Love Everlasting #8: This Must Be the Place (Denial Melody)

A key power that comics, and sequential art as a whole, employs is time manipulation on the page. By simply adding or removing panels, the flow of time can be drastically altered at any given time. A book like Chip Zdarsky and Mark Bagley’s Spider-Man: Life Story is effective thanks to its ability to encapsulate extensive periods of time across six issues, achieving a generational story at a speed many mediums would struggle with. 

That sense of temporal manipulation is all over Love Everlasting #8 – written by Tom King with art from Elsa Charretier, colors by Matt Hollingsworth, and letters from Clayton Cowles – as it returns to the rhythm of the first arc, splitting the book into three sections of Joan’s life instead of jumping between various eras/places. As Joan returns home from extensive psychiatric care, she settles back into the false life of a housewife looped in 1963. She keeps the house clean, goes through the motions to support her children, and even gives in passing moments of passion with Don, her husband. 

Things are still out of place, like the Cowboy haunting her every waking moment or the killing of a neighborhood cat, but Joan refutes these in favor of her mundane life. Only in one moment, when Joan considers committing suicide, does a sense of her circumstances return, but it’s tossed away when she returns the gun to its safe. She returns to normal and fakes it well, even when the world around her reminds her of all the false truths. 

King’s narrative rhythm to the opening arc is a fascinating approach to remind audiences of the otherworldly nature of the premise, utilizing form to reinforce those conventions lost due to the repeated setting. In the opening issues, the shift would occur with Joan’s death or realization about love, while here, it’s when she dives headfirst into denial about her situation. The first is the dissociation about killing the neighborhood cat, while the second is during a passionate sex scene with Don. In both moments, a metaphorical death sends Joan forward, rather than the physical ones of the first six issues. 

Charretier’s use of form mirrors the narrative on display, adjusting layouts and compositions to reveal Joan’s mental state. In the previous issue, Charretier employed a dense amount of small panels to showcase the fracturing of Joan’s mind, while this issue returns to a more traditional flow. That dense panel page returns once in this issue when Joan considers suicide by Don’s gun. Joan putting the gun to her temple is the focus from multiple angles, taking up two-thirds of the page and panels on display. Once she abandoned the notion of ending her life and possibly resetting her reality, Joan returns to her mundane existence, and Charretier returns to a more formalistic approach to layouts. 

Also echoing the first arc, the story breaks are created with full-page images, and Cowles provides similar title credits for each. In each section broken up by these images, hints of cracks, in reality, occur around characters beyond Joan. In one instance, Timmy, one of Joan’s sons, wakes from nightmares of the dead cat saying, “I Love You,” It’s a haunting moment that resembles Joan’s tangled experience of death and romance and has slipped unconsciously into Timmy’s mind. Through the rest of the issue, he seems shaken, to the point that a line of dialogue towards the end of the issue creates a beat of tension. 

While these breaks occur in the narrative, Joan’s denial of reality keeps the book’s form intact. Hollingsworth blacks shift slightly in the dream sequence, exemplifying a harsh red or black background around the nightmare, but Charretier’s layouts keep in line with the mundane. For a moment on this page, it seems like more panels may start to overtake the page and add frantic energy to this moment, but Joan soothes Timmy and, by extension, herself, allowing the break-in structure to recede. This combination creates a tension of reality versus delusion that picks at the brain, showcasing an excellent sense of cosmic horror that tries to rectify the inconsistencies but fails at every turn.