Love Everlasting #5: The Stories They Are a-Changin’

With episodic storytelling, recurring structures and narratives can wear on the audience, and good works know how to create variation. One of the most effective works to employ this variety is the X-Files, which blended its episodic, alien of the week stories with mythology episodes. These mythology stories connected the dots across episodes, building deep lore and recurring elements for the leads to deal with. The rotating between these two stories provided an acceleration of the plot, ensuring its audience didn’t get too complacent with the alien of the week stories. With the newest issue of Love Everlasting, the creative team offers its first mythology installment, implementing a new tone and structure for both its scripting and art. 

Love Everlasting #5 – written by Tom King, with art from Elsa Charretier, colors by Matt Hollingsworth, and letters from Clayton Cowles – breaks from the standalone stories of Joan’s doomed romances to offer a new plot structure, one built around a visit to dating coach Penny Page. Penny has Joan recount her past relationships, spanning her rejections of marriages by Pirates, borning men, Disco Stus, and everything in between. In every story, Joan explains that the Cowboy appears and shoots her after every rejection. 

Penny lets slip, as the time and place around the duo, that Joan’s mother expects Joan to accept marriage every time like a good girl. Joan demands an explanation and for a moment it seems like her mother is coming to provide one. Instead, Joan finds herself attacking Penny and then facing the Cowboy again, before shifting to a new time and place, this time jailed for her rejection of love. There’s no indication that Joan remembers her time with Penny, and it seems that she’s back to square one, still stuck in the endless loop of being forced into love. 

King’s script starts to dig into the larger mystery of the series, pivoting from episodic stories of Joan’s many romances to explore the recurring themes of these experiences. Looking back, the notion that Joan’s mother has been largely absent from previous issues clicks into place and her possible role in this loop makes immediate sense. What King does masterfully in this script is the control of information, giving just enough to break the typical structure of the series and then returning it to the status quo by the end. 

For every question King begins to answer, three more take its place to ensure the beating heart of an enigma at the center of this story is in place. The control of information also helps to reinforce empathy for Joan, as she’s learning this information at the same rate as the reader. The stripping of the meta-reading keeps the reader in the story, allowing them to experience the rich atmosphere along with Charretier’s timeless art and Hollingsworth’s chameleon coloring. 

The art in this issue blends the spectrum of setting and time period to create a disorienting effect while maintaining a narrative consistency as Joan and Penny discuss the expectations of love. Charretier’s ability to infuse a stylistic timelessness to her art is a key factor of this book, and it’s never more apparent than this issue, as reality can ship from the groovy 70s to the stuffy 1800s in the flip of a page.

Even as this set changes occur, Charretier’s panel composition and blocking remain consistent, ensuring there’s no confusion in the visual language of the character even as the window dressing changes. The change is never more powerful than in the page showing each of Joan’s murders for the lives she recounts, playing out like panels of the action but each step takes place at a different time. As the title “Love is Everlasting” gets repeated, Charretier illustrates the bloody stages of Joan’s death with equal weight, centering on her violent reaction to each shot issued by the Cowboy. 

Just like Charretier’s art, Hollingsworth’s colors take the premise of multiple time jumps across the conversation and run with it, instilling different looks for each era. The tone and emotion created by each time change with Joan’s shifts forward and back, evoking a palette that falls in line with the set design and costuming for the era in reference. The pale, muted colors of the 1800s are in harsh contrast to the vibrant pastels of the 70s.

The page referenced above, in which Joan is shown all four times, begins to unify the coloring when the Cowboy takes his shots in each timeline. The shock of orange from the flash of his six-gun maintains a consistent hue even as the backgrounds and costumes exist in their own palettes, indicating the temporality of this executioner. The issue tells us he’s working with Joan’s mother, and the coloring reinforces that notion of the woman pulling some of the string for Joan’s loop.