Love Everlasting #10: Love Won’t Keep Us Alive

In works of art across mediums, there is a resonating connection between love and tragedy. They seem the two feed off and nourish one another, sharing a sense of hubris and defiance that leads to ruin. Both are powerful and carnal, springing from the basest of emotions and offering two sides of the same coin. When they intertwine, it becomes clear that love is high that thrives in the shadow of tragedy, and a book like Love Everlasting knows and plays with that combination. 

Love Everlasting #10 – written by Tom King with art from Elsa Charretier, colors by Matt Hollingsworth, and letters from Clayton Cowles – brings the book’s second arc to a close with yet another revelation about the central premise. The issue follows as Joan enters her sunset years after Don’s death, going from an independent widow to a nursing home due to a fall. The decision comes from her sons, one now a math teacher and the other in landscaping, forming their own families. 

Here, Joan meets Ralph, another facility resident who sparks a connection with Joan over bingo. As the two grow closer, Joan denies any budding romance as she clings to the memory of her marriage with Don. After a point, Joan throws caution to the wind after Ralph blurts out his love for her. And with the deceleration of love, time and space reset yet again, and Joan finds herself elsewhere, youth restored. 

This time ’round, Joan is the model for a stone statue and is in love with the artist, who cannot see past his work to the living beauty in front of him. As the narrative force takes control and they begin to embrace, Joan snaps and murders the man, breaking the loop and summoning the cowboy. Joan promises to come and find him and then her mother and kill them both for stealing her family with Don by resetting her life over and over. 

King’s script for the issue makes the tragic inclination of love prevalent as Joan is thrown from life to life, romance to romance. The embrace she shares with Ralph is fleeting, and the finite (only a single page) passion they share makes the moment even more bitter. The moment, juxtaposed with another romance scenario featuring stone carving, becomes a perfect metaphor for Joan’s reality. She is the unmoving stone, trapped in a state someone else has carved, entirely dependent on others. The end of the issue, and Joan’s oath to the cowboy, start to show the first cracks from the inside. 

The writing also twists the chisel of Joan’s lost family, giving personal stakes beyond just her looping when concerning the central premise. In the first arc, each of Joan’s jumps in time seemed to discard the people of her various lives and loves with little care. She had no care or knowledge of those she left behind, and the quick nature of these shifts meant little attachment was formed for the readers. King uses the convention of telling a life across five issues to endear the children and then grandchildren to Joan and the audience by extension. 

For the first chunk of the issue, Charretier uses nothing but five or six-panel pages. The rhythm stays the same until the second title page, with Joan in the nursing home. As she starts to bond with Ralph and open herself up, the layouts vary until the two kiss, and the pattern resets, moving from one full page to another, echoing the changing of time from the opening arc. As Joan’s sense of self and reality starts to falter, the layouts then e even more varied, with grids and more s filling the page.                               

Charretier depicts this with excellent use of tight, cascading panels on the page, taking elements from the dense pages of this arc. The starkest example of the formalism displayed in the issue is a page composed of 24 panels in a four-by-six grid that only features blood spatters and narration. It’s the peak of Charretier’s use of grids with blackout points to indicate Joan snapping and shows an irrevocable shift in her psyche with the loss of her loved ones. The blood stains the page and the grid, marking it as the ultimate expression of tragedy, the words syncing with the blood to indicate what was essentially a slaughter of her kin. 

The coloring in the issue incorporates the various palettes from across the arc, allowing Hollingsworth to branch out again as the looping occurs. The stark reds of blood and the soft pinks of ice cream function as emotional anchors, signaling the range of joy and despair. The blood splatter infects the paneling in the scene above and stains the statue in the new romance script towards the end of the issue. The red colors the marble sculpture and Joan’s face, creating a symmetry that hammers the theme of tragic love.