually the ruse of this perhaps metafictional time- or narrative-jumping tale. By page 11, we’re already sure that something is amiss— this isn’t a romance anthology, it’s a story about displacement or impermanence or
Does it deter from the sense of mystery when creators are showing their work so much along the way? To me, NOT AT ALL! Watching the weekly streaming Disney+ and HBO Max TV shows, seeing the proliferation of breakdown videos and fan theory sites, I feel like King and Charretier are just wily in plugging into the intensity of curious and speculative, interactive readership/followership that constitute modern-day fandom.
Indeed, King’s many maxi-series (mostly at DC these days) have played cannily— though some might say formulaically— into this kind of readership. Which has been refreshing for me, since I’ve often felt like not enough modern comics take advantage of the fun of serialized storytelling. Most books feel created for the trade or the binge, with only feints toward last page cliffhangers or reveals. (Notable exceptions to me are Brian K. Vaughan, Gene Luen Yang, and King).
So to my delight, Charretier and King aren’t spilling the beans on plot elements so much as discussing their craft of mystery-, mood-, and romance-making. Charretier shares this tidbit:
“When the responsibility of establishing the mood falls on my shoulders, the layout stage is all the more important. Here, I opted for not showing her face too much, placing the reader in the cowboy’s position.”
-Elsa Charretier, “Behind the Love: Everlasting Love page #19” at everlastingproductions.substack.com/p/behind-the-love-love-everlasting
All this makes the Productions part of “Everlasting Productions” feel like a participatory, insider-y experience, a way that creators are utilizing Substack’s invested stakeholder/follower model to capitalize on the maximalist engagement potential of the Substack comics enterprise.
Where’s Joan?
Or rather, when is Joan?
Turning to the story itself… Since it IS so layered in mystery, let me make sure you’re not SPOILED from the experience of the first issue. It’s worth the enjoyment. And King’s penchant for just the right magic number of story elements, distributed in well-paced beats, combines with Charretier’s masterful economy and elegance on the page. The read is breezy enough for the jolts to hit. It’s artful enough to repay many slow re-readings.
So after that roundabout spoiler warning, I’ll assume you’ve read that “Everlasting Love” #1. But recapping that:
“Meant to Be” in pages 2-9 puts Joan Peterson falling for her roommate’s beau/new boss George in a 1940s-50s era romance milieu with an abrupt happy ending;
“One Last Kiss” in pages 10-17 throws Joan into a 60s-70s era suburban flight to hippie-ish rebellion, flipping the tables on father’s stodginess by revealing guitar-wielding Kit’s latent eligible-ness (with hints of Joan’s confusion— she remembers George);
“Fight for Love” in pages 18-24 sets Joan in the romantic frontier West, with Chad and Bill dueling for her as prize, and horseback escapes and bandits pressing her further into the scripted damsel, though Joan begins her own unbridling as she questions where George and Kit and her situatedness have gone…
“Sick with Love,” on page 25, has now breached the rule of 3 stories per anthology, and we’re now with Joan, whisked into one of those nurse-patient fantasies, that the only sure ground is that we are experiencing the lie of “forever” in the endless churn of romance tropes. With Joan in the last panel, we utter a tasteful expletive of exhaustion.
I’ll unromantically do the math and count that, after a perfect “cover” splash, the stories number at 7, 7, 6, and 1 pages, not only utilizing great disrupted symmetry (in classic Tom King post-Watchmen ways), but with decreased words and sped-up pacing to create a mounting vibe of disjuncture within Joan, progressing to an escape climax and issue-denouement on the last page.
The beauty of the premise is that all signs of format point to the disposable and mass-manufactured feeling of romance stories, ironically all about landing the “everlasting” love, perpetually obsessed with re-enacting the pursuit. And while the narratives are about scratching the itch, our protagonist Joan bucks the role and suddenly starts demanding wholeness as a person in a time with a need for a finished story.
Is Joan not only jumping from period to period, but from the object of reader projections to the subject of her own agentive resistance?
My Rad Way of Reading this “Romance”
Whenever I consider the romance genre, from the 90s romantic/comedies like Sleepless in Seattle that intoxicated my adolescence to the genre-blending philosophical exercise of Time-Traveler’s Wife, I find my reflections deeply shaped by the influential 1984 book by Janice Radway, Reading the Romance.
In short, Radway read rural, romance-obsessed white women in the 80s with the same theorized sociology and ethnographic empathy that I instinctually gave to urban, non-white youth reading Milestone comics in the 90s.
The key insight that colors my reading of LOVE EVERLASTING is what a mistake it would be to (a) look down on the romance industrial complex— its producers, consumers, purveyors— as though there were not tons of agency, complexity, and culture-making involved in their activity, but also (b) to overlook the imprint everywhere of hetero-patriarchy, the imbrication of structurated desire in norms of gendered hierarchies, economic stratification, nationalist imaginaries, and so on.
Radway’s Cultural Studies imprint on me was to see a genre and its attached fandom in ways that addressed the classic structure-agency dilemma in human sciences. The romance readers in her writing are neither mindless dupes or puppets of a culture industry, nor were they solely agentive customers exercising their unconditioned free choice over their own entertainment.
Ultimately, it looks to me like EVERLASTING LOVE is a playful examination of genre and who we are as humans within them.
This is gonna be fun.
For now, all these reviews of Substack comics will be available to all subscribers. Thanks for signing up for our newsletter! But starting in a few weeks, paid supporters will get the deeper dives and questions, while free subscribers will only be able to read some overall impressions. Just a heads up, in case you’re considering…