Joan Peterson is a 1950s secretary, she’s a 1960s hippie, she’s a 19th century frontier rancher, she’s a 1920s maid, a WW1 cabaret singer, and she loves George, she loves Roger, she loves Dane, Tony, Don, and Frank - but something’s not right here. And as Joan suspects her very reality is an ever-changing cliched construct, the Cowboy is there to put her doubts to bloody rest. Because love? It’s everlasting, baby.
Tom King and Elsa Charretier’s Love Everlasting is a pastiche on the cheesy romance comics of yesteryore, where all the female protagonists were subservient to the men and pined for their attention while the other male characters, usually the disapproving wealthy fathers, got in the way of forbidden love, etc. It’s also Tom King’s worst comic to date.
Because, while he does nail the tone and style of those comics, it doesn’t make those romance comics any better to read, even with a knowing modern wink. The problem is that there is a kernel - and that is all it is, really, it’s that small - of an interesting idea here. The tiniest glimmers of Joan breaking the fourth wall and facing the killer, or whoever’s putting her through this, might’ve been fun if they were larger sections, but they’re only ever brief snippets at the end of each issue.
To get to those? You’ve gotta wade through basically the same boring romance story, often told multiple times per issue, in every issue, and it’s just not worth it. It’s so gratingly tedious and I hated it. There’s also a very unsatisfying payoff with an uninteresting pseudo-message about being an individual and standing up to the expectations of society - ie. marriage, motherhood, being a woman, etc.
If you genuinely enjoy romance comics, particularly the older types from the ‘50s/’60s, you’ll probably like Dreariness Everlasting but I couldn’t have been more bored. The romance stuff was too overwhelming and there wasn’t enough of the subversive material to engage me or want to pick up future books in the series.
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